Not solving climate change is ‘suicidal’ — no longer just ‘inconvenient’
Climate change negotiators and NGOs have descended on Katowice in Poland for the 24th Conference of Parties (COP). UNFCCC Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez yesterday called a no-deal ‘suicidal’ as the pressure mounts to agree key issues at the close of the conference this week. This is a step beyond Al Gore calling climate change ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in 2006.
Since then, digital energy has really come to the forefront of energy transitions politics. It was 9 years ago, in 2009 during the Copenhagen-hosted COP, when a group of NGOs, industry and startups came together to call for open access for consumers to their energy data.
This was a radical idea, that your energy data was your own, and that “permissioning” it to be used by third parties to provide you with innovative energy services would lead to better, cheaper options for consumers.
Nearly a decade later, it feels like groundhog day
Though we have certainly seen new deployments of digital energy, and projects like LO3 Energy’s Exergy are taking the principle of energy data permissioning and access one step further, we are still stuck in an old paradigm: the idea that we can gradually evolve to a new energy system.
We have run out of time to ‘evolve’
Unfortunately, our time is running out. We are ‘completely off course’ with emissions continuing to rise. We need emissions to drop to zero by mid-century. The only way to achieve this is rapid decarbonisation and unprecedented innovation. Weren’t we saying this a decade ago? Before the forest fires, dramatic weather events and immigration crises?
We have an opportunity to have a much better energy system
With more data being created each year (digital energy is growing at 20% pa) we have a real opportunity to change electricity markets globally and decarbonise faster.
We — individuals, schools, commercial and industrial campuses, neighbourhoods — are an integral part of an emerging ‘grid-edge’ system where new distributed energy resources (DER) technologies such as electric vehicles, or rooftop solar PV, and advanced control networks are making it possible to generate, store and use electric power in entirely new ways.
We can use this consumer power (combining data and new energy technologies) to become ‘flexible’, not only consuming power when it is green, but avoiding it when it is dirty. This is what we’re making possible with FLEX Network and Tempus Energy. More on how.
We’re seeing roughly 20% annual carbon savings in markets as diverse as Australia and the UK from these automated actions. Expert analysis from BNEF and RMI shows demand side flexibility is the lowest cost route to decarbonisation.
70% of us want to digitally manage energy or generate our own, according to Accenture. This is not the future, it is NOW.
Under the hood of PR
Poland hosting a climate conference epitomises the idea of incremental change, where forests absorb the CO2 emitted from new coal-fired power generation that it is hoped will be subsidised for years to come. Poland isn’t alone. Though Europe bemoans the annual cost of cutting emissions to zero (EUR 175–290 billion) when it would more than make up for that if it stopped annual fossil fuel subsidies (EUR 100 billion) and lowered imports (EUR 266 billion).
It is nearly 2019, and fossil fuels are no longer viable. Coal in particular is unprofitable, it is high time we let it go.
Profitable decarbonisation can’t be locked out
With the UK capacity market rendered unlawful on Nov 15th, thanks to incredible determination by Tempus Energy, removing $5.6 billion in subsidies, 74% of which was to fossil fuels, there is now a precedent for Europe to look at other options to innovate to solve climate change.
The next decade will see even more change in our energy systems than the last. Profitable decarbonisation — using all the ‘smart’ digital energy tools at our disposal — cannot be locked out.
