Energy is a vital part of any country’s ability to be competitive, and we need to recognize that to innovate is the critical enabler to a clean energy future. Today half the world’s capital is invested in energy and its related infrastructure, which is the backbone of any industrial and urbanization strategy.
We need to keep pushing for discoveries, experimentation, and demonstrating. We must nurture innovation and continuously look for ways to facilitate its pathway in the Energy Transition we are presently travelling.
Our economic prosperity will be determined by transforming the energy sector, and it is through innovation we will achieve this. To avoid the predicted consequences of climate change, the global energy system must rapidly reduce its emissions.
Most global CO2 emissions come from the energy production sector, our buildings or transportation systems, and the making of “things” still from fossil fuels. They all need a purposeful design of a new, cleaner energy system.
Innovation needs to be at the top of its game, to be accelerated and scaled.
The energy transition the world is undertaking is one of the most critical areas where innovation needs to be at its absolute best, top of the game, to make the level of change necessary. We need to deploy every innovative tool to leverage ideas and discoveries and then accelerate the validation into a commercialization path sooner than later. We fail miserably as we do not understand that collaboration and cooperation are essential to achieving any transformation of this complexity.
Innovation needs to get out of the laboratories, moved from theory to application, and off the desk of those executives who fail to see the urgency of change we need to achieve the energy transition.
Innovation is always associated with risk, but that imperative to push the boundaries must always be constantly in our minds; global warming, pollution, and finite resource are our “burning platforms.”
We must ramp up our need for solutions to reduce greenhouse gases, redesign energy generation, transmission, and distribution and bring balance back into our environments.
Pushing our present understanding, looking beyond the knowns.
- Today the solutions need to be centred on decarbonization, applying digitalization, and switching to an energy system that is more decentralized than at present. It is finding imaginative, innovative solutions that become essential to achieve this climate change through the energy transition we are undertaking.
- Each organization within the energy transition does need to look at its position and applies any changes to advance its competitive position, but perspectives need to open up. Having one specific perspective, you can lose a more significant opportunity.
- We need to extend the reach of electricity; we need to focus on Hydrogen, validate carbon capture and storage (CCUS) as well as exploit bioenergy and take them out of the lab, out of the realms of theory and validate the innovation concepts into scalable ones that deliver the gaps we have in our energy transition.
- We must find innovative solutions to reduce local air pollution, strengthen energy security, and develop a more resilient energy system to minimize shutdowns and power outs from our fragile, out-of-date power grids.
- We need to find solutions to reliable and sustainable energy solutions that deal with heating, lighting, cooking, and cooling. Any change needs to find a way to create local economic value and jobs, as others in any change of this magnitude will be displaced.
- As we search for enabling technologies, we need to constantly facilitate the integration of renewable energy, accelerate storage, explore sector coupling, introduce new ways to operate within the electricity system, seek out new power generation, design the grids for increased flexibility and digitalize solutions to provide further services, tools and distributed generation deployment knowing how to diffuse innovation in these general five approaches becomes valuable.
- We must continue de-carbonising challenging industry sectors like steel, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, or our transportation systems to achieve any positive outlook of curbing carbon emissions and moving toward a zero-carbon future.
Innovation and showing progression give the market confidence and encouragement that the innovation story is well designed and vigorously adopting experiments, pilots and scaling to fund this innovative momentum.
Everything we are looking at in energy solutions faces a scalability challenge.
It will be the ability to harness the existing with the new. This is the role of innovation to deliver changes by being the bridge and the catalyst of change with new technology and innovative solutions.
Innovation adoption in the technology lifecycle for Energy Translation
Technological innovation has a central role to play in the Energy Transition currently being undertaken throughout the world. The shifts need to take the different parts of the energy system through a lifecycle approach to any future energy system.
The six critical focal points of the energy transition.
The six main thrusts for technological innovation within the Energy Systems for today’s energy transition are:
- To accelerate the deployment of renewable energy technologies throughout the system.
- There is a real need to find innovative solutions focusing on the end-user sectors of transport, industry, and buildings.
- The technological and digital innovative solution must focus on the overall system design and the operation needs.
- Innovation needs to increase electrification through emerging solutions on the grids’ digitalisation and provide grid-scale energy storage to resolve variable renewable power and build out further energy storage.
- To push, nurture, and facilitate different energy sources to provide solutions to scale them up. These include solar power, geothermal, biopower, hydropower, onshore and offshore wind, and tidal power.
- Lastly, innovation needs to achieve an affordably decarbonize industrial transition.
Many innovation solutions need to unlock the system’s flexibility continually.
Besides technological innovation, there is growing potential for redesigning operational systems through new services, tools, and distributed generation deployment. There are opportunities to find fresh market designs that have demand-response models central to provide then new, more tailored services and then the exciting potential of designing new business models that look to greater co-creation, more flexible power purchase agreements and bring the consumer into the system as contributors, aggregators and highly energy aware.
My focus is on innovating energy and accelerating your understanding
Innovation must be at the forefront of the energy change; otherwise, we will fail to deliver on the 2050 commitments and goals, which will have consequences for our existence as we know it.
My work increasingly focuses on supporting knowledge and encouraging deeper understanding, pointing to emerging opportunities.
*Part of this post has been revised from the original 2021 one.