Innovation has the power to unlock the Energy Transition. Innovation thinking and design are needed everywhere within the energy system. Technological and systemic innovation is incredibly important to the end-user sectors of transport, industry, and buildings, as well as replacing and upgrading much of the overall system design and operation of delivering energy to power our economies.
Innovation needs to be everywhere in transforming our existing energy systems. Each day, there seems to be some level of innovation development or fresh concepts breaking through, challenging the accepted or pushing the thinking in imaginative new ways.
Innovation has a central role to play in the energy system.
We need to keep pushing for discoveries, experimentation, and demonstrating. We must nurture innovation and continuously look for ways to facilitate its pathway. Innovation comprises many enabling technologies; it needs to be built in a highly systematic way. The need is to continually look for re-imagining new market designs and business models to stimulate the changes and solutions for our future energy transformation.
Many discoveries are unpredictable, but if there are sound, well-established innovation systems in place, you can pursue solutions that have both short-term, medium-term and longer-term approaches to advancing the understanding of a solution — for example, improving the battery technology, advancing charging efficiencies for an electric vehicle or exploring different storage capacity for longer times. Just keep asking “why” and “what” can I challenge that is unexpected or a different logic that can “stand” what we do on its head, and we discover a new way to do it differently.
Any energy transition takes a long time, requiring a highly collaborative and multidisciplinary approach. For example, wind solutions have continued to evolve as we learn to explore new materials, improve the integration of advanced technology development, and better understand weather conditions. Then, the wind turbines evolved to generate more wind power by improving the blades and expanding their size. From the early wind turbines of 30 KW, we now have 8 MW or more today. Wind turbines have evolved increasingly over forty years. Wind turbines are not seen on land, but we have floating wind farms at sea. Innovation takes a long time to push existing knowledge and find new solutions.
We see discoveries emerging from the interface of different areas where imagination connects and sees possibilities and experiments by opening our minds and applying the principles to a completely different field or problem.
Innovation is a long, arduous task of iterative improvements and some rare breakthroughs, and this requires increasing collaborations between public, private, and research institutions to pursue ideas and concepts together so their combined disciplines and understanding can push design and solutions in a continued way.
Innovation inspires action; it can focus efforts and drive synergies if set up correctly. It is having a well-established innovation process or a clear, transparent one that can engage, communicate and build shared understanding. That sense of collective identity has a greater chance of generating innovative solutions.
Collaborative working needs a system that offers a portfolio approach to ideas generated, concepts investigated and potential solutions in the innovation pipeline. Hence, the portfolio provides a common purpose and that shared understanding.
Innovation is often made up of novel solutions. Still, in areas of complexity, the better the understanding of standards, in the harmonization of approaches, in recognizing “universal” performance, there is this potential for burden share. Investments in any new energy solution must work through validation to commercialization in established ways. It builds mutual learning, adding more momentum to solve problems and improve designs.
Sharing the best ideas allows for more significant open exchanges. Governments, institutions and the private sector each have roles to play in any transition of this size. The Private sector mostly brings innovations to market. Still, all parties are involved in sharing risks or can be supportive and mutually reinforcing to validate, promote and clear the pathway for regulations to adapt to change when new solutions are being explored, tested and commercialized.
Our economic prosperity will be determined by transforming the energy sector.
t is mainly through innovation we will achieve this energy transformation. Innovation is vital to the integration and operation design of the energy system, and we need to recognize its crucial role. Innovation should be as close to the core as research, science or engineering. It translates those interesting concepts into viable solutions through innovation disciplines, resources and a well-structured design.