I wrote a mini-series of three posts to introduce a radical concept that envisions the energy transition as a living, evolving entity that bridges technology and nature, sparking profound shifts in how communities generate, consume, and perceive energy.

It aims to trigger innovation engagement and activation strategies to change the energy transition dynamics within a community setting, offering decentralized community energy.

It focuses on the community in a decentralized way for its energy. It challenges established norms and prompts a complete reimagining of our relationship with energy and the environment through innovation, creativity and ecosystem thinking and design.

Imagine transforming the energy transition into a holistic ecosystem of interconnected businesses, each contributing unique value to accelerate sustainable energy adoption.

The links to take you to the sites where you can read the proposed solution are at the bottom of this post.

Introducing the Energy Transition Nexus: A Living Energy Organism” that challenges the Conventional Approach to the Energy Transition

This Energy Transition Nexus is a conceptual leap, a radical departure from how we presently undertake parts of the energy transition. It does shift ownership of the energy transition. by forming these community energy ecosystems that promote local entrepreneurship, collaboration, and business-building opportunities through innovation and learning from others. It encourages radical change simply because we need this significant shift in our thinking.

It comprises the following parts to consider shifting our thinking away from the presently accepted, more highly centralised thinking on energy provision into community enablement. It is conceptualized upon the following thoughts:

I feel it is essential to bridge the gap between the natural world and the business world in a more closely aligned way, going beyond existing frameworks or thinking but still grounding this into business-orientated understanding to relate more.

Let’s explore a business-oriented, yet still disruptive, approach that brings a conceptual leap to the energy transition with this decentralized community proposal while maintaining some degree of continuity with business practices but set in an ecosystem way of thinking and design:

Holistic Energy Ecosystem: Integrated Business Network

The ecosystem-centric model accelerates the transition while aligning with existing business paradigms by creating an integrated business network that shares resources, knowledge, and expertise. It’s a transformation that leverages collaboration, investment, and market dynamics to drive radical change within the energy industry and supports the primary community needs as central.

We begin to talk about a different energy game, a new language that reflects a living ecosystem for energy.

Energy Transition Nexus: A Living Energy Organism

Imagine an energy transition paradigm where communities create a living, self-organizing energy organism called the “Energy Transition Nexus.” This radical concept merges cutting-edge technology, biology, and community engagement to revolutionize the energy transition process:

What if we can construct a groundbreaking opportunity to reshape the energy landscape to empower your community, stimulate local innovation, and drive sustainable growth? It puts your energy future in your hands.

Innovation often emerges from pushing boundaries, considering diverse perspectives, and embracing a broader lens of potential connecting solutions to give a positive impetus to changing the energy transition into something more tangible to ourselves and our communities.

This feasibility rests on many factors, such as community interest, local regulations, technological readiness, and effective leadership.

Successful implementation requires a comprehensive understanding of local dynamics, a strong stakeholder commitment, and the ability to address challenges as they arise. While there are challenges, the potential benefits in terms of community empowerment, innovation, and sustainable growth make this concept worth exploring.

We do need a radical rethink of our energy transition. It needs to revert to communities, the final arbitrator and the consumer. That builds their energy needs and connects their growth. We still have national grids and can augment energy supplies, but the community gains a degree of independence to shape their needs and destiny.

Originally posted on www.energycentral.com as a three-part mini-series. The first post, which introduces the concept and framework thinking, links into the two follow-up posts on the Energy Transition Nexus: A Living Energy Organism and its suggested framework.

Further reemphasised on my posting site with the first post, “Envision Energy as a living, evolving community.”

The post Envision Energy in living, evolving communities that challenge conventional wisdom. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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.

The post Innovation is essential to unlock all parts of the energy transition. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

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:

1.  To accelerate the deployment of renewable energy technologies throughout the system.
2. There is a real need to find innovative solutions focusing on the end-user sectors of transport, industry, and buildings.
3. The technological and digital innovative solution must focus on the overall system design and the operation needs.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.

The post We need a new Energy Mantra- innovate, innovate, innovate. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Today, our innovation activity needs to transition through collaborating and co-creating, applying ecosystem thinking and platform designs for business. We increasingly recognize the future value and impact for businesses to grow, is through combining innovation, and external collaborations, and ensuring solutions are more sustainable.

We need to have a new open architecture for undergoing this transformation that is scalable and built, combining technology and tools, for speed and effectiveness.

Making Sustainability central to innovation capability building requires a new ecosystem-designed way that connects the parts.

Let me tell you my story of what I believe; it continues to evolve

Today’s challenge is to build the capacity, competencies and capabilities to be different, more resilient and resourceful. These need to be built upon a deep appreciation of what innovation can provide; the stimulus for creative solutions that have sustained lasting growth.

It is through continued open learning and collaborations we build, capabilities so they become stronger and resilient, and increasingly difficult for competitors to understand and imitate. Capabilities grow through use and application in increasingly intensified ways. Knowledge explored offers new knowledge gained. We need to continue to learn, simply in growing within ourselves and what we are inspired to work upon.

Ecosystem thinking is becoming central to our future as we open up to greater co-creation and collaboration opportunities, exploring broader open innovation initiatives. I believe co-creation spreads out risk and accelerates ideas into higher-value solutions through the diversity of thinking and contributions, by building out ideas and concepts within the connections and relationship network.

We gain by increasingly “looking outside our lens on the world,” that increased awareness and focus, which have that “combination and connecting-up effect.” This greater potential to give impact and value in returns is attuned far more to customer needs or market trends as more “eyes” are involved in finding gaps and searching for new solutions to fill them.

Building the capacity to innovate in more open, ecosystem ways can consciously strengthen the business pathway to a sustainable future. In a world of complex challenges to share with highly collaborative partners increases confidence in common needs and solutions, but this requires a different toolset and mentality to undertake.

It is through value creation that is increasingly built on a collaborative approach you look to achieve greater sustainability from the investment made and solutions offered to meet customers’ needs, so often motivated by spotting “first mover” advantage in the designs and solutions achieved.

Today the aim is to build distinctive capabilities, which draw out the characteristics of the organization, attract collaborators that are like-minded and driven by shared learning and find greater value in combining expertise, curiosity and knowledge. Working together through this diverse expertise it increasingly becomes harder to be replicated by others. It is through this sharing and integrating across the organization and with other like-minded collaborators we can find greater value and impact in the solutions offered.

We all are required to make transitions in our work

I am finding myself re-positioning to a “transition advocate” recognizing the combined effects of applying innovation, in ecosystems designs and thinking, looking to support clients for future sustainable solutions. has an increasing value and appreciation 

Specifically, I am focusing on the needs and solutions within industrial and energy systems that have the potential to radically change our world.

Combining innovation, ecosystem and sustainability is a step change for many.

Here is how I see this emerging new way of support I am undertaking:

• Transformational insights need to be explored at the front end of our transitions, looking for those different edges and gaps that offer real new potential. Facing many unknowns, I support that front end by providing the “stimulus, fuel and insights” This opening position underpins my supportive advisory & mentoring services to clients.
• We cannot stay “static”, we need to continue to evolve. It is seeking out these “dynamics” that nurture an understanding of what is evolving, and what impact and growth opportunities this has for a business to explore and exploit. Often we need to search for the spots where ideas collide, my job is to help facilitate and stimulate these dynamic moments.
• We need to find increasing time to leverage interactions and conversations far more. We need a greater exchange environment and this is where ecosystem thinking and designs emerge. I look to be a catalyst and triggering point to build out the necessary critical conversations.
• I break my business out into dedicated focal topics looking for the “big transforming” points of impact or emerging interest. By applying my understanding and insights that are, in my mind, complementary, synergistic or clarifying new emerging intersections, I am looking for growth potential that has value-adding impact and business model change.
• I provide insights, knowledge, fresh perspectives and outlooks through coaching, mentoring and advising to complement and add a different momentum.
• In my view, it is by taking the innovator’s perspective into the assessment of the need of a client’s transition, you provide a different understanding, to offer fresh insights coming from my ongoing research and investigations and diversity of experience.

What I firmly believe is the combination of innovation within ecosystem thinking and the design approach has arrived, capitalizing on the value points of digitalisation combined with technology and human ingenuity that is searching for sustainability in all we deliver, for lasting value creation and business impact.

So I come back to my positioning “My primary role is advising and coaching within these areas of applying innovation, and ecosystem thinking to deliver sustainable solutions. The principal focuses is to support and build internal capacity, competencies, and capabilities to undertake any transformation journey with external collaborators for greater impact and value-creation“

Repositioning has been a journey of comprehension and recognition.

I run a specialized advisor and mentoring business called Agility Innovation; it has an intensity of focus on its client’s needs and always looking to contribute to a client’s own specific journey

It is in the past two-plus years of work I have been seeing this combining aspect of innovation, ecosystems in thinking and design for sustainability, to shift my focus even more firmly into this position.

Working individually I suppose this does have the real advantage of being small, nimble and, yes, agile (in my own way) to provide a different fresher perspective than many others. My connected model by investing in research, exploring constantly the evolving landscape and exchanging, writing and practising the advice given, keeps me totally engaged in what I do.

The end result is bringing together many strands of thinking, in a ‘living and dynamic’ newly designed innovation touch and value, that evolves constantly over time in ecosystem thinking and design.

The real value is becoming (more) adaptive in design and capability understanding, which is constantly looking to see what fits clients’ immediate and longer-term needs. Ones that build up a capacity that gives this flexible, versatile and malleable design; an evolving, living ecosystem that constantly adjusts to give a new sustaining future of seeking out in different places growth and future value creation impact.

I do enjoy my continued journey of discovery. My ongoing wish is to keep deploying this thinking in future client work on the combining of innovation, ecosystem thinking and design for providing lasting, sustainable solutions that offer value and impact.

If your organization is at the stage of needing to transition or you are simply curious to find out more, I am more than happy to exchange and share thoughts on how and where I might be able to contribute to your evolution.

**Initial thinking on this was initially outlined on my Ecosystems4innovating posting site in 2022.

The post Completing transitions through innovation, ecosystems and sustainable approaches first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Innovation has a very tough job of attracting the necessary money to take a concept or idea all the way through to commercialization. There is always that constant asking about the economic return and the associated risks.

Financing game-changing investments, replacing something existing or simply providing something new have tough financial questions always to be answered.

Here I am taking an innovation need in a different way than most are used to reading about. So what are right conditions to invest and realize innovation?

The Energy Transition is one of the toughest innovation challenges ever. We must remove fossil fuel as a source of energy, decarbonize our planet and replace it with clean energy alternatives of solar, wind, hydropower, nuclear and green hydrogen solutions. To make the transformation in just under 30 years is a massive task. So far, we are doing a poor job of this as markets, solutions, opinions, and financial support are all highly fragmented.

Tacking emerging and developing markets is even harder to achieve an energy transition.

Can you imagine what it is like in a developing country that lacks sufficient energy and infrastructure yet is faced with the sizable task of expanding its economy to meet growing population expectancies and the need for rising incomes to give that essential potential for growth that having energy available can provide?

I re-visited an excellent report from IEA, “Financing Clean Energy Transitions in Emerging and Developing Economies“, written in 2021, and I have sustainably drawn down from this report in this post.

Today most developing countries are facing the real challenge of finding the development models that they are increasingly required and encouraged to find, to avoid high-carbon choices, locking themselves on a path that conflicts with the pressing global need for solutions that are built upon clean energy. They are caught as the needed financial support is not provided at the levels needed.

Choosing lower emission pathways for growth and prosperity has great opportunities in Africa, Asia, Latin American and the Middle East to avoid significant decarbonizing like the Developed countries. Today developing and emerging economies account for two-thirds of the world’s population but only one-fifth of investments in clean energy and one-tenth of global wealth.

Global economics, moving towards a global recession, the war in Ukraine and higher energy prices today are undercutting the prospects of any substantial shift being well-funded due to these economic changes and those providing more evident returns on projects are more likely to achieve financing. How can developing countries raise their equal priority to achieve a more sustainable path towards building clean energy solutions?

The need for deliberate, stronger action to contain future emission growth and transform the energy systems in these developing and emerging markets is essential. They come in different forms or challenges and need strong financial support and governance, often with higher risks and uncertainty.

It is estimated that to put developing counties on track to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, the need is for at least an annual spend above USD 1 trillion. Today we spend USD 150 billion per year.

With Electricity consumption growing by around there times the rate of advanced economies in developing countries, the urgency of investing in clean power (wind, solar, etc.) gives energy efficiency and electrification the best chance to avoid emissions and decarbonization caused by replicating the path of developed countries and their reliance on fossil fuel and the higher costs of change.

To achieve this, access to finance becomes essential.

In the parts of the world where extraction of essential minerals, coal, oil and gas takes place, fossil fuel is entrenched in infrastructure, achieving lower cost extraction returns, and the ongoing reliance on hydrocarbons conflicts with the “need” for replacing this with renewable solutions, primarily untested, immature, needing variable scaling options for ‘right sizing’ or yet to be fully commercialized or tested in different environments and conditions. This is where fresh financial thinking needs to be applied to recognize the different issues and seek to find imaginative solutions.

Affordability, Reliability and Sustainable must be embedded in any modern energy solution. We need to solve the estimated 800 million people who still have no access to electricity and often water. 2.6 billion don’t have access to clean cooking options and rely on charcoal or wood, which exposes them to potential health issues.

We have a world where 15 out of 25 most polluted cities are in emerging, and developing countries and air pollution often is dangeruôusly high and a major cause of premature deaths.

So we need to mobilize capital on a massive scale.

We need to find a private sector role alongside a more enhanced one for international and development financial institutions. Clean energy investments need to come far more from private sector finance. In contrast, the public sector, including state-owned enterprises, must focus more on taking the financial lead of grid infrastructure and kick-starting emission-intensive sector switches.

We need imagination and creative and innovative solutions.

Global investment capital is available but needs the (magic) mix of sound projects, incentives and adequate returns to balance the risks. Today many emerging or developing economies do not yet have a clear vision of a clean energy pathway and a comprehensive road map of supportive policy and regulatory changes that can provide the environment to drive and catalyse rapid energy transitions.

Many promising projects fail as the risks associated are not well-underpinned or clarified enough, and the concerns for the ongoing creditworthiness of the parties and all the enabling resources these need remain unattractively too high. Many concepts don’t fully consider all the essential parts of the infrastructure and support mechanisms or the very real political struggles and local constraints.

There is often institutional weakness, licence and acquisition constraints, foreign direct investment restrictions, currency risks, less than robust local banking, and a lack of local capital avenues. The debt burdens of those operating today of (government-owned) utilities, the chronic under-investment in network infrastructures and sheer difficult economic and resource conditions of limited fiscal and mobilizing the understanding and limited specialised resources are significant barriers.

We need to mobilize the capital to finance clean energy solutions or transitions.

Cop 27, held in Egypt in November 2022, had a breakthrough in getting developed countries to recognize the loss and damage built up by the pollution from these countries. The impact and future risk are to minimise severe floods and overcome droughts, rising sea levels and harsh storms. This recognition needs “hard” cash, not just pledges. I hope that negotiators from developing nations don’t spend valuable time looking back but put their creative energy into looking forward.

The IEA stated in a report two critically important areas of forward-looking focus.

“The focus should be building imaginative and creative solutions that include measures to enhance financial markets, improve the visibility of public policies, remove distortions from energy markets, enable grids to integrate renewable power better, empower local entrepreneurs to develop smaller-scale clean energy solutions, as in energy efficiency, and build models for universal access to modern energy” (IEA)

“The massive scale of the challenge requires rethinking how we approach it – and major efforts from international financial institutions, their donors, multilateral development banks and many other actors. Many institutions are already seeking to do more, which I (Dr. Fatih Birol, CEO IEA) welcome. But when we look at the numbers globally today, it is clear that we are nowhere near mobilising the level of funds that will be needed. This is why one of the most urgent recommendations is that governments give international public finance institutions a strong strategic mandate to finance clean energy transitions in the developing world“. (IEA)

It is the suggestion of IEA in collaboration with the World Bank and World Economic Forum to build a suggested framing of how to bring developing markets up to a better market-ready condition, based on a growing awareness and understanding of technologies that are both mature but equally at adoption stage for renewables and energy efficiencies that lay the ground for the necessary integration of new technologies.

Finance models need to be highly adaptive and innovative to individual needs.

The suggested priorities are ten broad areas of scope. This list, drawn from exploring case studies from Brazil to Indonesia and from Senegal to Bangladesh, offers the potential pathway forward of finding innovative solutions based on new technologies emerging or fully validated understood in cost, return and necessary infrastructure and local policy support to attract capital and institutional support.

Innovative projects that need to be housed or grouped in a (universal) structured approach

This grouping allows for the beginning of collective investment accordingly. It allows metrics and standard criteria to be established to become global in selected focus areas, emerging into comparable standard practice and making financial assessments more systematic. Categorizing, giving focus, expertise and emerging financial models that tackle the groups mentioned below:

*Harness the readiness of investors to back renewable power
*Ease the delivery of reliable and clean power by expanding and modernising grids
*Enhancing the financial performance of utilities
*Build equitable and sustainable models for universal access to modern energy
*Embed high efficiency and connectivity into all new buildings and appliances.

*Leap ahead to invest in more efficient and electrified mobility solutions
*Recast the development model of producer economies
*Lay the groundwork for scaling up low-carbon fuels and industrial infrastructure
*Boosting innovative strategies to transform emissions-intensive sectors
*Accelerate the shift away from coal while ensuring a people-centred transition

The list above begins the Priority actions for financing clean energy transitions in emerging and developing economies. These can be summarized as providing the necessary frameworks and activities for the investment communities to “pull together” and begin to structure their financial risk, reward and mobilization around the need to achieve global agreement.

– Redouble international support
*Give international public finance institutions a strong strategic mandate to finance clean energy transitions.
*Boost and improve the delivery of international climate finance.
*Enhance the deployment of blended finance to mobilise additional private capital.
*Incentivise international capital markets to fund a broader range of clean energy investment opportunities in emerging and developing economies
–Tackle cross-cutting issues that affect investment risks and returns
*Make it easier and cheaper to develop viable new clean energy projects.
*Improve domestic access to capital through more robust banking and capital markets.
*Remove distortions in markets and prices that work against sustainable investments.
*Put state-owned enterprises, especially utilities, on a firmer financial footing with sustainable strategies.
*Empower local entrepreneurs and small/medium-sized enterprises to drive change.
*Harmonise sustainable finance frameworks and improve reporting on climate risks.
–Scale up private capital rapidly for clean power, efficiency and electrification
*Build equitable and sustainable models for universal access to modern energy.
*Harness the readiness of investors to back renewable power.
*Ease the delivery of reliable and clean power by expanding and modernising grids.
*Embed high efficiency and connectivity into all new buildings and appliances.
*Leap ahead to invest in more efficient and electrified mobility solutions.
–Focus already on the hardest aspects of transitions
*Recast the development model for major producer economies.
*Lay the groundwork for scaling up low-carbon fuels and industrial infrastructure.
*Develop innovative strategies to transform emissions-intensive sectors.
*Accelerate the shift away from unabated coal while ensuring a people-centred transition.

The key here is to mobilize funds by providing the basic framework and desire for financial capital to find higher visibility for enabling investment returns in innovative solutions in a stronger institutional design.

We need to begin structuring investments in developing and emerging countries. Each country needs a plan and a recognition of what it is clearly missing and the constraints, nationally, locally, and at a district level, to begin the ‘honest’ assessment of all of what needs changing, preparing and then exploring so support at Government or International and development institutions alongside the role of private sector investment and what each needs.

Clean power is central to the development and any transition strategies but needs transparency of all those investing and realistic time scales and return expectations and that is extra hard in many political, social and current environments facing economic constraints and qualified people to deliver.

The major resource for this post IEA, “Financing Clean Energy Transitions in Emerging and Developing Economies“, report written in 2021.

The post Innovation comes in different forms and problems, all requiring financial support. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

No energy transition will be achieved without invention and innovation, yet we are currently failing badly to fund research, development and deployment. We are losing the race to stop our planet’s warming as our innovative human endeavours are not at the level they should be, or we lack the “will” to make the changes we so desperately need to undergo to protect our planet.

The sheer scope of the energy transition often pulls me in so many different directions. Still, the foundation stays in place, that of making the contribution of my understanding of innovation as my focal point of contribution- the accelerant to energy change.

With such complexity and pace of change occurring in solutions to the Energy Transition constantly pushing me, there is an absolute necessity to understand a significant amount of advice, detail and opinion as well as basic research on the areas of energy solutions and their potential impacts. This enables me to appreciate more where innovation has an even more significant potential to contribute.

I keep constantly investing my time in growing my further understanding, expertise, and thinking of energy transition ‘cross-over points’ where we move away from the old energy systems into the new ones.

This knowledge understanding provides some distinctive and interrelated “core” topics, which are admittedly time-consuming but essential based on the in-depth research undertaken.

Where innovation fits within the energy transition story, it actually becomes the accelerant of change:

As you get into the complexity of this energy transition, you realize the difficulties.

Innovation will, in my view, be the critical driver of the energy transition; it needs to deliver the following:

1). Deliver technology breakthroughs that provide renewable solutions to offer cost-effective alternatives to conventional energy technology,

2) technology innovation that improves the existing renewable technologies to reduce current costs and achieve more significant deployment,

3) new business models that allow new investors to be attracted to the energy system,

4) exploring new concepts that promote the scale-up of renewable technologies,

5) supports new financing models and justification and validation for fresh capital investments,

6) enabling policies and regulatory changes to offer change incentives for different market access,

7) contribute substantially to fresh market designs and concepts,

8) encourage and provide opportunities for new energy system operators to undertake part of the transformations needed.

This energy transition needs a dramatic shift towards clear innovation approaches so we can accelerate, support, and deliver the radical, often disruptive shifts.

I have been building out my innovating4energy.com insights and offerings as a source of reference and opinion. If you have the opportunity, do take a look, it aims to build greater innovation understanding (and need) within the Energy System

For me, the energy transition that the world is undertaking requires all forms of innovation to offer technically advanced and breakthrough solutions to an incredibly complex energy delivery system. To redesign a complete energy system in twenty to thirty years, which is the current time frame being wanted to be achieved, is as demanding as you can get. I certainly want to play a role in this transformation; it is exciting, challenging, and demanding for all involved.

The critical enabler will come from technology and systemic innovation.

Innovation needs to be broader than just being conducted through technological research and development; it requires a more significant integrated innovation model with business models, policies, processes, and market design as part of the solutions.

Energy transition and innovation contribution, on this global scale, is as powerful a demonstration of the actual value and contribution that innovation does bring; it needs highlighting and drawing out.

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