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.

I have been consuming the latest flagship report, released today, 10th September 2020, by the IEA called “Energy Technology Perspectives 2020

The report’s comprehensive analysis maps out the technologies needed to tackle emissions in all parts of the energy sector, including areas where technological progress is still lacking such as long-distance transport and heavy industries.

It shows the amount of emissions reductions that are required from electrification, hydrogen, bioenergy and carbon capture, utilization, and storage. It also provides an assessment of emissions from existing infrastructure and what can be done to address them.

Within the work going into this report, the IEA has identified over 800 technology options that need to be further examined, explored, validated, and accelerated for the World to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. That is an awful lot of innovation to get us to a clean energy transition from where we are today.

The report is over 400 pages long and is framed as a guide book for all involved in the energy transition. The report not only shows the scale of the challenge but also offers vital guidance for overcoming so many of the issues and challenges identified today. As anyone knows the more you explore innovation and what it is trying to resolve, the more complex it becomes.

To cover the whole energy system what we have been identified today in technology options will multiply, adapt, change, and build out different solutions as we continue to learn and advance.

If nothing else do read the press release for this report HERE “ Reaching energy and climate goals demand a dramatic scaling up of clean energy technologies – starting now”

Accelerating Innovation through rapid innovation adoption cycles

There are so many aspects of innovation need within this report but one part I felt was worth highlighting as it suggests eight innovation approaches of rapid innovation cycles for the Energy transition. These are ways to look to accelerate a more rapid innovation cycle within the energy transition. I wanted to put these into a simple table as they make real sense of how we can tackle innovation within the drive towards a clean energy transformation

You can download this as a PDF Table of rapid innovation cycles for the Energy transition

Different approaches to more rapid innovation adoption cycles

This rapid innovation cycle approach is the work of IEA- all rights reserved.

The examples illustrated are ones chosen by IEA to help relate the attribute to the example of technology, innovation, or process change.

Within this extensive report on the innovation need to deploy clean energy technologies you get a deep dive through this Energy Technology Perspectives 2020. The report focuses on technology needs and opportunities for reaching international climate and sustainable energy goals. This flagship report offers vital analysis and advice on the clean energy technologies the world needs to meet net-zero emissions objectives.

Providing a comprehensive innovation understanding of the impact and relationship

It is a comprehensive report for anyone interested in how and why innovation is central to our lives as it has the major role to play in the energy transition we are all undertaking.

A journey to turn our energy into clean modern and more sustainable ways, as well as to move towards the eradication of harmful emissions caused by our industrial past we need this transition to hopefully give us a promising future of ensuring our (one) planet will be fit to habitat in decades to come.

In my view applying and harnessing all we know on innovation, research and development give us this (one) chance.

The post Energy technology needs more rapid innovation cycles first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

There is complexity in all the energy transitions going on. Still, it is the ones that can see the possibilities and ‘energize’ through new innovative solutions that hold the future in our hands to capitalize upon as fast as we can..

All we can predict is that the pace of innovation and energy transition will speed and then scale up to meet the needs of a world rapidly wanting to decarbonize, and the companies that are the investors in innovation will be the best placed to capitalize on this.

During the next ten to twenty years, we are in a race to transform our energy systems, one that moves from fossil fuel reliant to clean fuels based on renewable energy. Innovation is the catalyst for this.

We need to decarbonize and make energy greener.

The magnitude of realization of achieving deep decarbonization of our energy systems, the upending of fossil fuel reliance into renewables, and this undertaking of a complete energy system redesign is hard to comprehend within the time scales set.

What we do in the next ten years will determine if we can achieve the goals of reducing global warming by 2 percent by 2050. The cost of not achieving this will be significant for its impact on our lives if we do not attempt to undertake this.

The need is to allow time for new technologies to commercialize.

To undertake something like a global energy transition, you need time; time to figure it out, validate the options and pathways and then provide the necessary time to pilot, learn and then commercialize the (multiple) solutions to be scaled and applied. The cost of this transformation will eventually run into trillions of dollars.

The innovation aspect needs to gather momentum. Technologies are emerging based on several solution needs:

• Ones that are grid edge in design, meaning more customer-facing and power-flow controls
• Radically different storage technologies that can handle the variances in renewable of holding the supply of solar and wind generating energy as well as converting energy through electrolysis, hydrogen and synthetic fuels that serves the needs of mobility, heating, agriculture
• The present gas and steam turbines need to be upgraded, optimized, converted and have applied hybrid solutions that combine different energy sources, various technologies that combine to provide mixed energy source power plants
• The advancement of carbon capture techniques and carbon removal
• Exploring next-generation nuclear fission and fusion
• Finding different solutions that allow high-temperature superconductor transmission and solid-state transformers to be introduced increasingly into the energy system
• We need to increase the transparency, reliability, and resilience through the application and use of sensors, monitoring, analytics, and self-learning systems to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
• Finally, putting to use digitalization for machine and device connectivity, managing growing complexity in overall systems

Each of these initiatives “demands” new technology design.

They need to be economically viable and scalable and need to drive a clean energy transition and provide increasing systems flexibility

These new technologies need to break into the existing lifecycle of energy design to substitute incumbent solutions. The speed of development and deployment will be unprecedented for use to meet the climate goals, decarbonize the system, and change the fuel source.

Innovation is at the heart of the energy transition.

Innovation will be at the forefront of the energy transition; it will be both radical and full of breakthroughs to achieve the goals set to decarbonize our world.

Innovation is enabling technologies, offering new business models, market design, and system integration options in focusing on flexible solutions to overcome solar and wind variability, provide increased system flexibility, and allowing for reduced total system cost.

Innovation is playing a significant role in facilitating the integration of the emerging new renewable energy system providing new opportunities to explore and evolve:

1).  For new business models, where new services, enhancing the system’s flexibility, and providing the incentivizing of further integration models can play there part.

2). Then we have the consequence of any innovation change, in energy source and delivery, and that is in market design innovation. Regulations, policies, new incentives for value-adding services are building new business opportunities that give a new breed of energy players, including a new set of infrastructure investors, the opportunities to support and gain from the new introduction of solutions.

3). Lastly, the innovating models for operating in the electricity system can give a different way to share the value out of managing this VRE generation. It opens up the market to a whole new range of energy providers, including, you as a net contributor back to the energy grid with the right approach to usage, storage, and generation from your renewable technology stack of solutions.

Innovation solutions are both supply-sided and demand-sided

Innovation is working on both the supply-side in finding the new flexible solution but on the demand-side as well. Just providing two significant examples where innovation can transform parts of the energy system:

The Grid is offering real potential to different innovative solutions. The need for a growing range of flexible solutions to reduce the dependencies on large centralized grids offers a transformational set of opportunities. Network Grids that are more downstream or even operate at the edge, closer to final demand, enable energy to achieve a closer match for the generation and response to consumer demand. Also, the more variable generation having a more distributed grid provides increased flexibility in storage and new grid operations. From these new grid designs, Energy Utilities can deliver solutions that interconnect the systems to be more flexible and deploy digital solutions that support increasing effectiveness and coverage, closer to users to offer improved services.

Storage through advancing battery-scale solutions and the power-to-x solutions is also offering a completely different range of options for demand-side management. As designs become more optimized, the distribution of energy gets closer to the markets and the ability to aggregate distributed energy resources to match and design the grid services for giving the need consumer that flexibility by taking out the variability of renewables.

Within these two examples, Innovation through new technology application becomes the catalyst to the changes we need within the Energy Transition. Are you unlocking its power to transform?

The post Innovation has the power to unlock the Energy Transition first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

1. Firstly by exchanging fossil fuel hydrogen with renewable hydrogen for fertilizers and feedstocks
2. Secondly, exchanging coal and gas with renewable hydrogen for steel making and chemical production.
3. The Electrolysis method can bridge the gap between power and the industry sectors, increasing the value of electrons and provide the essential molecules.
4. The Electrolyzer can complement the intermittent renewable energy sources of wind and solar to form a complete energy source. Hydrogen can be stored, and the electrolyzer ramped up when you suffer variable weather conditions to offer continued energy, all based on renewable sources, solving the seasonal variations that wind and solar can have.

Hydrogen does the potential to tick all the boxes of the decarbonizing industry as well as be the alternative heat source fo building and through hydrogen fuel cells offer low-carbon mobility. Using renewable hydrogen can accelerate the shift to green energy and decarbonization as a replacement for fossil fuels. Finally, it has the potential to be substituted in many of the harder-to-abate industrial sectors reliant on hydrogen through steam methane reforming as well as compliment electricity and decarbonize the gas grids we presently rely upon.
Hydrogen is not an energy source but an energy carrier. It is versatile; it offers no greenhouse gases, particulates, Sulphur oxides, or ground-level ozone but does have a high Co2 intensity upstream if produced from fossil fuels such as coal, oil, or natural gas. To make it green hydrogen, it has to be green, and that requires production through water electrolysis.
So We Are At The Time for Ramping up the Electrolyzer
I want to return to the discussion that Armin Schnettler EVP of Siemens Energy had with Kevin O’Donovan here. He was asked, “what are the technical challenges with the (PEM) Electrolyzers?
The reply by Mr. Schnettler was mostly about working on the fundamental technologies of Electrolyzers as the critical needs to make Electrolyzers Industrial ready. He pointed out the PEM technology is presently not mature enough, and this needs more robust solutions.
 The list of issues to tackle was in Mr. Schnettler’s opinion:
1) Certainly, get the capital cost down of the Electrolyzer
2) Make the Electrolyzers more compact, in their size,
3) Make sure they have high levels of reliability to operate in industrial application environments for 10 to 20 years and
4) Scaling up the Electrolyzers from the existing 4 MW to the next “ten-factor step” that seems achievable every 4 to 5 years and deliver the 100 MW plant solution next.
5) Finally, to get to these 100 MW solutions as soon as possible and then to 1 GW.
It was here he put it: “it is moving from MW to GW as the challenge (and opportunity)”
Why is this scaling up so important?
Just imagine Siemens have only delivered their latest Gas Turbine, the Siemens 9000HL model recently in the UK to work in a combined-cycle plant. Weighing in at just under 1.1 million pounds (497,000 kilograms), it’ll rotate 3,000 times a minute and generate 593 megawatts of power at peak, likely for decades. That turbine could be argued is “the pinnacle of today’s combustion technologies.”( Bloomberg / Siemens).
All these power generation technologies are competing; all are focusing on not just efficiencies but finding fuel systems that support that technology solution. Electrolyzers need to get into the big league of energy generation, pure and simple, to compete effectively. The pricing of the finished product of Hydrogen has got to get far closer to what the fossil fuel alternatives can deliver today in efficiencies and effectiveness and are matured through well-established solutions and integrated designs.
The significant upcoming advantage for the Electrolyzer is the marginal unit of power generation is coming from a smaller and smaller source. In 2020, the median kilowatt-hour generated in the UK will come from a plant of 596 MW of capacity. In 2040, the median kilowatt-hour will come from a plant of only 40 MW of capacity. (Source: Bloomberg). The other is by using the Water Electrolyzer (PEM) it is better to combine with other variable renewable sources for a faster ramp-up and giving a totally carbon-free fuel or product solution that offers a clean, sustainable alternative.
The commercial competitiveness of the electrolyzer will depend on the ability to advance the underlying technologies. These I will be exploring in my next post.
The need is for technology improvements of higher efficiencies, less degradation, higher availability, larger cell sizes, higher operating pressures, less reduced critical materials together with this need for reduced material size (Armin’s compactness). 
 Getting to this, the plants will require a significant plant production capacity ramping up and becoming more automated. That plant ramping up will need more automation production of the Electrolyzer cell components, the cells, and stacks to build GW scale electrolyzer plants. Then you will have a set of different challenges at the installing site, where the cost of electricity becomes critical. Coupling low-cost renewable energy with Electrolyzers makes them viable.
So the push by Governments brings up closer to the tipping point of building a significant renewable Hydrogen business in the next decades. Already according to Wood MacKenzie, the green hydrogen pipeline more than doubled in five months from 3.2 GW to 8.2 GW of electrolyzer investments by 2030
The plan in Europe is to take the share of Hydrogen from less than 2% to 13-14% of the European energy Mix.
So as we all look to Electrolyzers as the solution towards offering a power source of Hydrogen it is 1) the technology developments needed to be well-mastered, 2) to build out capacity volumes to bring down unit prices, 3) we need to see GW scale to make them industrially attractive,4) renewable integrated electricity- hydrogen partnerships and 5) integrated project development, construction, and installation approaches, so these solutions can ensure electrolyzers competitive. And that is a long hard road to travel between now and 2030 to get the Electrolyzer the Real alternative to other power generation options.
Exploring this further
So we need to look a little more at the Electrolyzer and see if it is scalable in asset readiness, system design, and value chain developed to offer an Industrial shift to Hydrogen in these next 5 to 10 years.
To understand this readiness and the issues to be addressed, I decided to take a further, more in-depth dive into Electrolyzers. You will find my outcomes from my research and piecing different parts of the Electrolyzer puzzle together over on my dedicated energy transition posting site: https://innovating4energy.com.
I plan to explore and explain some of the significant obstacles to be overcome in ramping up today’s “pilot” electrolyzers into full-scale industrial-grade solutions. Electrolyzer solutions than can compete with other power generation technologies, ones that are very mature and will certainly not yield their established market space without a fight and some compelling arguments of the reasons to change.
A more in-depth review of Electrolyzers can be found on my dedicated posting site for all thongs of Energy Transition by clicking this link “Show me an Electrolyzer.“

The post From MW to GW’s of Renewable Hydrogen using Electrolyzers first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

At their own admission, it has been three years since they (IEA) released its last Energy Technology Perspective (ETP) report. Although they argue they have been reflecting on the critical technology challenges, it is way overdue.

In this new report, “Energy Technology perspective: Special Report on Clean Energy Innovation” released today, 2^nd July 2020, they have developed some improved modeling tools to bring a higher capacity to answer key technology questions in greater detail. This is good news.

IEA will further follow up later this year with a flagship ETP 2020 publication later in the year to keep a tighter and more consistent focus on the role and need of innovation to accelerate clean energy transitions.

They, the IEA are planning an IEA Clean Energy Transitions Summit really soon to convene ministers and CEO’s to the aim of driving economic development by this more robust focus on clean, resilient, and inclusive energy systems.

The IEA is suggesting they are is in the midst of a modernization agenda to keep them at the forefront of sustainable and clean energy transitions globally. They need to become a more significant focal point for reliable and leading-edge advice.

They put it starkly, the realization is simply that the energy sector will only reach net-zero emissions if there is a significant and concerted global push to accelerate the need for the innovation part of the energy transition.

The IEA sees (a growing) disconnect between climate goals of Government and Companies that they have set for themselves and all the concerted efforts needed in the innovative efforts underway to develop better and cheaper technologies to realize their goals.

We have recently been hearing that we have “all the technologies now we need to get on with it.” This, in my view, is partly right, we know where to put the efforts, but the abrupt step change we need to scale, re-engineer and develop these technologies and the delivery mechanisms (infrastructure, policy changes) are massive. We are losing sight of this.

The “drag and resistance to change” is significant. This needs resolving quickly to deliver a decarbonized world.

If we take the example of Hydrogen. When solutions and policies that have recently been emerging around Hydrogen from a European perspective,e they have been proposing a clear focus on green hydrogen as the focal point.

Green hydrogen is based on renewables and the significant deployment and use of electrolysis that makes it the clean energy solution (vector) as the Government policy focal point, we then get significant vested parties pushing back hard.  There is the intense push back of the suppliers of blue solutions offering carbon capture and storage as equally necessary in any policy and funding from any change in EU and Germany energy policy decisions. The argument is we need bridging solutions to any transition. There is a lot of merit in this argument.

Then we get those industries established on grey hydrogen, which is a significant greenhouse emitter, pushing even further back, claiming the ability to switch hydrogen from fossil fuels to clean is many years away. We are entering the geopolitics of hydrogen, can we afford this?

The dizzy array of solutions on offer needs validating for the pathway to fast decarbonization.

What we do need is the fastest transition through all means possible the low carbon options, but the lock-in risks in investments and where we deflect our research and development take us further out into the future if we need to achieve these net-zero emissions.

The rapid evolution of the dizzy array of solutions is one that all economies, especially the emerging economies, have to be very aware of this “lock-in effect if they chose the wrong transformation pathway.

The technology mix to decarbonize each economy and industry reliant on secure and resilient energy sources is a tough one. It is organizations like the IEA that need to be turned too for the best advice, not specific solution providers pushing their solutions on a narrow pathway of their focus.

The IEA, by rethinking how they re-designate technology innovation, makes for a substantial shift.

The major shift outlined in this report, released on July 2^nd, 2020, regroups the policy measures by families of key technologies based on similar technology attributes.

To quote from the report: “Within each of these families, knowledge and application spillovers hold significant potential to accelerate innovation if linkages are exploited: against this background, the section provides some concrete suggestions for action for each family of technologies to help policymakers to integrate tailored approaches for priority technology areas into overall strategies.”

Technology families:

• Electrochemistry: modular cells for converting between electricity and chemicals.
• CO2 capture: processes to separate CO2 from industrial and power sector emissions or the air.
• Heating and cooling: efficient and flexible designs for electrification.
• Catalysis: more efficient industrial processes for converting biomass and CO2 to products.
• Lightweighting: lighter materials and their integration in wind energy and vehicles.
• Digital: integration of data and communication to make energy systems flexible and efficient.

 The list above is not intended to be exhaustive. Still, it covers the types of solutions that hold the most promise for advancing value chains involving electrification, hydrogen and hydrogen-based fuels, CCUS, and bioenergy.”

To further quote from the report: “Among the other technologies that all have important roles to play in achieving net-zero emissions are large, scientifically complex technologies such as nuclear, including small modular nuclear reactors, and small-scale, consumer-led technologies such as flexible or buildings-integrated solar PV or high-efficiency motors.

In between these extremes lie geological technologies to enhance geothermal energy, hydrogen storage, or CO2 storage, as well as such high-potential areas as ocean energy, prefabricated net-zero energy building envelopes, and thermal and mechanical energy storage.”

This report is a timely update as our new technology innovation focal point.

Without a major acceleration in clean energy innovation, the net-zero ambitions on emissions will simply not be achieved.

The mix of many technology innovative solutions needs not just further discovery, it needs translating into scalable solutions. The “stark disconnect” of the “walk and the talk” around net-zero needs significant resolution. The IEA, through updating and giving innovation the central focal point for our need to deliver clean energy technologies.

Do please find time to work through the report.  It is critical to grasp the role of innovation within the energy transition. What is certain is we have been not giving this the appropriate attention it needs in resourcing, exploring, and maturing present as well as future solutions, we will clearly need to get us to a decarbonized world.

We need to accelerate transitions towards clean, resilient, and inclusive energy systems, and that comes from putting integrated clean energy innovation into the heart of energy policies and solution needs.

The post Sharply accelerating clean energy innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.