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.

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 started posting my thoughts on innovation in August 2010. I have written on this site alone, www.paul4innovating.com, by just coming up to a milestone of 700 posts focusing on innovation thoughts and opinions, so I just wanted to pause and think about all the different places I have tried to get the innovation message(s) out.

I always find the post-New Year to be a reflective part of the year of reviewing, deciding, and then setting new goals. This is a post about the sources of my knowledge that feeds my innovation passion.

Let me start. I often wonder whether the posts and articles I’ve written have been hitting the right buttons, helping solve the needs of those involved in innovation; I hope so. I have pushed out and explored various aspects, learning myself as I go. I have followed a number of great innovation thinkers and read different books on the areas of innovation.

It amazes me. How much is talked about, advice offered and sometimes that deep down nagging feeling, innovation understanding does not really change; it is the people managing it as they often seem to be simply passing through this innovation period onto other things or vanishing in pursuit of different career interests.

During this time, I have adopted and sometimes improved many innovative tools and methodologies or simply explored all the different ways to look at and investigate innovation. Reading and even contributing to different innovation books that have come out has added experience and contribution, but I do so often wonder that innovation seems not to have changed as much as I would have expected.

Innovation application and practice seem to have stayed stuck, largely due to how it is organized. The software has been increasingly proven and improved, mostly at the front end of the innovation process,but the whole innovation process or system stays in pockets of disconnected knowledge and fails to fully leverage the collaborative potential, insights or experiences of all involved if the innovation discovers to commercialization was open and supported by a clear ecosystem approach and strong, dedicated platform and technology-enabled environment.

Even with all the countless advice, ideas and concepts written by many, innovators still stay marooned on individual islands, lacking insights, alternative opinions and broader diversity in thinking. I wonder if innovation management has made the level of progress or remains still a little steeped in mystery and the big “big ah-huh” moment, often so vital to breakthrough innovation.

How can you just trigger multiple “ah-huh” moments? Having those insights are the wonderful moments of magic, and they still hold such power over our innovative thinking, sometimes unfairly judging our innovation process as “ad hoc”, but we must not deny us all to find ways to open up to a different way of innovation management through open, collaborative innovation engagement.

For me, it is necessary to grasp what Ecosystem thinking, and Platform design can do through all the connected technology and human collaboration this approach can provide. This is my primary focal point today.

I have doubled down on innovation more to prompt others.

More specifically, in my investigative travels, I developed a number of my own tools, frameworks or methodologies, or in numerous collaborations, especially with Jeffrey Phillips, a great sparring partner, the dialogues and exchanges have produced some good framing tools (in my opinion). Jeffrey has been writing articles and posts since 2005 and can be a great source of inspiration at Innovate on Purpose.

Equally, if you go to my dedicated page where I keep many of my tools and methodologies for easy reference here in this posting site insights and thinking, you get a fair amount of knowledge, collections and insights pulled together on this one tag or page. You can “search” on keywords and see what comes up.

I have with pride been constantly quoted, referenced or acknowledged as an innovative thinker and shaper, appearing for ten out of the last twelve years in the top 40 innovation bloggers, run and collated by Braden Kelley, who focuses today on Human-Centred Change and Innovation with a lot of good, helpful tools on his website.

On the academic side, I have been referenced 94 times in different papers, especially at Academia.edu. I have written for numerous organizations tailoring innovation to their specifics, be that Energy, Digital, Industrial and Software related on different length contracts commissioned. I like to equally contribute to different innovation practice references such as Future Shapers, occasionally Digital Transformation People run by Tim Ellis and consistently for BusinessInnovationBrief. I constantly feature posts or articles on LinkedIn and Medium as well. For my Energy Transition work, focusing on where innovation fits, I contribute to Energy Central, which has around 200,000 global power industry professionals visiting the site.

I run different innovation-related posting sites for my own innovation thinking, as innovation remains my core. I need to break out different parts of it to better focus a reader’s mind (and my own!)

I decided to try and separate my innovative thinking into more focused activities such as Ecosystems, the Energy transition, the Future of Work, Digital Technology, and of course, Innovation, so I can offer choice, greater depth or find a more selective place to write or clarify aspects of my work.

This one of paul4innovating.com, my core site, then one focusing specifically on ecosystems and platforms at ecosystems4innovation.com, one for where innovation fits within the energy transition over at innovating4energy.com where we are undergoing a transition in all of our lives.

I have two business advisory offerings, agilityinnovation.com, my main business offering that looks to find value creation, growth and impact from the advisory, coaching and mentoring work and hocaconsulting.com, more for the future of work or in my specific focus of work-to-be-done.

Lastly, I wanted to have (simple) reference sites to delve into quickly; these are thinking4innovators, my advocating coaching and guiding site of Guide4innovating.wordpress.com and a final one that focuses on the dynamics of innovationfitnessdynamics.wordpress.com which clarifies where individual, groups or organizations are positioned on the innovation landscape for capabilities, capacities and competences.

I see myself as an innovation journeyman, learning and sharing.

I simply enjoy innovation in all its forms. I got ‘hooked’ twenty-plus years ago. I work as a transition advocate and advisor for innovation, and ecosystems, focusing today more on those massive transformations being undertaken across the energy system and industry 4.0, requiring radical changes, new designs and innovative solutions.

I relate content to context to give greater knowledge and build the transition narratives we are all undergoing. For this, I love the notion of walkabouts for learning and testing ourselves.

The value and insights come from researching much of the need for innovation; in society, businesses and institutions need to constantly look to develop novel innovation solutions and frameworks that add new value.

My primary role is advising, mentoring and coaching within these areas of innovation needs.

For me, innovation needs to enter the DNA of our organizations and our own individual makeup. What I do is deliberately set out to help grow and extend the body of knowledge on innovation.

I have taken this pathway or learning journey around innovation as it fascinates me.

Why have I written this?

Well, It is not just my journey but yours to share and gain from. The sharing of knowledge and insights provided for others to gain makes this dedicated focus worthwhile and keeps me ticking along in business advisory, coaching and mentoring around innovation when asked for advice or engaged in work on a client’s behalf.

Are you leveraging all the resources available and mentioned here? Take a look, explore, and then ask if something needs clarification or is missing from your perspective. I learn from the ask.

Contact me, and we can design your innovation journey tailored to your individual needs.

The post Helping discover your innovation pathway first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Innovation often fails to align with strategic needs. It is a known, well-discussed fact. This is often not the fault of the innovator but the very people designing but not sharing the strategy or failing to recognize all the implications this might mean in shifting resources, investing money or simply under-appreciating the complexities that often lie with innovation to conceive, validate, contribute and deliver the contributions into that strategy.

Sadly many innovators are simply happily working away with no specific guidelines, apart from the general remit of “we need to be more innovative”, and this lack of coherence merging from the boardroom, failing to cascade down the organisation leaves this strategic part that innovation should plan as far to vague. They are not drawn into the need for change and its implications from an innovative perspective. Alignment should be a rigorous evaluation.

Building our capacity to innovate needs understanding and reflects the organization’s business activities. Innovators need to grasp the value creation aspects that will deliver the necessary capital-efficient and profitable growth and then ‘go in pursuit’ to achieve their contribution to these goals.

Even the basic questions often remain unclear: “How are we looking to grow revenue, save costs, reduce working capital or improve our fixed capital?” What is specifically being deployed or recognized needs to change and to get into the necessary detail becomes essential.

Managing our innovation activities thoughtfully and in alignment can help in all of these goals set in strategic direction or even mission purpose. Often the CFO is guilty as they want everything but are not prepared to reassess and reallocate the essential funds to unleash a new wave of innovation.

Shifting strategy always has significant implications, and the real need to understand whether it fits with what we have available generally makes deliberate questioning of the eventual role of innovation’s contribution and ability to deliver.

Then where equally does risk fit into the strategic equation for innovation?

Innovators often lack the clarity or governance guidelines to know if they can or can’t ‘push’ for groundbreaking innovation.

Risk is kept vague, often not as well articulated as it should be in guidelines or limitations deemed beyond the scope and areas to explore. Without real clarity, innovators, as with many other functions, often go beyond their imagination and explore the unknowns associated with any different innovation in the belief that this fits with the strategy. They are not deep into the strategic evaluations and are often ill-equipped when second-guessing.

Sometimes it even becomes ‘the art of avoidance’ by the person who wants innovation but not the associated risks, so the decision is “let’s not talk about it”.

Innovation is not the usual.

I recall a report some time back written by PA Consulting report called “Innovation as Unusual.” They were suggesting the innovation spend just in the UK alone is flushing some £65 billion down the drain each year, as nearly half the organizations waste good ideas, are far to risk-averse and fail to invest boldly around more ground-breaking ideas.

From my perspective, does the Strategy of Board guidelines clarify acceptable risk levels, or do they simply wait to see how the organization responds to a general idea?

So we are still seeing the majority of organizations struggling with innovation. In the process, they are losing out financially, forgoing huge opportunities in not achieve future competitive positions or foregoing the chances to alter their market position radically. It seems innovation remains incoherent within many organizations still.

PA Consulting suggested five innovation killers – fear, lack of focus, innovation engine failure, the wrong ROI and a natural reluctance to truly invest in building the right innovation capabilities. Pretty bad, I think? So we end up with costly failures.

So, where do we start in gaining Coherence?

Changes in Strategic direction or re-assessments of organizations’ goals always have significant implications. For me, a handy number of analytical or visualization tools applied to where and how the function and design of innovations fit help deepen the understanding and “bubble up” to the board the right questions they need to address in support of their decision for change.

Maybe we should all start visualizing first, all eventually arriving on the same page.

XPLANE, visualization thinkers who apply a design thinkers approach, produced brilliant visualizations of the organizations needs. They suggested visualizing the Cost of Confusion and the other as the Value of Clarity. Imagine having these as your starting point for establishing the innovation direction, resourcing and contribution directly in engagements with the board

Leveraging the power of the three-horizon methodology for innovation

I greatly favour the three-horizon methodology to work through to achieve this coherence in understanding. The three horizons offer an excellent framing technique to bring this ‘coherence’ that we need from our ‘here and know’ activities and future innovation efforts.

Dedicating time to knowing your innovation capability fitness

I have constantly been working away at what constitutes the dynamic capabilities for innovation that are needed for new innovation and those, shall we say, as more static and simply in place for the repetitive innovation renovation. It is identifying and seeing the difference and then knowing how to apply those that are dynamic and highly valuable to obtain against those that require a little dampening down. A significant resource calibrating can be taken by knowing the essential differences.

Take a look at www.innovationfitnessdynamics.wordpress.com. for some triggers

The question is, which are critical, which naturally occur when others begin to be put into place, which seems to have limited or no real effect on changing the dynamics of innovation?

The need to diverge and converge to reshape innovation activities

The alignment to the strategic direction (and importance) with any capabilities available needs to be understood. What present activities diverge away from the new strategic core and identify those that are converging?

The diverging ones need to have a real emphasis on improving performance or be “junked,” to question how they are managed for cash or releasing of precious investment capital to sell or be .disposed of eventually. Then those that are converging onto the new ‘known’ core of the business to grow and expand have potentially more capital and resource ready to be put to work on new concepts that fit.

So by recognizing these, and that is not easy in itself, you are beginning to know and identify the capabilities you need to have in place to fix today to make it as healthy as possible, alongside those new capabilities that will create a new winning set of growth and value propositions that give the ‘promise’ of what can come by applying different mindsets, resources and thinking.

Deciding that capabilities can be better leveraged requires separating exploitation and exploration.

Then we need to figure out the future core and start moving towards it. We should leverage the two dynamics of exploitation and exploration for our innovation and future growth.

Today we need to exploit and explore, and our capabilities need to be built fit for one of these two purposes.

Exploiting is today’s business need to leverage and improve on the existing business and simultaneously explore for tomorrow’s new business growth.

We certainly need bolder investments in knowledge and insights to begin inquiry that leads to the changes around the make-up of innovation capabilities and those shifts.

I certainly believe there is a real call for fresh and bolder investments in knowledge in infrastructure that focuses on activities that spur new approaches that lead to innovation. These are not just the traditional ones based on managing today’s core.

It is finding those innovations that provide the necessary new value. This new generation activity is occurring from recognizing how we can build, yes build for further exploitation (extending the life of valuable contributors that enable a better-financed transition) and exploration (new understanding) and manage each as separate risk evaluation exercises with different metrics of progress.

Identifying and finding new capabilities has potential hiring implications, the ability to fit with the existing, providing the tools and environment, and spelling out the future of where these capabilities fit.

We also need a deeper innovation grounding of internal workings and alignment.

What I feel we need is a deeper grounding in what is happening inside organizations within their innovation activities, how these align with the needs of strategy, and what is clearly missing. We start here as it gives us all this clarity and coherence, missing in much of our existing understanding.

Dialogue is essential

It is mastering this new ‘black box’ of actual innovation activities, exploring and exploiting the necessary innovation capabilities that are required to be ‘going on’ in organizations to achieve a closer coherence, one that can radically improve innovation performance.

We have a real opportunity today to find new ways to combine the four emerging forces of knowledge, technology, entrepreneurship and innovation, which will drive the growth models of tomorrow. It is these that are forming the new innovations ‘black box.’

I have plenty of ideas, frames and methods built up to help you make innovation fit and be more coherent in its contribution in times of strategic change.

I strongly advise not to carry on as usual, or innovation becomes the drag to strategic change and reinforcing the image that “our” innovation is a drain on capital, not the NEW source of growth, capital renewal and the key to changing strategic direction through supporting its delivery.

The post The needs of Innovation Coherence 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.

Innovation is vital to the energy system’s integration and operation design, and we need to further recognize its crucial role. I believe we undertake a radical transformation in the way we supply, transform, and use energy. This requires a profound transformation in technologies, systems, and infrastructure.

Innovation is made up of many enabling technologies that support energy. This complexity requires innovative approaches to be built in highly systematic ways. Its ultimate result is to offer innovation that can continually look for re-imagining new market designs and business models to stimulate the changes and solutions for our future energy transformation.

Innovation needs to be transformational, offer greater value than what it is replacing, show the real advantage, set out to achieve competitive gains and offer a higher level of sustainability, value and impact.

We need an innovative mantra for energy.

Energy is a vital part of any country’s ability to be competitive. Today half the world’s capital is invested in energy and its related infrastructure as it is the backbone of any industrial and urbanization strategy.

Our need is to keep pushing for discoveries, for experimentation, for demonstrating. We must nurture innovation, and we must continuously look for ways to facilitate its pathway.

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.

The vast majority of global CO2 emissions come from the energy production sector, from our buildings or transportation systems. 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 that 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.

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 has risk always associated with it, but that imperative to push the boundaries does need always to be constantly in our minds; global warming, pollution, and resource finite are our “burning platform.”

We need to ramp up our need for solutions to reduce greenhouse gases, redesign energy generation, transmission, and distribution and bring a balance back into our environments.

Pushing our present understanding, looking beyond the knowns.

• Today the solutions are centred on decarbonization, applying digitalization, and switching to an energy system that is more decentralized than at present. It is finding imaginative, innovating solutions that become essential to achieve this climate change through the energy transition we are undertaking.
• Each organization within the energy transition looks at its own position and applies any changes to advance its competitive position. Quite rightly, but in focusing on one specific perspective, you can lose the bigger opportunity.
• We need to extend the reach of electricity; we need to focus on Hydrogen, validate carbon capture and storage (CCUS) as well as 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 significant energy system that is resilient to minimize the shutdowns and power outs. 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 need to continue to de-carbonize challenging industry sectors like steel, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, or our transportation systems if we wish to achieve any positive outlook of curbing carbon emissions and moving onto a pathway towards a zero-carbon future.

Innovation and showing progression give market confidence and encouragement that the innovation story is designed to adopt this innovation adoption approach.

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 the changes by being the bridge and being 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 that focus on the end-user sectors of transport, industry, and buildings.
3. The technological and digital innovative solution needs to 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 finally tidal power.
6. Lastly, innovation needs to achieve an affordably decarbonize industrial transition.

Many new innovation solutions need to continually unlock the system’s flexibility.

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 then provide 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.

Innovation must be at the forefront of the energy change; otherwise, we will fail to deliver on the 2050 commitments and goals, and that will have consequences for our very existence as we know it.

Besides writing about innovation and energy on two dedicated blogs of innovating4energy.com and digital4energy, I recently launched a complimentary website of innovating4energy.website, one that is laying out my business positioning and offerings to help in accelerating innovation within the energy system. That “open for business” sign.

I set out to offer the external perspective to those busy inside organizations focusing on mapping out the future of energy and where they fit to support, compliment, and provide different value points to this thinking and eventual work. I see this as more advisory to complement their insights, more feeding into and complimenting their expertise with different points of value.

** published simultaneously here and on my innovating4energy.com site relating to “all things” in the Energy Transition.

The post The crucial role Innovation must play in the Energy system 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.