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Alternative energy: Key quotesOur Alternative Energy Principal Voices, Jeremy Leggett and Juliet Davenport, plus Kishan Khoday discussed the need for energy efficiency and how important renewables are to avoiding an energy crisis. Read an article about the event here. Watch and read some of the highlights from the participants, below Juliet Davenport "If you look at climate change you have two things on a collision course. To increase our economy and develop as we are, we're going to need to use more energy, but at the same time climate change and the effects of climate change are going to increase and they are beginning to impact on our lifestyle. So you have a conflict in economic development between energy and climate change." "The route I've come at it is giving power back to people. I think we've taken power away, I think its' been very centralized and people don't understand the value of power and the value of their use. I think renewable is very good for bringing that home; it's very visual. And from our experience once people take that first step it become much easier." "We're looking at a whole range of people in society that are waking up to the fact that continuing to use energy in the same way that we have over the last century cannot be sustained. So I think from that point of view what's really interesting is that we've got more people now involved in the process and more people interested, so the brain power we have round the world is quite significant. " "The new environmentalist are very much embracing it but you have to prove it works on a financial model as well as an environmental model and you need to bring these two things together. The new entrepreneurs that are coming in today and saying you can make good money being green. In a sense with our business Good Energy, that was the whole premise behind it to demonstrate you can make profitability out of a green business and then trying to get people to be a part of that. Until you get money flowing into a business. To me there's the environmental framework which gives you how you operate, and you've got the financial rules to make that work, so they come together hand in hand." "People are looking at buildings at a whole new way, so when you put in your electrical systems you put in an alternative and a direct current system, so you can actually reduce the loses in that building and take power directly from wind into DC. With technologies coming together and load management tech, my vision in the UK is that you only wash your clothes when it's windy, where everyone has a micro turbine that runs when the wind is blowing. I see that kind of things as the way forward. It's not just about these iconic technologies by themselves it's how you use them and how you integrate them into people's lifestyles." "If we want to grow our way out of poverty we'd need 15 planet earths, so we going to have to find another way of growing so we can solve the other problems we've got, because this isn't the only problem we've got. I think if we don't make the shift to another source of resources then you are going to get more conflicts in the world." "Every single company has a responsibility or how they behave so should they be looking to include on their expense claim, CO2 use for example, that is a very simple little message to show people the impact of the things that they do." Jeremy Leggett "In a country like Britain that more than half of greenhouse gas emissions come from directly or indirectly from buildings, not transport that's the biggest problem, it buildings if you count power stations, it's a incredible achievement, because we can go to not just low carbon but to no carbon." "If you think we invest around $1 trillion a year in energy in the world, this year more than $100 billion will go into renewables, yet less than 1 percent of global primary energy. So here you get to the first downside: the magnitude of the challenge. We know we have to get to low carbon, even zero carbon and manage a withdrawal from fossil fuels in time, we know this from the advice of the world's best climate scientists and we know we can do it with the existing technologies, but, boy, do we have a huge challenge time wise." "We're headed for an enormous energy crisis as we try and make this transition. In my previous career I was a geologist and a creature of the oil industry and looked at oil source rocks, funded at times by BP and Shell, so I followed this debate as it's been emerging over the past few years where people will be aware, there's a growing body of people in the industry that are saying "we just don't have enough of this stuff out there, we're not finding it at the rate we need." This is going to hit us with a premature peak in oil production and it's going to force us to go even faster and harder for these survival technologies. So as I see it we're in a race against time and it's a race that's both driven by climate change and the physical availability of oil and gas." "There's so much going on in this area at the moment, there's money flooding into it. Just in the last six month $12bn of investment has gone into solar and wind energy in the private equity and public markets. Sure, a lot of that is going into China, there are 60-odd publicly quoted companies on the stock exchange and most of these are Chinese and some of them are raising really large sums of money. But it's also going into other countries where their governments "get it" about market enablement and the need to stimulate these markets just for a few years so you can get to economies of scale." "Where there is leadership in the world we're doing very well and I think when you look at the business community, a company like Wal-Mart, the biggest company in the world is rewarding its store managers worldwide as much on how much carbon they save as the profitability of their stores. It has a target of zero carbon, not low carbon, in all its stores and operations worldwide. Unlike governments that tend to say a great deal but do very little, business people generally do something if they say they're going to do it." "The corn ethanol biofuel idea is a disaster. And it's a disgrace for our system if we can't get that right. In Mozambique there is a dreadful famine going on and they are in receipt of food aid and they are turning land over to cassava ethanol to export biofuels. That's a crime against humanity in my book." Kishan Khoday "We've seen a huge surge of activity by the private sector in the area of green investment for financing renewable energies. How do we take the very successful cases and scale them up? This is the next big challenge of the next five years." "The focus really has to be on integrating energy efficiency to the end user. Up to two thirds of future green house gas emissions can be prevented through improvements in end use energy efficiency. In China as in other large emerging economies industry is driving energy consumption, about 70 percent of energy consumption in China is from industry. I think there are good examples that we need latch on to." "The richest woman in the world is a Chinese paper recycler. These changes are taking place here and not anywhere else because in China there is a very pragmatic approach to these kinds of issues. Once there is a practical solution that is identified it is latched on to and worked to succeed. China is now exploring the moon, India too. I think the level or ambition and imagination and creativity that these countries are bringing to the challenges will I think bring new solutions to the problems through new technologies." "I think what we'll see in the future is other parts of the world depending on China to provide technological solutions. I think we've seen it with some of the renewables where China is producing at very low cost some of the ingredients of renewable energy and technology." |
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