Financing Decarbonization in Energy and Infrastructure

Siemens Smart Infrastructure Grid Edge Summit

Siemens Smart Infrastructure offers many different solutions to achieving this change at the energy grid edge. Recently, to amplify this, they have been holding a conference over two days entitled “the grid edge summit“.

You can still register here as the event is available for some time to view and explore. It would help in understanding their solutions if you visited their different energy topic areas. Here Siemens offers you a significant range of choices, solutions and advice on Grid Edge topics to give you time to check out some of the #GridEdge tech & solutions.

These topics and solutions are organized under decarbonization and sustainability, distributed energy solutions, the integration of renewable energy resources, mobility charging, and the consulting and financing solutions available to utilize. The main conference event is a series of talks and panels exploring the topics above.

One panel I particularly enjoyed was “Financing Decarbonization.”

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Missing the building blocks of ecosystem design in the Energy Roadmap by IEA

https://theconversation.com/humanitys-sustainability-is-no-excuse-for-abandoning-planet-earth-80699

I have been reading a groundbreaking report,  the world’s first comprehensive study on how to achieve a“Net-Zero by 2050: a roadmap for the global energy system“(referred to as NZE here in this link). It is produced by the International Energy Agency (IEA)

Why is this so important? Well, it is about the most dramatic change in our Energy Systems globally and emphasised that this decade is pivotal to reaching the targeted goal of net-zero by mid-century. Each decade will bring dramatic change to all of our lives. Our planet is under significant threat of global warming that will impact how we can live and perhaps survive.

This 2050 target is in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement, the foundations of global consensus to limit the rise in global temperature to 1.5c. This requires nothing short of a total transformation of the energy systems, a complex “beast” that provides us with the basic energy sources we need to survive, live, build and grow.

The report sets out a cost-effective and economically productive pathway, resulting in a clean, dynamic and resilient energy economy dominated by renewables like solar and wind instead of fossil fuels. The report also examines key uncertainties, such as the roles of bioenergy, carbon capture and behavioural changes in reaching net zero.

The Energy System is a complex Ecosystem.

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Creating A Unique Nested Hydrogen Ecosystem for the Energy Transformation

Ecosystems hold a certain fascination for me. The ecosystem approach can tackle and help resolve some of the more complex issues we face.

We increasingly use the word “ecosystem” to describe our environment that we operate with, but we are often diluting its true positioning.

Truly unique ecosystems are hard to find and certainly to manage. One I really feel reflects a collaborative model worth explaining is the ones that are forming around Hydrogen as the alternative energy vector based on renewables. To replace or become a significant part of any entrenched energy system requires a system design approach. This part of the energy transition fits within the ‘greater’ energy system design.

Let’s look at this with some context and then clarify that approaching Hydrogen needs a unique Ecosystem design. We are presently building a unique ‘nested’ Hydrogen Ecosystem within the Energy Transition. It is interesting to explore, firstly here and then in a follow-up post on one of its specific parts.

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The building of a Hydrogen Ecosystem in Europe

The global challenge of climate change is coming rapidly to the points where it is forcing governments, businesses and knowledge organisations all over the world to mobilise behind carbon-reducing innovations, e.g. large-scale renewable energy implementation and electrification.

When it comes to innovation and leading the energy transition, Europe is showing clear leadership and in one specific and important technology, a global leader in electrolysis technology required to produce green hydrogen. The challenge today is to convert that leading position into a sustaining best of class one, that leads the world in electrolyzer expertise, production and research.

Today, Europe has a promising start, but it has significant challenges to break down the silo’s of knowledge and expertise and seize this opportunity to learn how to collaborate and build a thriving, robust and collaborative ecosystem around the building of a world-leading position in the electrolyzer market space.

At this time though, despite a promising outlook for the use of the eölectrolyzer for hydrogen, water electrolysis technology is not sufficiently mature to fit that purpose. It still is at a limited scale and is not yet at the point of the expectations building up around it. An enormous challenge lies ahead in upscaling currently available technologies to GW-scale factories required to drive forward the energy transition.

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The Evolving Platform Strategies in the Industrial Space

There is far more focus on the consumer platform market where Facebook, Alibaba, Google, etc. all get the publicity and consequential high valuations to their business models. Yet, the size of the Industrial Platform market will be bigger, perhaps not in “eyeballs” but far more in economic value and growth to those that commit to these changes by collaborating through a networked designed platform ecosystem.

Redesigning a specific industry space to adapt and adjust to a platform business model is hard work. The investment in years of building internal systems is rapidly becoming worrying “legacy” issues. The new way to perform in business is through open, collaborative networks of collaborators that achieve far more growth potential by participating in an ecosystem of partners.

Strategic Industrial relationships are radically changing

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Are innovation spillovers about to accelerate the course of the energy transformation?

Achieving clean energy technology innovations will be vital if we want to meet the goals of net-zero emissions in the next fifty years.

Innovation is central to the energy transition through new technology solutions.

Innovation can accelerate and achieve rapid reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases to anything near the net-zero goals set in the Paris Agreement of 2015 to hold the global average temperature to below 2oC of pre-industrial levels.

We need significant development and diffuse new technology solutions to displace existing energy assets to move towards a global economy based on clean energy.

As we look at any clean energy scenarios, it is highly reliant on moving concepts, through prototyping into a commercial demonstration. Presently many of the clean energy solutions rely on technologies that are present only in a prototype or early smaller demonstration-scale and will not come to a commercial scale without significant new R&D efforts.

There are also numerous concepts indicating promising technology solutions that have not been, as yet, commercially deployed in any mass-market way. Some scenarios looking out over the next thirty or more years are suggesting these critical technologies can make up to 75% of solving any cumulative CO2 emissions.

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Exploring the Innovation Technology in the Clean Energy Ecosystem

Anyone involved in the Energy world knows how complex it has become.

It seemed as we look back at the past; we had simply one power provider, using one fossil fuel, maximizing their dedicated infrastructure and transmission lines, to then deliver to their dedicated substations and then onto the eventual consumer or customer the needed electricity or heat supply. It is radically different today for numerous reasons.

Reality is, we need to undertake a radical redesign of our entire energy ecosystem.

The consensus is that over the next twenty to thirty years, we must undergo a drastic change in our whole energy systems.

Do we understand what this means? Can we grasp the complexity of this undertaking?

I think we have some real help in understanding this through how the International Energy Agency is going about tackling the complexity will significantly help; they have mapped the entire energy system.

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Needing three distinct Ecosystems within any Business Design

I believe ecosystems are the new organism of the business world to innovative, network, and connect. Organize these correctly and you have a really powerful collaborative force

The three ecosystems of knowledge, innovation, and business mutually reinforce each other, it is all their interacting parts, their interdependence to each other, and how one part fits and reacts with the others, gives this great power.

We need to recognize business ecosystems are emerging as a real competitive force?

We all need to recognize that the world is changing. It is a highly connected one, built on some incredible technological advances. What is emerging as crystal clear, is that the single industry and one business-specific approach are seeing massive change, are being placed increasingly under threat of not even surviving. We require different business models to compete and it is through an ecosystem design you can extract greater value.

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Recognizing a Unique Part of the Hydrogen Ecosystem

Can you imagine a Hydrogen Ecosystem being created and organized, that needs to influence and shape national strategies for energy, provide education and understandings, suggest and provide regulations, standardization, infrastructure, and incentive suggestions and encourage solutions that need to scale?

Enter the Hydrogen Council to galvanize change within the Energy Transition and bring its promise to realization; to make our transition away from fossil fuel dependence into clean ones based on Hydrogen?

A shift to a high level of dependence on a critical energy vector is undoubtedly no easy task in a short period of giving the required momentum over the next 10 to 20 years. Our world is under such global warming threat we need to urgently make some real changes to our energy systems.

The Hydrogen Council has designated the current decade as “the H2 decade” to provide Hydrogen with the momentum, the pathway to scaling, and focus it needs, so it can be an irreversible force by 2030, to gain global recognition and adoption.

The building of a unique ecosystem in design is the formation of the Hydrogen Council.

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Creating A Unique Nested Hydrogen Ecosystem for the Energy Transformation

Ecosystems hold a particular fascination for me. The ecosystem approach has the potential to tackle and help resolve some of the more complex issues we face.

We increasingly are using the word “ecosystem” to describe our environment that we operate within, but often we are diluting its accurate positioning or understanding.

Indeed unique ecosystems are hard to find and certainly to manage. One I really feel reflects a collaborative model worth explaining is the ones that are forming around Hydrogen as the alternative energy vector based on renewables. To replace or become a significant part of any entrenched energy system requires a system design approach. This part of the energy transition fits within the ‘greater’ energy system design.

Let’s look at this with some context and then the clarification that approaching Hydrogen needs a unique Ecosystem design. We are presently building a unique ‘nested’ Hydrogen Ecosystem within the Energy Transition, and it is interesting to explore, firstly, here and then in a follow-up post on one of its specific parts, the Hydrogen Council.

Read more