Co-Create a Collaborative Energy Transition
In this article, I would like to offer an opportunity for my network to building a key technology required for a successful transition on an accelerated timeframe. A reviewing of the barriers holding back an accelerated energy transition, indicates to me that if we fail to achieve the disruptive transition required, it will be a failure of our organisations, governments and even individuals to collaborate. I present a hypothesis that by building effective social technology to address collaboration on the level of individual relationships, we can affect real change on this ultra-complex problem.
It will come as no surprise to most people that the energy industry is under robust transformational pressure. This transformation is occurring as a result of pressure on maintaining a viable energy systems under what the The World Energy Council calls the energy trilemma. The energy trilemma represents three constraints; Energy Equity, Energy Security and Environmental Sustainability, that must be balanced in developing energy systems to ensure the long term prosperity and security of individual nations.
- Energy Equity. Higher demand for electricity and the necessary ongoing maintenance and replacement of ageing infrastructure create upward cost pressure that is passed through to end users via market prices. However, 35% of low income citizens across the world do not have access to electricity prices and as we try to decarbonise the energy ecosystem, these people will need access to reliable, low cost electricity to maintain a livelihood.
- Energy Security. Adoption of disruptive and transformative technology is underway. Our adoption of intermittent renewables generations and electrification of transport and process energy is expected to drive 7 times more growth in electricity than oil and gas (McKinsey). With growing adoption of these new technologies there are additional costs and technical challenges. To deal with these, technology and market design changes will be necessary to ensure ongoing adoption of intermittent renewable sources.
- Environmental Sustainability. The historic Paris Climate agreement provides a goal of maintaining global warming below 2 degrees. As a result signatory countries are now working towards implementation of carbon emission reductions to meet requirements under this agreement. These targets drive large changes in the mix of energy sources for transport, process and industrial and domestic use.
Enablers of Energy Transition
Global transformation takes time. While the Paris agreement is a major political achievement, it attracts attention because it lacks binding commitments and a mechanism to enforce them. As a result there is uncertainty that each country will live up to the promises. There are costs to be met, technology development and commercialisation required and political and regulatory change. All of which are usually associated with frustrating long lead times, uncertain outcomes and risk investments. To track our progress, the world economic forum publishes an annual report on the energy transition index. The report benchmarks 115 countries performance on a similar framework to the energy trilemma and a list of the enabling factors (figure 1) that are correlated with energy transformation performance.
If you consider what actually needs to happen for each of the enablers above to work a common theme of collaboration appears. For example, the adaption of the energy system structure requires an increasingly tight collaboration between producers, transmission and users. Innovative business environments require open and collaborative ecosystems of the same productivity as the silicon valley start up ecosystem. The very nature of the problem in its complexity requires the fast tracked, effective collaboration between large numbers of stakeholders with diverse requirements.
Our current preferred social technologies are not optimised to manage this problem. Our capitalist system provides benefit to those individuals and organisations who are able to gather the most resources and put these to work in their own best interest. The competitive free market creates the incentive for us to entice each other to consume rather than to optimise. The result is often the production of vast numbers of products and services that are mutually not wanted by the producer or the customer. Similarly, The democratic process is a contest of ideas and egos. Whoever can argue the point most convincingly has influence over the policy of whole countries. It only takes subtle corruptions of the democratic system to enable those in power to serve their own best interests more reliably than the common best interest.
Social technology is the use of human, intellectual and digital resources to influence social outcomes. Recent developments in social technology have shifted the themes towards open innovation, co-creation and self organisation. The Climate CoLab is an open problem-solving platform where a community of 115,000 people create and assess plans to mitigate complex social problems. While this provides one example, others are rare (I would love to hear about other examples if you have them).
The purpose of publishing this article is that, I believe that we can radically improve our collective abilities to collaborate between individuals and organisations and that this will allow us to achieve exponential results in terms of highly complex problems like climate change.
To test this hypothesis I want to start exploring the collaborative ability of my network of friend colleagues and family. To do that I need your help. I have put together a list of questions about collaboration and working with others. If you prefer and you have some time, send me a message and I will schedule a time to call and talk through the questions with you.
Secondly, I am looking for examples of unlikely collaborations between individuals and organisations to observe as part of a fact finding mission. If you are starting, running or have run an interesting, difficult, uncommonly successful, or unlikely collaboration drop me a line, I would love to come and see you, skype chat, or swap emails to understand how you do it.
I will be sharing the insights and experience that I get from the discussions and survey responses in future articles. In addition, I will be looking for ways to engage my network in co-creating solutions to any problems or opportunities that we can identify together as part of the discussion.
To conclude, I want to present to you a possible future. Imagine a future where the complex environmental and social problems that stumped us as a global population from the 1990’s to 2020’s are the motivation for millions of global citizens to contribute at their work and in their community. The energy transition is progressing well and we are also making headwinds into social equity on income and health. It was clear very quickly that some industries are no longer viable and they have been decimated by the change in technology and carbon costs. However, we have found uses for the intellectual and human capital of the firms destroyed and are redeploying their skills onto new projects. Relationships between organisations, governments and individuals are characterised by openness, transparency and mutual common good. Your company is heavily competing with others to provide the greatest value solution to their common problems by leveraging off the incrementally improving contribution of others including our competitors. Incremental improvements on the status quo is rewarded and waste, rework and duplication of effort sinks businesses and countries. Value is realised by those who harness the collective intelligence of the planet effectively to increase the long term sustainability and capabilities of the global human and environmental resource pool.
What is it that we need to do differently to head towards this future?
