November 02, 2006
Camilla Cavendish
The demand for new power sources will be the most disruptive force in business since the internet
I was chatting to a green friend at Shell this week, expecting him to be excited by the sudden new focus on clean energy. “Actually I’m nervous,” he said. “It’s all coming faster than we expected.”
The demand for carbon-free power is about to become the most disruptive force in business since the internet. And disruptive innovations have a way of knocking flat even the most entrenched companies. Five years ago Google was tiny, just starting to sell adverts based on clicks. Ten years ago, Nokia was still thought of as a Finnish paper company. Twenty years ago Dell was a small business selling computers through geeky magazines. These companies came to dominate the market not because the established companies were stupid — not at all — but because they couldn’t quite bring themselves to turn their processes upside down.
That is what climate change will require. Sir Nicholas Stern was only repeating the growing consensus when he said this week that we must reduce greenhouse emissions dramatically within 20 years. That means adopting renewable energy at a hitherto unimagined pace. It means taking a different approach to the design of buildings and transport. It also means turning our power infrastructure upside down. Department of Trade and Industry figures show that we lose about half of our electricity in generation and transmission because we have giant power stations far away from users. We need to turn offices and hospitals into power stations, and let householders feed into the grid instead of letting the grid feed them. Woking has reduced its CO2 emissions by 77 per cent since 1992 by decentralising its energy. That’s what I mean about turning things upside down. Who would have thought the future was Woking? read more
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