Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 30TH AUGUST- 5TH SEPTEMBER 2019 | 15 Utility of the Future: climate change Coming up in "climate change" in future issues of Utility Week: • How big a deal is water supply? • The ultimate green fuel • Can utility rms play their part in enriching biodiversity? S arah Bell, founder and chief executive of Tempus Energy, echoes Nina Skorupska (inter- viewed on the facing page), when she says that putting tar- gets into law without faciliatory infrastructure is posturing. The net zero goal is "admirable", she says, but it needs a detailed policy and a full plan of action to be meaningful. Even then, "we are not on track to meet our 80 per cent reduction target, so making a new, more ambitious target seems premature". Bell is a polarising € gure in the industry because of her hard-fought campaign to get the capacity market suspended on the basis that it rewarded burn- ing fossil fuels rather than sav- ing energy. She believes that free innovation in an open market could be the big- gest driving force in the energy transition, and that current policy works to sti‚ e this. "Change will hap- pen when com- mercial incentives create an environ- ment that leads to customer adop- tion of low-carbon technologies en masse. Without policy frameworks that create com- mercial incentives the targets are meaningless." An example of a restrictive policy is the subsidising of fossil fuels in the UK. Bell says the UK has the high- est levels in Europe at £12 billion a year. The actions of regulators have also held back transi- tion in her view. She explains that the "energy system regulation needs to change rapidly to enable cus- tomers to fully participate. Currently, she believes, the powers-that-be are spending a great deal of time, e‹ ort and money on holding change back to a slow trickle. For Bell, the result is clear to see: "We're not transition- ing. Not fast enough. Not even close." "I'm actually an optimist," she says, "and I believe in mar- kets. I think if you enable inno- vators who have solutions to compete, then we will transition rapidly. "The International Energy Agency came out with a report saying that carbon emissions grew in 2018. No-one in any rea- sonably sane state of mind could fail to acknowledge that we are not solving climate change. "In order to solve climate change, we would have to have started taking drastic action at least ten years ago. We probably have € ve to seven years le" to take drastic action and we are not taking drastic action. "Since we live in a mainly capitalist world, it is still too easy for the likes of RWE, Shell and BP to make money out of selling or burning fossil fuels. Real change will not happen until we make it commercially impossible for that to be the most pro€ table model. "The truth is that fossil fuels are already being out-competed. Instead of subsidising them, we should let them die so the cheaper, cleaner options get implemented. We have all the technologies we need to solve climate change. We're just not using them." actually is", says Woodhall. He explains that this means not just the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) average, but the range of opinions and possibilities, which are "from probably disastrous to de€ - nitely disastrous, and from we should do something now to we have to do something now or we're all dead". Once informed, the assembly would then vote on a course of action to recommend to the government, which can act on it, in theory, with a mandate divorced from many of the potential political hurdles. This, Woodhall is certain, would both increase awareness of the severity of the issues and prompt more decisive action. It would be bene€ cial, even if the assembly does not fully support XR's view. "It might happen that the citizens' assembly comes back and goes 'oh yeah, 2040 is € ne'," heœadmits. "I'm con€ dent the citizens' assembly will move things faster than the politicians will. Whether it moves it fast enough, nobody knows, but I'm very con€ dent that it will move things faster." Overall, the key to shi" ing society to one that is equipped and able to counteract climate change is something Woodhall describes as "magic". By this he means "the sort of magic that Derren Brown creates", where the results are spectacular, but when you break it down and look at the targeted prompts and nudges, the end product is "entirely predictable". XR's opportunity for change is in creat- ing the "circumstances to get those people to make those changes". It believes it can achieve this by continuing to get everyone from students to pensioners on the streets, glued to buildings, or arrested by police. Such actions bring the issue to the attention of a large number of people, and whether consciously or subconsciously elicit a response that is more o" en favourable than it is not. In theory, each of these scenes is a prompt in our collective minds, pulling together the circumstances needed to form an overwhelming wave ofœchange. "Some of the more practical people talk about how we need to create non-linear change to deliver exponential bene€ ts, I just call it magic." The fl exible technology proponent "No-one in any reasonably sane state of mind could fail to acknowledge that we are not solving climate change."

• Cover