So I’m in the wonderfully atmospheric wood-panelled Room 102 at 30 Russell Square in Bloomsbury trying to talk engineering to mostly business and communications students. Which is a challenge in itself. Yet I’m also trying not to do too much talking, but encourage the other people in the room to play with the information I’m presenting and do their own thinking.
It’s all about energy transition – or “Energy Change” – as I term it – that I argue is an essential response to Climate Change. I also argue that Energy Change is an essential response to discontinuities and emerging fractures in the current fossil fuel-dominated global energy system and the global economy.
But mostly I argue with a fair amount of positive personal energy that we already have all the technologies we need to move towards a very low carbon and 100% renewable energy system, where low carbon gas backs up variable renewable electricity generation.
During the discussion after my presentation, where the room became full of buzzing brain power, I ask people to break out into small groups to answer these not-too-simple policy questions :-
Q1. Can you design a policy support mechanism
for Renewable Gas that doesn’t involve subsidies
in any area of : electricity generation, heating &
cooling, transportation or energy storage ?
Q2. In whose short-term and long-term
interests would it be to begin to provide
Renewable Gas ? What should their strategy be ?
Q3. What barriers to the growth of Renewable
Gas production do you think there will be ?
There were some very interesting answers given to the room at the end before we had to open celebration bottles to complete the positive cheer. And then, of course, after all that jollity, I had to take in a pint of dry cider and some hot potato chips at the pub with my colleague Dr Paul Elsner and engage in a conversation, the upshot of which is that I now have a massive “to do” list.