On September 14, WIRED and Octopus Energy hosted the Energy Tech Summit, a one-day event dedicated to showing how we can reach net zero within the next decade. From tactics designed to encourage changes in behavior to subversive tech innovations that wouldn’t feel out of place in an Isaac Asimov novel, the concepts outlined in the event’s sessions challenged the way we currently think about sustainable energy and showcased how we can meaningfully transform the system to make it faster, cheaper, and better for everyone.
Astronaut Tim Peake laid out the problem with a stark perspective you can only get from staring at Earth from space. “There’s not a lot of it,” he said, referring to the mere 16 kilometres of atmosphere surrounding our planet. “When you see that tiny, paper-thin strip of gas, it makes you realize, ‘Wow, that’s it’,” Peake said. “You realize how important it is to protect it.”
That protection will come from effectively making the energy transition to renewables. The tech required to power our planet with net-zero energy is available today, but the uptake is lagging. In the UK, heating homes has a huge environmental impact. As Lord Martin Callanan, minister for energy, efficiency and green finance, told the audience, the UK has the oldest housing stock in Europe—more than 4 million of our homes were built before 1919—and those old, draughty homes leak heat, and leak cash. Right now, the UK is dependent on gas for affordable heating, because cleaner alternatives like heat pumps are a big expense. At the Energy Tech Summit, however, Octopus Energy Group founder and CEO Greg Jackson revealed how the energy provider is seeking to change that.
On stage, Jackson unveiled the Octopus Cosy 6—a super smart, slimline electric heat pump that, Jackson says, is the answer to getting affordable, clean heat into normal homes. The Cosy 6 comes with custom-built controls that optimize its performance and can be easily integrated into smart homes. With a government grant, the whole Cosy setup costs £3,000, but some customers—those with reasonably good plumbing already—can get it for free. “We really are on the way to helping people see the exponential improvement in renewable technologies,” he said. “That means we can tackle climate change faster and cheaper than anyone thought.”
Other speakers at the event discussed additional ways we can make the net-zero energy switch in the next decade. Toby Park, head of the Nudge Unit’s energy and sustainability team, explained that 62 percent of the cuts required for the UK to reach its net-zero goals depend on changes in citizen behavior, for example, and throughout the day, the audience heard guidance on how to encourage that behavior change.
Didem Un Ates, VP of AI strategy and innovation at energy management company Schneider Electric, pointed to “truthful education” as the best way to change behavior.
Artist Daan Roosegaarde spoke of using “beauty as a strategy to help people to open up and accept change.” Andy Baynes, cofounder of offshore software developer GT, called design a shortcut to “behavior change en masse”. He’d know—he helped develop the Nest thermostat, which has avoided 113 billion kilowatt hours of energy since its launch in 2011. “When you find a product and a design that is solving a real problem, that creates engagement, and customers are changing their behavior without knowing it because of the design effort that’s gone into [it], you can start to actuate real change. ”
Even small changes in behavior can have a big impact. Innovation charity Nesta saved 500,000 tons of CO2 and £300m in energy bill costs through its inaugural Money Saving Boiler Challenge, which 3.1 million people participated in last winter. All they had to do was lower the flow temperature of their gas boiler, Nesta CEO Ravi Gurumurthy explained on stage. “I think this very small tweak, this very dull innovation, will end up being a policy unicorn [a policy that saves £1bn],” he said.
In addition, Octopus’s Cosy 6 wasn’t the only piece of radical new tech to be shown off on the Energy Tech Summit stage. Google head of sustainability EMEA Adam Elman explained how the tech giant is using advancements in AI to predict and respond to the earth-shattering side effects of climate change, like increasing floods, as well as finding ways to cut down on preventable pollutants. Contrails account for 35 percent of a flight’s global warming potential, but Google has cut that down by more than half in a 70-plus flight experiment with American Airlines, by simply adjusting flight paths based on AI predictions.
Even wilder innovations came from keynote speaker and Deep Future managing partner, Pablos Holman, including a reactor that runs on nuclear waste, for example, and a fission reactor powered by ultra-strong magnets and saltwater. But most jaw-dropping was solar panels in space. “The relentless onslaught of night is fucking up our solar panels every single day,” Holman explained, pointing to the unavoidable dip in solar energy generation when the sun isn’t shining. In space, there isn’t that problem.
Startup Virtus Solis has figured out a way to get solar panels out into space, where it’s sunny 24-7/365, and beam the energy generated back using radio waves. John Bucknell, Virtus Solis CEO, joined Holman on stage for a live demo, showing how the radio waves could easily pass through clouds and other atmospheric blockages on their way down. Bucknell says he expects to have the first one in orbit within three years.
That pace is usually unheard of in the energy field, as red tape blocks the way at every turn. But in space, there’s no local council or required government permissions. “There are no regulations in space,” said Bucknell. “It’s the Wild West.”
That kind of freedom is also what allowed the World Wide Web to become what it is today, its inventor—and incredibly esteemed guest—Tim Berners-Lee revealed at the summit. “The universality was really crucial, you had to be able to use it for anything,” he said, explaining that the only requirement he had for uploads was the http://. “It turned out that because the design was that it could be used for anything, it ended up being used for everything,” said Berners-Lee, “almost.”
The same is true of the early internet. The US’s early internet policy was that anyone could use the internet, or add to the internet, as long as they provided equal access to everyone else. “If we’re going to enable this [renewable energy] revolution,” said Octopus’s Jackson, “we need to have similar rules.” In the net-zero future Jackson envisions, the energy grid will be open, decentralized and much more efficient, and the Energy Tech Summit charted a path towards that. If you missed it, you can still watch all the talks here.
Berners-Lee believes we need to be building up resilience in our energy systems and suggested developing a kind of energy router, which would allow one household to toggle between different energy providers.
Foster, a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, encouraged energy leaders to employ younger consumers as consultants, rather than just as sellable faces in ad campaigns.
Holman caused many jaws to drop at the Summit, but one of his most surprising facts was that space-based solar panels can generate eight times more energy than those on Earth. Great news for us, but less so for the battery industry, as this solar energy can be beamed directly to where it’s needed—no storage necessary.
Dragons’ Den investor Meaden led a discussion on how the global energy revolution would be bigger than the internet. Her final thought: “We can do this, human beings are amazing, the question is: ‘Do we have the will to do it fast enough?’”
Solar energy storage system head Chandan practises what he preaches. “If I had a magic wand and I could change one thing, I would change the way we value companies,” he said. Instead of purely financial valuations, he’d factor in societal and environmental impacts. This received a rousing, spontaneous round of applause from moderator Meaden.
While Google is clearly laser-focused on using the latest tech developments to help reduce emissions—far beyond their own—Elman made an important point on stage. “I don’t think we should always think about future technologies,” he said, “we have a lot of the solutions we need today.”
Ukraine has lost 50 percent of its energy infrastructure, but Onishchuk’s foundation is working to rebuild. As Russian gas is clearly not an option, renewables have become the go-to and the number of Ukrainian households with solar power has doubled. As if Ukraine wasn’t already impressive enough.
Not only did Jackson unveil the cutest-looking heat pump we’ve ever seen, he also outlined his aspirations for it at the summit. “It’s easy to enjoy the moral high ground of walking away from a problem,” he said, referring to the UK’s obsession with gas. “It’s much harder to decide what you’re going to do about it.”
Zhang spoke on a panel of innovators from developing nations, outlining what we can learn from their energy leapfrogging. He also summed up our sentiments perfectly after a day of inspiring talks. In response to Europe’s net zero by 2050 goal, he said, “I think the target is too low.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
