PassW0rd – 11 September 2024 (Greening The Future)

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Speaker C: Hello and welcome to Password and Resonance fm with me, Peter Warren. In this month’s foray into the technological world that now underpins our entire existence, we look at energy, the stuff of life in our high tech world and as we all now know, the stuff that is now having a huge impact on our lives due to climate change. Last week it was revealed that despite our sudden summer that this year has been the warmest on record and one that has achieved a record number of storms so far this storm season from 2023 to 2024, we’ve got as far as Lillian, the latest of the 12 named storms to have hit the UK, the largest number since records began in 2015. It’s a record breaking picture that has been replicated around the world with fatal heat waves in the Mediterranean and in July, the hottest place on earth, Death Valley in California. Record recorded its hottest month ever. A frightening catalogue of temperature rises that climate change experts and environmentalists say we have to dramatically alter if we are to reverse a trend they claim will not only become irreversible, but will have a catastrophic impact on other species on land and in the sea. If not counted, they claim it will also lead to a humanitarian disaster on an unprecedented scale as people move from a rapidly developing sub Saharan Dust bowl in the only direction that makes sense, northwards across the Mediterranean and into Europe, a migration that will occur in numbers that dwarf the current figures. Exercising politicians in 2020, the Institute for Economics and Peace, a think tank that produces annual global terrorism and peace indexes, warned that by 2051, 1.2 billion people in 31 countries are not sufficiently resilient to withstand ecological threats. The study uses United nations and other data to assess 157 countries exposure to eight ecological threats, then assesses their capacity to withstand them. It found that 141of those 157 countries could face at least one ecological threat by 2050 with, as I’ve said, sub Saharan Africa, but also South Asia, the Middle east and North Africa being regions facing the largest number of ecological threats. The IEP is not alone. In 2023, the European Union’s most senior diplomat, Josep Borrell, the EU’s external affairs commissioner, warned that migration could be a dissolving force for the European Union, which he described as a decades old problem fueled by wars and poverty in the departure countries, a climate change dislocation. Many in Europe are blissfully unaware of, according to Branko Bruckic, the editor in chief of South Africa’s highly respected daily Maverick. Speaking to PASSWORD at what many consider to be the world’s leading conference on journalism, truth tellers, the Sir Harry Evans Summit on Investigative journalism, Brikick said that many of those in Europe were completely unprepared for the environmental, political, economic and societal catastrophe that is beginning in Africa and potentially pouring fuel on the fire. Recent comments from US presidential hopeful Donald Trump do not bode well. In his closing speech at the Republican national Congress on July 19, Trump vowed to drill, drill, stating that the US has more liquid gold under its feet than any other country and that he planned to kick start the US auto industry scale back on green policies and that this would cut energy prices. It’s a 20th century view of the world. Many of those interviewed for this program said. It’s simply environmentally unsustainable. And that is is the profound issue that we have to face. The problem for our climate is not so simple. It is not how we choose to travel. It is how we live our lives and the economic model we have evolved. A point made by Bill Karslake, the co founder of Guild of Ships, a company committed to returning the world of shipping to sail power, who says that environmental pressures are seeing the reintroduction of coastal trading and the reuse of the UK’s small ports and harbors. And that sail is outperforming conventional fuel.

Speaker D: We don’t need to do it as much as we do. And certainly there are companies out there who are proving that ships can even move it faster than lorries coast to coast within smaller maritime areas like Europe.

Speaker C: Right. So what does that mean then that we can start seeing shipping take off again around the coast? We used to have all of these ports and harbors, didn’t we?

Speaker D: We certainly did. And yeah, there’s no question we are in the early stages of what I think of as the gold rush in terms of the shipping world, and that’s maritime shipping. And yes, you’re right that a lot of these smaller ports that used to be very active and have long been inactive because they’re not deep enough for the really large container vessels. They are now becoming active again for a combination of reasons, not least smaller ships who can move in and out quickly, but also differently designed ships that don’t have to have such a massive depth.

Speaker C: And also, we’re not just talking about motor shipping, are we? Here we’re talking about potentially reinventing a world that we haven’t seen for a Long time.

Speaker D: Yeah, we’re talking about wind. Not just wind, but wind is certainly where my own personal interest and excitement lies. And I’m not alone. There are many, many very exciting companies out there who are. Well, one designer who I saw interviewed talked about it as breaking the sound barrier. He says, listen, we’ve already broken the sound barrier, as it were, in terms of sail design and speed at sea. And I saw at another conference an older, very esteemed designer saying that he never thought he would live to sail that fast. He didn’t even think it was possible. It was possible, and that was only 10, 15 years ago. So it is very exciting. And there are a huge number of companies out there and there are countries who are taking it very, very seriously. Netherlands, France, Costa Rica, just to name three. You mentioned earlier about the bus scenario. There was a nice interview with Torben Haas, who runs a very traditional ship in Germany and Holland on those northern coasts of Europe. And he’s even proved that on a particular trade route that he was undertaking, that he was actually faster than lorries. It’s not pie in the sky. This is very, very, very real trade dynamics that, as you say, have been around for thousands of years. And wind as a power, obviously, is something that we can bank on. The cost of wind is not going to change. And that’s not what we can talk about in terms of fuel supplies.

Speaker C: And Also, given the UK’s geography, you’re never much further than 70 miles away from the coast in the UK. It seems to be a bit silly, doesn’t it, not to actually take advantage of this?

Speaker D: Oh, no question. The heritage in the UK and in Ireland, where I live, is there for the mining and the sheer level of interest, if you like, is also there. And it’s always interesting when you’re at a meeting or a conference and you’ve got people who are captains of very large container vessels. As you know, these things carry over 20,000 containers, some of them. But that doesn’t take away the love of the sea. It doesn’t take away the love of messing around in boats. These captains, they still love to sail. So there’s a genuine interest from some of those you might think of as hardened operatives. Not the case at all. They’ve got the history, they’ve got the interest. And now the desire is more and more possible to put into a sort of commercial shape.

Speaker C: Okay, so we can go back to sailing, we can go back to opening up all of these lovely little ports and these harbours, but is there other infrastructure that we’ll need. I mean, some of these ports used to be connected by canals.

Speaker D: Canals is a great example. And also trains and also electric vehicles. So there’s huge potential. And canals is a classic, of course, if you’re. If you’re talking about Holland, for example, which has a very strong sail industry, it’s the only country with a. As in wind sail, Sailors Union. And Germany as well, also has a very, very long history of that interconnectedness.

Speaker E: So.

Speaker D: Yeah, and of course, in the UK as well, we. We have a vast, vastly extensive canal network and there are people interested in using wind on canals as well. Although I have to say that one of the most effective companies I came across is a long time ago, because I don’t work with canal boats, was entire emission electric canal boat, just using solar. It has absolutely no cost. There’s definitely potential there with solar.

Speaker C: So with a mix with something controlling something that’s catching the wind on your barge, and with the solar panels for the electric motor, we could quite soon see things bumbling along the canals. And given the fact that we’ve managed to master refrigeration, now, we don’t really have to worry too much about perishable cargo. So if we come up with an intelligent mix of electricity and wind and canals and coastal ports, we could take a lot of the freight off the roads, no question.

Speaker D: I think we need to take a step back. I mean, you’re implying it anyway. But just to be absolutely clear for anyone listening, that the reason the freight is on the roads is that it’s come on the ships and it’s come in container vessels, and so it’s come in containers and they are relatively recent invention.

Speaker C: Bill Karslake, co founder of the Guild of Ships, on how rethinking transport could take us back to the more elegant time of sailing, when climate change was not even on the horizon. Karslake’s vision of a cleaner, more elegant world is one that is possible if, instead of seeing net zero as some bleak contraction of our lives, we see it as an opportunity, something Chris Hocknall, founder and director of the sustainability consultancy 8vera and an expert on decarbonisation and energy policy, was keen to point out.

Speaker F: If we get it right, there are a lot of opportunities. I’m not sure we are always thinking in the correct manner, but, yeah, there’s certainly a lot of opportunity for this transition. It can create jobs all over the place. One of the problems we do have is actually because we don’t really make a great deal here. So much of the green Tech for example is obviously imported and that’s a bit of a missed opportunity because I suppose if we, if we go big on heat pumps or any other kind of technology, green tech, because most of that is manufactured and most of the jobs sit elsewhere, that’s to other countries benefits. But if we’re a bit smarter and tactical about things, I do believe we can, you know we could be talking hundreds of thousands of jobs, new jobs in various different sectors. Just the enhancement and the refurbishment and the improvement of the grid inflation infrastructure that’s needed to obviously change energy system that alone creates 20,000 permanent jobs. Yeah, that’s not to be sniffed at. I mean that’s one of the key things. I suppose if we start because we are effectively, I mean I think this does come with some security issues but we’re going to move a lot of electricity generation infrastructure from on land in very localized high density kind of generation points throughout the country to less dense, much spread out areas away from the land and into the, into the sea with you know, for example the huge offshore offshore wind farm that’s planned, Dogger bank that is absolutely enormous. And obviously as I said there are some, I, I have a great deal of security concerns about that. But I mean that whole east coast will, well you’ll, you’ll need people going, thousands of people coming and going every day for maintenance and all kinds of surveys and things like that. And if, yeah, if done properly you could think of a very, I think a very effective way to rejuvenate some of these communities that have really been chewed out and spat out from obviously changing habits and tourism and de. Industrialization etc. Hopefully a lot of those seaside towns as we know have got a lot of problems. It’d be fantastic to think that we could create a lot of high tech or at least highly paid technician jobs. That would be incredibly exciting prospect. So I think we certainly have the complexions and the ideologies within governments for decades now seem to have quite shied away from the idea of industrial strategies and I suppose advanced technically based strategies to this problem. It’s a real shame and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many other countries have made a lot of progress in and around latching onto these industries and creating sectors and employment, et cetera. As we touched on before, I’ve been hearing about wave and tidal power in the uk. It’s, it’s potential for, for decades now and we just, it says oh, you know, the UK has got the greatest resources. So one of the greatest resources and opportunities there, but very little happens. And often when you find this was really the case in with the previous government, then anytime we found some, I suppose public private partnership notion or idea would be it was small modular reactors or something like that, the government would put in some pitiful amount, 40, 50 million when they were and they were expecting the private sector to put in 3 or 4 billion. And it’s just not really being taken seriously in that lack of investment, that kind of agnosticism, I suppose to technologies and industrial strategies. Something that’s I think is quite sad, it’s ground my gears for quite a while because we’re kind of trapped in a bit of a bit of a stasis while other countries and industries move on. I mean all of the wind turbines are made somewhere else, all of the PV panels are made somewhere else, all the heat pumps are made somewhere else. We do very, very little in this. And while we got very grand amb, we don’t have much in the way of domestic capacity and opportunity. And something we do have, I suppose, innovation from an academic perspective. We are obviously still doing quite well in the uk, but usually as we know, once it reaches a certain point it goes off to the US to get commercialized or perhaps somewhere else in East Asia and then it really leaves. I think the government’s also got a lot to blame in this. They really have not seen a strategic opportunity and nowhere near investment has gone into it at all in the last kind of 10, 15 years. So big words and not a great deal of action, sadly.

Speaker C: A re engineered world that has also got to be pragmatic and face up to the changes that technology is also demanding as we enter a new AI age that needs to be powered by ever increasing amounts of energy, particularly due to the rapid rise of generative AI. As the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT nearly two years ago has sparked growing concerns about the energy demands of large language models. And AI’s appetite for electricity is continuing to grow, putting pressure on power grids, raising carbon emissions and exacerbating environmental issues. A single ChatGPT query is said to use 2.9 watt hours, about 10 times the energy required for a typical typical Google search, which just uses 0.3 watt hours. According to researchers at Best brokers, the annual electrical power consumption of Open AI’s chatbot when responding to prompts over the course of a year will consume approximately 226.82 million kilowatt hours at the average US commercial electricity rate of $0.131 per kilowatt hour at June 2024. This means the energy costs of answering questions in the US alone will be $29.71 million. It’s an issue Hocknull says we have to address.

Speaker F: One of the things we’ve also got to contend with is also the increase in energy. Amanda mean where I think we’re looking at a doubling or at least an extra 60 to 70% on current electrical demand in the next 10 years, particularly as we start moving consumption away from fuels and you know, hydrocarbon fuels onto, onto electrical grid EVs and such things all massively increasing electricity demand as well. And I don’t think that’s been properly factored in into some of the strategies. Some of the strategies tend to imply energy efficiency and demand reductions which, you know, are obviously needed and where they make sense, we should make them. But there’s, there’s kind of sometimes an implicit energy poverty dynamic in the argument which I think is, is a very, is the wrong way to be looking at it. And I think that’s, that is, that is also a bit of another, another concern about some of the, the thinking around this. And you know, we’ve, we haven’t really, we go back historically. I mean when have we actually contracted and reduced our intensity of energy consumption? You know, we enhance and demand more and you know, energy and economic output and activity are very heavily correlated. So you know, we can’t put ourselves in a, in a sense of energy, energy poverty. And also I think some of the approaches to who pays for this transition have not been equitably disputed. And you know, asking just the way we kind of open, which is obviously some of the cause of some of the populism and, and the pushback against net zero green policies is the rising energy bills and such things. There’s an argument obviously I can see why they might put the cost of the entry transition onto per kilowatt hour consumption figures. But I think be much smarter to have this funded by general taxation and other kind of sovereign wealth or investment bank, national investment bank models rather than feeding it back as a regressive kind of distribution where those on prepayment meters on council estates are paying 35, 40 pence per kilowatt hour, which is just, we’re basically putting them into a state to die of fuel poverty. And I think all you’re doing there is just turning the people against you and people thinking what is this green craft? You know, it’s, it’s costing me, cost me dearly. So I think also the Way we’re distributing the. The cost is, is also not particularly smart, but hopefully we will, we will get better at that. And suppose it remains to be seen with the current government, but let’s see,

Speaker C: I mean, it strikes me that really what they should do is they should have some grant enabled solar panel scheme that they can roll out. That would be very popular. And then if you’re putting, as you say, solar panels on the council houses and if you’re putting them onto big blocks and people are getting cheaper electricity as a result, they’ll be sitting there thinking, yeah, we’re utterly behind all of this. And you’re also getting additional electricity going into the grid and it’s renewable electricity. That strikes me as an area that they should be doing a lot more thinking on. You seem to be describing living a world where we almost need the response that we came to in World War II, where we suddenly said, right, we’re at war with these horrible people and we’ve got to develop industry really, really fast, we’ve got to develop radar, we’ve got to develop this and that and we need to go on to a war footing.

Speaker F: I think that’s, that’s very correct observation. I’ve actually used that analogy myself in some other kind of written comment. I think that is exactly what we need. And well, we saw from COVID which I think we can maybe argue as to how suitable and how well run that response was. We saw this phenomenal mobilization for responding to Covid and obviously it came with all manner of problems and wastage, but what that actually showed, in some ways the response to Covid is just the amount of capacity and how fast we can move if people need to and want to. And yeah, that’s exactly what we need. I think there is a certain myopia in there. And I think also some of that comes from, well, I suppose from the people who don’t want the transition to happen, but also some of the people who are strongest advocates of it. I think my general take is on this sector and the kind of the brain trust behind it is that by and large there is an overestimation of the efficacy and I suppose the readiness of many of the tools and technologies which we need. Generally, it’s not uncommon. If I speak to someone in this sector who is an advocate or whatever they may be, their mindset is generally we have all the technologies, had everything you just need to do it. And I actually don’t necessarily agree with that. I think we need a lot more innovation and a lot more Funding and I’m talking radical, radical like you know, 10x kind of increase into R D, funding, innovation and things like that. I think we need to radically bring down the cost of some of these technologies.

Speaker C: It will also mean that we have to start looking at the world in different ways because to develop this new world we will also have to be able to store huge amounts of energy. And once again, according to Hocknall, this could involve water.

Speaker G: The best example we have of that is the Norwig power station in Wales, also called the electric mounting but you know, a perfectly well, well suited geography where yes we can the elevation, we have two elevations. We pump water from lower elevation up to the higher elevation. When we have plentiful and effectively cheap or even free energy, renewable generation peak in the day, for example, we pump it up to the higher altitude and obviously we have head, we have hydraulic pressure and then we run it through the turbine, it generates electricity. The national grid couldn’t run without that. That power station has been in use for a very long time and it’s paid for itself thousands of times over. Now it said that obviously we don’t have, we got many geographies that are as suitable as that. But given that that is such a phenomenally effective piece of the kit for balancing the frequency of the grid and tuning demand with supply at any one time, you know, we should be looking at using this many, many more times over and obviously when we have that excess energy, because at the moment when we have too much renewable power, we’re curtailing farms because one of the problems with renewable energy is we’ve got to obviously overbuild capacity because it’s runs at a lower load factor. So when we have a blustery and sunny day we’ve got to tell lots of wind farms to turn off and curtail their output. Well that’s the perfect time obviously to be using that power, to be putting it into a different energy medium of potential energy, obviously water, water stored at an elevation. So yeah, that’s something which I think is seriously underutilized. And even so if we, if we could, we could engineer potentially these sites to some extent, you know, if we needed to, the amount of vast sums of money we’re going to be spending on our other energy infrastructure, a handful more of these cisternorwig type assets would be phenomenally important.

Speaker C: Investment energy expert Chris Hocknall, founder of the sustainability consultancy 8Versa on that wonderful substance, water. Hocknall is not the only one who can sense green gold in the winds of, of change. Russell Dalgleish, chair of the non profit Net Zero Nation, which helps businesses meet their net zero targets, is also someone who sees a green future as a place of opportunity. Businesses, says Dalglish, will have to be able to prove their green credentials to work with other companies. If they don’t, then that will have an impact on their carbon balance sheet as they try to meet their net zero targets. So what we’re doing is we’re at the front end helping companies to make that transition now, which is going to ultimately lead to them being more competitive as the world moves forward in this direction. It’s not to put in regulations, it’s to actually make it an attractive thing to do. People want to do it because they can see that it’s part of the market. They can is part of demand. Russell Douglas, chair of the non profit Net Zero Nation on the gradual greening of the supply chain as we start to begin to take the carbon out of our future as we try to tackle climate change, it’s a journey that to most of us is most visible in the transport that we use. Though currently it means large and expensive vehicles. It’s a change that we can only make if we bring down the price of those vehicles. According to Professor Kenneth Boyer, author of

Speaker H: the Electric Vehicle Revolution, things take unexpected twists and turns. Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, came out, I think it’s eight months ago now, and said, hey, we got a skunk works. We’re working on making a low cost electric vehicle. Guess what? That’s what Henry Ford, the OG did 120 years ago. You have to sell to the masses. Once we get affordable electric cars, the revolution is going to occur. The steep part of the s adoption curve. People are going to buy these cars. Look at China. Roughly 50% of the cars in China are electric because the government has had a willingness to commit. So my book has a chapter, Gears of Change, pun intended. You need three things. You need a willingness to commit, which is essentially marketing. Who are you trying to convince? How are you trying to convince them? What are you trying to convince them of? But you also need an inability to profit. Who’s going to pay for the things you’re trying to do? How are you going to make money off of it? And so on. But you also need to transform the supply network. You have to build partnerships with electric cars. We have to figure out how to make the batteries work. We have a different powertrain. We need to figure out how to put out vehicle fires. We’ve had 100 at least 120 years. More like 150 years of experience with gasoline engines. We’re not going to figure out electricity in four or five years. So going back to China, China is successful because starting 20 years ago, there’s a lot of public policy, starting with a gentleman by the name of Wang Gong who wrote a proposal about taking China electric. And so China has had a series of government policies for two decades supporting, encouraging and rewarding consumers for using electric cars. China’s roughly 50% electric. Norway is 90% electric. So for Gen Xers, they’ll enjoy this story. One of the reasons Norway is ahead is that the lead singer for AHA, an 80s band that many Gen Xers will remember, started a crusade of public demonstrations, protests, advocacy 30 years ago in Norway. Norway also has had a series of policies for 20, 30 years to support electric cars. Okay. Other regions of world Europe, less adoption, only 12 to 15%. In part because Europe’s a democracy. We let people argue about things. I forget who it was that the best form of government in the world is democracy, except for you have to work through the noise of getting people to try to agree on something. And then you have America, which is kind of the laggard. America is only at about 8 to 9% electric vehicle adoption. We have a little election coming up in November that a lot of the world is watching, and depending on who it wins, it’s going to have a lot of influence on what happens with the electric vehicle revolution. They’re choices. We can make smaller cars. It’s not inherently that they’re going to be more dangerous. We have to sort of. And that’s what my book is about is it’s about how do we improve our choices over time. I’ll give you an example from my

Speaker C: book,

Speaker H: Marcus Sandel, and I’d ask your audience how many people have heard of Marcus Samuel. They should have, because Marcus Samuel was a seashell merchant in London in the mid 19th century. His father started a business, trading business. The reason Marcus Samuel is important is he went to Azerbaijan in 1888, and at the time the Baku oil fields put out, I think it was 20 million gallons or barrels of oil a day. We didn’t know how to cap the oil wells at that time. So you had giant lakes of oil. So why do we care about Marcus Samuel? Well, at the time, John D. Rockefeller and the Rothschilds, who many people have heard of, had a monopoly. They had cut a deal. They shipped oil to Japan in the Far east in tiny little tents, 4 inches long, 1 inch high in a wooden ship. We all know what the answer is, but they didn’t know. Then Marcus Samuel came up with the first workable oil tanker, the Murex. And he was brilliant because he hired a company to build it, to design it with all these safety features. And the brilliance was the CEO of the company. The president was on the Lloyd’s of London board because you needed Lloyd’s of London approval. Go through the Suez Canal. So the first oil tank, first successful oil tanker was the Murex, named after a seashell. Marcus Samuel was the founder of Shell Oil Company. They’re choices. We can make smaller cars. It’s not inherently that they’re going to be more dangerous. We have to sort of. And that’s what my book is about, is it’s about how do we improve our choices over time. I’ll give you an example from my book, Marcus Samuel. And I’d ask your audience how many people have heard of Marcus Samuel? They should have, because Marcus Samuel was a seashell merchant in London in the mid 19th century. His father started a business, trading business. The reason Marcus Samuel is important is he went to Azerbaijan in 1888 and at the time the Baku oil fields put out, I think it was 20 million gallons or barrels of oil a day. We didn’t know how to cap the oil wells at that time. So you had giant lakes of oil. So why do we care about Marcus Samuel? Well, at the time, John D. Rockefeller and the Rothschilds, who many people have heard of, had a monopoly. They had cut a deal. They shipped oil to Japan and the Far east in tiny little tents, 4 inches long, 1 inch high, in a wooden ship. We all know what the answer is, but they didn’t know. Then Marcus Samuel came up with the first workable oil tanker, the Murex. And he was brilliant because he hired a company to build it, to design it with all these safety features. And the brilliance was the CEO of the company. The president was on the Lloyd’s of London board because he needed Lloyd’s of London approval. Go through the Suez Canal. So the first oil tank, first successful oil tanker was the Murex, named after a seashell. Marcus Samuel was the founder of Shell Oil Company. So my book is ostensibly about electric cars, but it’s got other things in there. And to what I’d say is you make a great point is just because we’ve moved past a certain technology doesn’t mean there’s not a use for it. Let’s go back to your sailing around Britain. How wonderful Would that be if there were jobs moving things around the United Kingdom from port to port that created jobs in smaller port communities that are not London, that are not Edinburgh, that are not one of the big cities? Same thing in America. I think it’s the Jones act, in my opinion, insane. We can’t get it changed. I think it’s the Jones act that prohibits anybody from moving cargo unless it’s an American ship between ports in the us. And what that has led to is we have a huge imbalance of these giant container ships bringing things into the United States on the east and west coast. But you can’t move stuff by ship unless it’s broken down and put in a smaller American ship. It’s absurd. Okay, so I could see the same thing in America using sailing ships up and down the east and west coast. Why not?

Speaker C: Professor Kenneth Boyer and his point that in the past that we’ve looked at a mix of different types of energy instead of opting for just one like oil is something that has preoccupied Tom Mason, a former academic for Imperial College, one of the UK’s leading universities, who has started the company Bramble to make hydrogen cells a viable energy system by driving down the cost of making them. Because according to Mason, there are some scenarios where electricity just does not work, particularly in freight transport. For Mason, the green argument is not one that can be simply used on its own or one that is simply pushed through by regulation. For the green revolution to work, it must become attractive to consumers.

Speaker B: I think that an energy transition that is regulatory driven won’t work. It has to be market driven. And if the market’s going to drive though this transition, it has to be done through efficiency of cost, of time, of profit. Whatever it has to be done, it has to be done as an advantage to incumbent, right? And asking people to transition a small city car from petrol to, to electric is actually quite easy, right? Because actually it can be lower cost per mile. You know, the, the cost of a small car, whatever, you know, it kind of works once you start getting these big things. Asking someone with a semi truck that’s, you know, 40 ton load with an enormous battery in it that costs three, four times the cost of a diesel truck. And then you have the challenge of how you fill it up and the time lost of charging it doesn’t work. Hydrogen unlocks that for people, right? Because it, because actually the use case, and I used to drive a hydrogen car when the UK’s infrastructure allowed it. The user experience of a, of a hydrogen car is exactly the same as Petrol and diesel, it’s just zero emission. There is no compromise. Right. It fills up in three minutes. It does. The, the Mirai 2 that I had does, you know, it’s a 20, 21 Mirai, 400 miles to a tank you in use. You wouldn’t know it’s any different except it’s completely silent.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So it’s an electric car. It is an electric car. Hydrogen cars. Hydrogen vehicles are electric cars. It’s just the energy is not coming from a battery, it’s coming from hydrogen with a fuel cell. But the user experience of the logistics firm of the consumer can be the same as petrol and diesel. If the filling instructions there are. Now, it isn’t there. So we shouldn’t ignore that it isn’t there. But it can be there and it will be there ultimately, because we simply aren’t going to make the logistics of the world work with batteries alone. It has to have hydrogen as a key component to it. And that’s why you see a lot of heavy trucking and light commercial vehicles, medium duty commercial vehicles are starting to use things like range extenders. We shouldn’t think that a hydrogen system doesn’t have a massive battery component. The best use case of a fuel cell is with a battery is where you take the power from the battery and the energy from the hydrogen and you can scale that if you think about it. So if you, if you want to move a light thing a really long way, you can have a small battery in a really big hydrogen tank and the other way around. Right. So if you want, you know, you can have a bigger battery, smaller hydrogen if you just need relatively small amount of energy, but lots of power, that sort of trade off you can see working in lots of different applications.

Speaker C: Okay, so, and you’re saying hydrogen zero emissions, it’s this, this wonderfully clean technology.

Speaker F: Yep.

Speaker B: I mean, if you read about it, you will hear people say things like 99% of hydrogen is produced by methane, right? Well, yes, but it’s also feeding the world.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: It’s how we make ammonia, which is how we feed our feed crops. It’s how we grow enough food for 8 billion people. Right. So don’t confuse that with how we’re going to move it around if it’s going into a vehicle. Right. Almost all of the infrastructure to support mobility comes from green hydrogen. So if you paint the picture slightly differently, it’s green. The big challenge, I mean, the amount of hydrogen that’s consumed in industrial processes now, so ammonia being the biggest one. So for fertilizers things like that is about 100 megatons a year. You know, that’s a, that’s an enormous thing that has to transition by methane to green hydrogen. Right. That’s the electrolyzer challenge. Electrolyzers have to get efficient enough and enough for production. Renewable energy has to be widespread enough and low cost enough that we have to transition 100 megatons a year of methane going into hydrogen to green hydrogen, which is, you know, that is a huge challenge in its own. And that’s before you’ve started putting green hydrogen into things like mobility, displacing diesel in transport.

Speaker C: So what you’re saying is that we have to dramatically up the amount of hydrogen we produce? Quite evidently, if we’re going to use hydrogen to replace the fuels that we’re currently using.

Speaker B: Absolutely. I think most estimates would have by 2050, we need to be producing about six times the amount we’re currently producing for in methane, but in green. So it’s a huge, it’s huge amount. And the stopgap hydrogen technology is carbon capture.

Speaker I: Right.

Speaker B: It’s to say, well, we’ll carry on using the methane while everybody’s still got their plants, they’re already made. Probably don’t make any new ones. Probably a good idea. But like, you know, we can transfer a gray hydrogen that is just methane hydrogen into storing that carbon. And that’s a stopgap technology. Ultimately we shouldn’t be using it because, you know, we can make green hydrogen at scale and make it cost effective.

Speaker C: You’re saying though that nonetheless it’s still a transition, that it’s not a long term solution?

Speaker B: No, green hydrogen is definitely a long term solution because if you have renewable energy as the input, so solar and wind, you have to store it seasonally. You have to. And one of the key components of hydrogen is its ability to store seasonally. And it’s the differentiator between it and lithium ion batteries, for example.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: There’s too much self discharge. You lose too much energy in storing with lithium ion. Long term. Right. Not short term, but long term. And that’s the advantage of hydrogen. So it’s definitely a key transition fuel, but a significant part. But let’s think about from the energy mix perspective. Ultimately, hydrogen is probably only going to be 10, 20% of the energy mix going forward. It’s not going to be all of it, but it’s, it’s the 10, 20% which is really hard to do any other way.

Speaker C: Tom Mason of Bramble or mixing up the energy needs of the future. And it’s a future that won’t be as reliant on transport as the world of the past. Technology in the form of AI, remote working and virtual reality will also be part of that mix, bringing with it its own problems, as we have already found out, because the data centers that will become the motorways of the 21st century have already proved themselves to be energy guzzlers. Here’s Mike Hoy, the chief executive officer of the data and communications company Paulsen

Speaker A: on why I see a whole array of infrastructure being used. There will always be a need for compute to become processed more and more powerful. But at the rate we see that, we also see compute becoming more energy efficient. The big things today become actually quite, quite small tomorrow. So we will see some infrastructures move into more regional play, more localized play right out to the very edge. You know, there’s IoT devices and smart devices we talk about all will have an element of AI in there. So you can’t. I don’t. There’s one answer to that question really is it we will see an array. But let’s not get carried away by the headlines. You’re seeing about super data centers growing up in every next to every motorway and that’s where AI will sit. It will be, I think it’ll be a different situation than the reality of it.

Speaker C: I understand that. But there is still a core infrastructure that you’re going to need. You are going to need data centers in Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham. You’re going to need something where some of that processing can take place. And to take your point, you’re also going to need to have some of that processing done locally done on the 8th.

Speaker A: Yeah, you will and I think it will be done at all those areas. Right. So if, try and think of examples that we can kind of talk through. But you know, we’re already starting to see, without mentioning names I guess so you know, we’re already starting to see sort of pharmaceutical factories which have got lots of sensor arrays going through, providing lots of data, making some on chip decisions within those devices, but actually more importantly passing lots of data back up. The days of having on, on premise servers and things are probably, you know, we aren’t seeing people going back to putting a server in the cupboard under stairs or within that they’re going to a regional data center. We’re processing within a regional data, we’re firing data back quicker at low latency. But there are other things that will then get sent further up and will go to the hyperscalers and will get processed and will get enriched with further information that’s available to those language models and those, those capabilities. So you’ll see it happen at all stages of the.

Speaker C: Oh no, I understand that but I mean the world that people have been suggesting to us is you will have computers, laptops that will actually network themselves within an office to do processing locally. That is necessary and you’re absolutely right that various values will be given to various bits of data. But if something can be processed nearer to where it’s needed, it’s almost a load balancing through a system, isn’t it?

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker A: I mean if you think about the nature of computing where we’ve come from, the Internet especially that that sort of grid grid computing is not a new, new concept. Being able to, you already see that within very simple things like you know, I don’t know if you’ve got mass updates to deploy around, you will have a range of computers all doing that makes sense to kind of go to the, to a local device to, to get processing. We’ve seen that in examples of search for extraterrestrial life where they’ll get people process, you know, using that, that compute that’s available and that’s really sensible to do. When you look at the history of it, one thing that’s fairly certain is we will go from centralizing to decentralizing and centralizing and decentralizing. And there’s a little bit of hype around centralizing again coming back in because of all the power requirements, the high performance compute. But I guess my point is that that isn’t necessarily what’s happening. It’s because that’s got the headline with it. There is some exciting advancements there. But that distributed compute nature, to your point, the local laptops doing processing and running programs has always been there and we’ll continue to use that. So I generally see a kind of this will develop based on the use case and where it needs to be. Won’t all be reliant on those big centralized data centers for compute and power we will have to rely on edge nodes, end user compute devices, regional data centers and making sensible use of it.

Speaker C: Mike Hoy, the CEO of PolSent. So for our world to work, we are going to be computing rather than commuting. And just as with cars, we are going to have to make the chips powering this world ever smaller. According to Sandeep Chana, the chief technology officer of the managed service provider csi, which provides computing services to companies companies. Channer says it’s estimated that data centers consume about 3% of the global energy supply and account for about 2% of total greenhouse gas emissions. But only 63% of the world’s population is online. And the global data center construction market is expected to hit $369 billion by 2030, and it’s expected to grow by a rate of 6.7% from 2022 to 2030. With such growth, the IT industry has a major problem on its hands. If we are to cool the world.

Speaker E: You know, we’re starting to hear that energy companies are actually saying things are starting to creak. You know, where people are pushing generative AI. The resource workloads are absolutely frightening. And look, I know the chipset manufacturers are trying to bring out, you know, much more efficient chipsets, but I think there’s a massive gap here. And a lot of people who we talk to in the industry, whether they’re creating AI platforms or whether they’re consumers, nobody talks about the compute and nobody talks about how much energy is going to get wasted. Hang on, does this even fit into your company has this ESG policy over here. You’ve not married the two up that you’re just compounding the problem on this side. It may not live in your data center. It might be in a public hyperscaler. You know, are you just pushing the problem somewhere else? You know, none of that is again being looked at.

Speaker C: Yeah, but the problem seems to be we started off with the CPU, then people wanted more and more GPUs because they wanted to have these pretty pictures and these sort of graphics. Now we’ve got both of those and people are talking about an AIPU as well. So you’ve got these three chips and the thing just seems to be growing organically rather than anybody sitting down and thinking saying, hang on, I’m going to rebuild, I’m going to start this from scratch and I’m going to build something that is, is made for purpose. I, I could see Nvidia. I know it’s bigger than Apple at the moment, but I could see Nvidia somebody coming along with some solution and Nvidia just disappearing like that because people will say, yeah, why on earth were we using all of these gpus? I agree.

Speaker E: And look, energy companies are starting to cotton onto this. You know, people are saying, you know, you’re talking, you know, in the next five, 10 years, you know, eight, 10 fold increase. You know, some, I’ve heard some countries are starting to actually limit and say, no, we can’t have so many new data centers or so much power being consumed by data centers. Because it’s a real problem, as we know, right? You know, there’s things going around across the globe, there’s wars going on, that power is premium. You know, everyone knows costs are escalating. You know us internally as an organization, you know, our power costs across all our global footprints have just soared and, and all we’re doing is making this power problem worse. That’s all we’re doing here.

Speaker C: Sandeep Channa of the computing company CSI on the growing power demands of the computers we will use in the decades to come. So how do we deal with this? Virtually all of the power we use in some way comes from the sun. Fossil fuels are the trapped growth of the past. The wind used by wind turbines is caused by the sun’s heat making the air move around. And solar power is self explanatory. Even the wave power harnessed by our last guest, Cameron McNaught, managing director of the wave energy company Mossian is a byproduct of the sun because the waves are whipped up by the wind. As McNapp points out, about the only potential energy source that does not come from the sun are the tides that are generated by the moon. A power source we will touch on in another program.

Speaker I: You can also create a healthier, more robust energy system by having a variety of types of renewable energy that feed into that grid. So that is genuine argument for wave energy, for tidal energy, for some of these more alternative and newer forms of energy. But we fully believe that we don’t go from where we are now to supplying large amounts of power to mainland grids in one step. That we get there by developing the technology at a smaller scale, by getting it into projects, by generating revenue, and then sort of scaling it up and meeting these other needs as we grow.

Speaker C: It’s interesting what you said about the island groups and these large expanses of ocean. The other day, President Trump was saying that the Americans needed to release all of these rich fossil resources that they’re walking on, that they’ve got this gold in the ground. But in a sense that that sort of source myopia, isn’t it? Because as you say, all of those islands are looking out at this ocean of energy that’s flowing around them.

Speaker I: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think they, I think it’s important to understand what natural resources, nations and places have, have it there, have available to them.

Speaker C: No, absolutely. I mean, you know, you look at the uk, we moan about the weather all of the time, but one of the things that is pretty consistent in the UK is wind you have to look at what you perceive as disadvantages and perhaps see them as wonderful advantages. What about, obviously you make, you’re generating energy from the waves. You’re talking about storage. Why is storage a problem? The waves are going up and down all of the time.

Speaker I: Waves have been shown. I mean, it depends on where you are. It’s, you know, any place you know has seasonal variability. You have variability on a day to day and an hour to hour basis in terms of how much energy is there. You know, generally speaking, you know, if you’re in a place that does have large swell, that swell is more consistent and it’s, it’s more predictable because often if you’re in like, you know, the west coast of Scotland or the west coast of Ireland or Portugal, you know, the waves that are arriving, the swell that’s arriving at your shore wasn’t generated by the local wind, wasn’t generated by the wind that you’re feeling now. It was generated by storms that happened way out in the middle of the ocean. Then those waves actually travel, you know, hundreds of miles to reach the shore. And it’s. One can model that behavior fairly accurately. So you can predict your wave resource, you know, days or even a week in advance, which is not something you can do with other renewables. So that, that is definitely true, but it is still variable and so it’s important. So, you know, with our product, as I say that it’s wave energy, it’s solar panels, it’s battery storage, and we’re generating probably on it, depending on where you are. But you’re probably generating five times as much energy from the waves as we do from the solar panels. But it’s all about timing. You know that solar, the solar panels are really important when you have those periods of low waves. And it’s often, you know, when you have low waves, it’s in the summer and it’s calm and it’s sunny. So wave and solar are very complementary. And then of course you do need battery storage in any kind of renewable system. But what we’re creating with our product is a micro grid. So it’s, you know, just the same ideas. If you were to power your kind of remote homestead up in the mountains or something like that, you know, you need probably a couple different renewables. You need a big battery and yeah, you need to manage your power.

Speaker C: We were trying to get an interview with somebody about energy storage because in Wales there are a couple of reservoirs and they just pump water uphill into the reservoirs at times of low demand. And Then they release it at times of high demand and turn it into hydropower. Which seems like an interesting and novel idea that you’re using renewable energy to pump water uphill and then turning it into energy as and when you want it. I could be getting this wrong, but really you’re talking about harnessing wind power, aren’t you? Isn’t that what creates the waves?

Speaker I: Well, and solar power creates the wind, so not comes from the sun, ultimately. But seriously, I mean, so, you know, that’s why we have wind, because different parts of the Earth get heated up differently from the sun. So. So you’re absolutely right. I mean, it’s, it’s just different ways of kind of getting at energy. Yeah.

Speaker C: Then theoretically, then, then everything comes from the sun because of that carbon resource that you’re trying to. Or, or that we’re trying to get away from that is actually harnessed solar power because it came from growth that’s now being turned into oil and coal and so on and so on and so on.

Speaker I: Definitely. I mean, I think the only thing that can’t be traced back to the sun is sort of like geothermal or energy that’s coming from inside the Earth.

Speaker C: I saw on your website a picture of lots and lots and lots of wave harnessing systems sitting in the ocean, a little light, all of the offshore wind farms. You were saying at the beginning of this that you’re actually becoming a lot more niche specific. So that idea of having lots and lots of little ships bobbing around on the waves isn’t one that you’re thinking will come through at the moment.

Speaker I: I don’t think that that’s going to happen in the near term. So what I’m saying is we’re not. That’s the vision. You know, I think that, you know, we can get there, but you have to get there with a technology that is robust, reliable, high performance, cost effective. I’m not going to make an argument that our first of a kind prototype should then be replicated hundreds of times and built into a, you know, a giant farm. But I think that’s the vision.

Speaker C: Cameron McNutt, the managing director of the wave energy company Motion on why we need to add the sea to the growing list of power sources that we will need to harness if we’re to generate the power we need for a future that doesn’t cost us the Earth. You’ve been listening to Password here on Resonance fm, presented and written by me, Peter Warren, and produced by Blue Buffery. If you’d like to find out more about technology and its impact on our lives. Go to our website, www.futureintelligence.co.uk. thanks for listening and goodbye.

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