PassW0rd – 13 November 2024 (Greening The Future)

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Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Password on 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 Lilian, 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, recorded its hottest month 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 countered, they claim, it will also lead to a humanitarian disaster on an unprecedented scale as people move from a rapidly developing sub-Saharan Africa Sahara and 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 exercised by politicians. In 2020, the Institute for Economics and Peace, a think tank that produces annual global terrorism and peace indexes, warned that by 2050 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 8 ecological threats, then assesses their capacity to withstand them. It found that 141 of 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 Brukic, 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, Brookik 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 U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump do not bode well. In his closing speech at the Republican National Congress on July 19th, Trump vowed to “drill, baby, 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 programme said it’s simply environmentally unsustainable. And that 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 Carslake, 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 harbours, and that sail is outperforming conventional fuel.

Speaker C: 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 A: 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 harbours, didn’t We certainly did.

Speaker C: 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 of them quickly, but also differently designed ships that don’t have to have such a massive depth.

Speaker A: 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 C: 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, 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 A: 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 C: 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 hard and operatives, but 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 A: 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 C: 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. So 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, on canals as well. Although I have to say that one of the most effective companies I came across a long time ago, because I don’t work with canal boats, was an entirely zero emission electric canal boat just using solar. It, it has absolutely no cost. There’s definitely potential there with solar.

Speaker A: 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 C: 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 a relatively recent invention.

Speaker A: Bill Carslake, 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. Carslake’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 Hocknell, founder and director of the sustainability consultancy 8 Versa and an expert on decarbonization and energy policy, was keen to point out.

Speaker D: 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, 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 the things, I do believe we can, you know, we could be talking hundreds of thousands of jobs and new jobs in various different sectors, just the enhancement and the refurbishment and the improvement of the grid infrastructure that’s needed to obviously change the 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 sea with, you know, for example, the huge offshore wind farm that’s planned, Dogger Bank, that is absolutely enormous. And obviously, as I said, I have a great deal of security concerns about that. But I mean, that whole east coast will— well, 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 deindustrialization, 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 an incredibly exciting prospect. So I think we’ve certainly have the And the complexions and the ideologies within, within governments for decades now seem to have quite shied away from the idea of industrial strategies and I suppose advanced technical, technically based strategies to this problem. It’s a real shame. And, you know, 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, etc., as we, as we touched on before. I’ve been hearing about wave and tidal power in the UK, its potential for decades now. And we just— it says, oh, you know, the UK has got the greatest resources, one of the greatest resources and opportunities there, but very little happens. And often when you find— this was really the case with the previous government— then anytime we found some, I suppose, public-private partnership notion or idea, whether 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. And 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 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’ve got very grand ambitions, we don’t have much in the way of domestic capacity and opportunity. And, and some that we do have, I suppose, innovation from an academic perspective, we are obviously still doing quite well in the UK. But usually, as we, as we know, once it reaches a certain point, it goes off to the US to get commercialized, or perhaps somewhere else in, 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, near any 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 A: 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 2 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 Google search, which just uses 0.3 watt-hours. According to researchers at Best Brokers, the annual electrical power consumption of OpenAI’s chatbot when responding to prompts over the course of a year will consume approximately 226.8 8.82 million kilowatt-hours. At the average U.S. commercial electricity rate of $0.131 per kilowatt-hour at June 2024, this means the energy costs of answering questions in the U.S. alone will be $29.71 million. It’s an issue, Hocknell says, we have to address.

Speaker D: One of the things we’ve also got to contend with is also the increase in energy demand. I 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 the electrical grid, EVs and such things, all massively increasing electricity demand as well. And I don’t think that’s been properly factored into some of the strategies. Some of the strategies tend to imply energy efficiency and demand reductions, which are obviously needed and where they make sense, we should make them. But there’s kind of sometimes an implicit energy poverty dynamic in the argument, which I think is a very— is the wrong way to be looking at it. And I think that is also another concern about some of the thinking around this. And we haven’t really— we go back historically, I mean, when have we actually contracted and reduced our intensity of energy consumption? We just continually enhance and demand more. And, you know, energy and economic output and activity are very heavily correlated. So we can’t put ourselves in a sense of energy poverty. And also, I think some of the approaches to who pays for this transition have not been equitably distributed. And, you know, asking just the way we kind of open to, which is obviously some of the cause of some of the populism 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 energy transition onto per kilowatt-hour consumption figures, but I think it’d 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, you know, we’re basically putting them into a state of dire fuel poverty. And I think all you’re doing there is just turning the people against you and people thinking, what is this green crap? You know, it’s costing me dearly. So I think also the way we’re distributing the cost is also not particularly smart. But hopefully we will get better at that. And I suppose it remains to be seen with the current government, but let’s see.

Speaker A: 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 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 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. 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 D: I think that’s, that’s a 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 mobilisation 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 that. 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 a, 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 technology, we’ve 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 A: 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 Hocknell, this could involve water.

Speaker F: The best example we have of that is the Norwick Power Station in Wales, also called the Electric Mountain, but a perfectly well-suited geography where, yes, we can— the elevation, we have two elevations. We pump water from the lower elevation up to the higher elevation when we have plentiful effectively cheap or even free energy, renewable generation peak in the day, for example. We pump it up to the higher, higher altitude and obviously we have head, we have hydraulic pressure, and then we run it through a turbine and it generates electricity. The National Grid couldn’t run without that. That power station’s been in use for a very long time and it’s paid for itself thousands of times over. Now, it’s said that obviously we don’t have 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. 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 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 stored up at an elevation. So yeah, that’s something which I think is seriously underutilized. And even so, if 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 Sysdynorwig-type assets would be phenomenally important investment.

Speaker A: Energy expert Chris Hocknell, founder of the sustainability consultancy 8 Versa, on that wonderful substance water. Hocknell is not the only one who can sense green gold in the winds of change. Russell Douglash, chair of the nonprofit 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 sheets as they try to meet their net-zero targets.

Speaker G: When COP26 was held in Glasgow a couple of years ago, on the build-up to that, our diaspora audience asked asked us what we could do to contribute towards reducing carbon. So we created an organization called Net Zero Nation, which participated quite heavily during COP26. This is now developed into a community whereby we have our accelerator and we also have experts and we have technology which helps companies to reduce their carbon footprint. The big market for us today is working with major corporates to help them to decarbonize their supply chain. And the success we’ve had is about this idea about building community where the supply chain companies work together to understand how to measure and how to reduce their carbon effects.

Speaker A: Obviously, you know, we’re all very, very, very worried about climate change or most intelligent people are. There are some people who don’t seem to be. Everybody’s worried about climate change. What do you think the biggest problem is in terms of what you’ve been talking about?

Speaker G: So my world is the business community, and if you’re running a business, it’s kind of a full-time job to actually keep everything going, keep the wheels going, hire the people, keep the customers happy, etc. What we’ve noticed that we have to do is to move the dial from asking companies to adhere to compliance regulation, which they view as a pain, to actually explaining to them the benefits that can be accrued through taking climate change seriously. So if you’re actually measuring your carbon, this is going to seriously improve your opportunity for winning tenders, for example, going forward. So it’s trying to explain to companies why being good for the planet is also good for them. You know, we’re not only talking about reducing carbon effects and carbon production from within your company, we’re also talking about increasing your profits. So that’s how we get the business community on board rather than simply through legislation.

Speaker A: How does it improve your profit? What is the financial case?

Speaker G: So one example would be that we’re now starting to see major corporates are insisting upon suppliers having carbon reduction plans in place. Being able to prove the fact that they are measuring their carbon usage and they have a plan in place to reduce it. So quite simply, if you don’t have that, you won’t be able to bid for the tender. So that’s a clear example. The second example we have is through the community, is by building companies with a like-minded approach here, they start trading with each other and that creates an internal market as well. So they’re the two major ones we’ve seen.. But over the coming years, it’s going to become— it’s not going to be the fact that you can’t win a contract with a bank if you don’t have a carbon reduction plan. You won’t be able to bank with them. So this is going to become the normal part of our society. 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.

Speaker A: 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 seen and it’s part of the market because it’s part of demand.

Speaker G: You’re quite correct, and as these new technologies come on stream, we’ll be looking to help companies to adopt them. What we’re trying to do is to look at— so we have a— one of my other businesses is an investment arm, and we look at green tech coming along, and there are a lot of interesting solutions developing, but they’re still at an early stage. So it’s how to adopt these as we move forward.

Speaker A: Russell Douglas, chair of the nonprofit 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 The Electric Vehicle Revolution.

Speaker E: Things take unexpected twists and turns. Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, came out, I think it’s 8 months ago now, and said, hey, we got a skunkworks, 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 3 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 ability 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 4 or 5 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 Dong, who wrote a proposal about taking China electric. And so China has had a series of government policies for 2 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 A-ha, 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. Other regions of the 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 wins, it’s going to have a lot of influence on what happens with the electric vehicle revolution. 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 in the Far East in tiny little tins, 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 to 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 there. 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. So I could see the same thing in America using sailing ships up and down the East and West Coast. Why not?

Speaker A: 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 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 electric is actually quite easy because actually it can be lower cost per mile, 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 truck that’s, you know, 40-ton load with an enormous battery in it that costs 3, 4 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 hydrogen car is exactly the same as petrol and diesel. It’s just zero emission. There is no compromise. It fills up in 3 minutes. It does. The Mirai 2 that I had does— it’s a 2021 Mirai, 400 miles to a tank. You’re in use, you wouldn’t know it’s any different except it’s completely silent. 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 infrastructure is there. 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. It’s 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 and a really big hydrogen tank. And the other way around, 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. Okay.

Speaker A: So, and you’re saying hydrogen, zero emissions. It’s this, this wonderfully clean technology. Yep.

Speaker B: I mean, if you read about it, you will hear people say things like 99% of hydrogen is produced by methane. Well, yes, but it’s also feeding the world, right? It’s how we make ammonia, which is how we 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. That’s an enormous thing that has to transition by methane to green hydrogen. Hydrogen. That’s the electrolyzer challenge. Electrolyzers have to get efficient 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 A: 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 6 times the amount we’re currently producing for— in methane, but in green. So it’s a huge amount. And the stopgap hydrogen technology is carbon capture, right? 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 we can transfer a gray hydrogen, i.e., just methane to 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 A: 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, 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 of— but let’s think about from the energy mix perspective. Ultimately, hydrogen’s 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 the, it’s the 10-20% which is really hard to do any other way.

Speaker A: Tom Mason of Bramble are 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 out 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 Pulseant, on why.

Speaker H: I see a whole array of infrastructure being used. There will always be a need for compute to become process more, more powerful. But at the rate we see that, we also see compute becoming more energy efficient. The big things today become actually 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, those IoT devices and smart devices we talk about all will have an element of AI in there. So you can’t— I don’t think there’s one answer to that question really. We will see an array, but let’s not get carried away by the headlines you’re seeing about super data centers growing up on every, next to every motorway. And, uh, and that’s where AI will sit. It will be, I think it’ll be a different situation than the reality of it.

Speaker A: 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 edge.

Speaker H: Yeah, you will. And I think it will be done at all those areas. If I try and think of examples that we can kind of talk through, but, you know, we’re already starting to see 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-premise servers and things are probably, you know, we aren’t seeing people going back to putting a server in the cupboard under the stairs or within that. They’re going to a regional data center. We’re processing within a regional data center. 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.

Speaker A: 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? Yeah.

Speaker H: I mean, if you think about the nature of computing and where we’ve come from on 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 arrays of computers all doing that. Makes sense to kind of go to the, to a local device to, to, to get processing. We’ve seen that in examples of search for extraterrestrial life where they’ll get people processing, you know, using 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 is 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, you know, has always been there and will 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. It won’t all be reliant on those big centralized data centers for computing power. We will have to rely on edge nodes, end-user compute devices, regional data centers, and making sensible use of it.

Speaker A: Mike Hoy, the CEO of Pulsons. 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 Channa, the Chief Technology Officer of the managed service provider CSI, which provides computing services to companies. Channa 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 I: 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 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 as 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 may be in a public hyperscaler, you know, are you just pushing the problem somewhere else? You know, none of that is, is, is again being looked at.

Speaker A: 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 AI PU. They are. So you’ve got these 3 chips and the thing just seems to be growing organically rather than anybody sitting down and saying, hang on, I’m going to start this from scratch and I’m going to build something that is made for purpose. I could see Nvidia. I know it’s big 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 say, yeah, why on earth were we using all of these GPUs? I agree.

Speaker I: And look, energy companies are starting to cotton on to this. You know, people are saying, you know, you’re talking, you know, in the next 5, 10 years, a tenfold increase. 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? 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 all we’re doing is making this problem worse.

Speaker A: That’s all we’re doing here. 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 McNatt, managing director of the wave energy company Mossion, is a byproduct of the sun because the waves are whipped up by the wind. As McNatt 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 J: 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 a genuine argument for wave energy, for tidal energy, for some of these more alternative and newer forms of energy. But, you know, 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 A: 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. In a sense, that’s 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. Yeah, definitely.

Speaker J: I mean, I think they— I think it’s important to understand what natural resources nations and places have available to them. No, absolutely.

Speaker A: 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 J: Waves have been shown— I mean, it depends on where you are. It’s, you know, any place 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, if you’re in a place that does have large swell, that swell is more consistent and 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, 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 hundreds of miles to reach the shore. And one can model that behavior fairly accurately. So you can predict your wave resource 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, depending on where you are, but you’re probably generating 5 times as much energy from the waves as we do from the solar panels. But it’s all about timing. The solar panels are really important when you have those periods of low waves, and it’s often, you know, when you often 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 need, you do need battery storage in any type of renewable system. But what we’re creating with our product is a microgrid. So it’s, you know, just the same idea as if you were to power your 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 A: 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?

Speaker J: Isn’t that what creates the waves? Well, and solar power creates the wind, so it all 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 you’re absolutely right. I mean, it’s just different ways of kind of getting at energy. Yeah.

Speaker A: And then theoretically, then everything comes from— the sun because of that carbon resource that you’re trying to, 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 J: Definitely. I mean, I think the only thing that can’t be traced back to the sun is geothermal or energy that’s coming from inside the earth.

Speaker A: I saw on your website a picture of lots and lots and lots of of wave harnessing systems sitting in the ocean, a little like 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 J: 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 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 A: Cameron McNatt, the managing director of the wave energy company Mocean. Discussion 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. This program has been brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you heard, please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate.