Small-scale storage boosts consumer choice

Hello, everyone. My name is Shakira, and I'm here to talk about the future of energy. So I think the first thing to talk about is what do we know right now about energy and the world and how it all relates to us? Well, we know we need to innovate our energy systems. We need more capacity, and we would like to get more renewable energy onto the grid, utilize in a very efficient manner where we can all participate in that renewable energy. We also know that a lot of our energy infrastructure is aging. It's getting very old. It needs to be replaced and it's quite susceptible to extreme weather events, which we are seeing all the time. We also know that consumers like yourselves and myself are very interested in participating in clean energy and sustainability going forward. There's a growing appetite for that kind of participation and potentially even at the home level. So we hear and asked ourselves some questions. We said, Well, what if we could unlock the potential of hydrogen as something that could store renewable energy for us at our home level? Can that help us be more sustainable and greener going forward? And can we imagine a future where consumers can readily procure technology that they can put into their houses to dramatically improve the sustainability of their homes by just buying something off the shelf from a hardware store in terms of a kit that would hopefully make energy systems much more resilient and allow people to firsthand play a very important role in energy transition. So our prediction is that we will have more distributed energy systems in the future rather than big plants generating energy everywhere. We will have homes generating energy and storing energy within their own boundaries as people participate in this energy transition. And we believe that hydrogen is going to be one of the key parts of that energy transition. So what is the future of energy? Well, I think we will see more convenient options available to us to allow for cleaner energy into the halls and into our homes. So small scale energy systems that are really beneficial to remote communities as well. That means more consumer choice. We will have more agency in taking a really important view towards this energy transition to not only get to net zero, probably what comes after net zero, which is the world of net negative, where we're actually reducing emissions very significantly compared to what we're doing now. So in terms of the drivers for this, I like to think of it and we like to think of it in terms of three DS. There's decarbonization, de-risking and distribution. So decarbonization is already happening. We are seeing the world pulling multiple levers to decarbonize and reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted into the atmosphere. But we also need to de-risk our energy infrastructure, which again is aging and needs to be replenished and is subject to extreme weather events all over the world. And finally, we want to enable a distributed, decentralized set of solutions to how energy is actually being used, especially as people make more and more choices to live in different places than they did before the pandemic, for instance. So decarbonization is the first of these many countries and governments have pledged to net zero by 2050. Many corporations have pledged to net zero by 2050. The Paris Accord is out there. There are lots of pushes towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, and that's reflected in changing consumer habits. Habits are changing in terms of energy. Long before the pandemic hit. But I think the global shutdown has really forced people to reevaluate how they live and what their behaviors really are. To better understand consumer behavior. We undertook a survey of about 8000 people globally to take a look at what they really wanted. How did they want to play a part in this transition, especially after they experienced a long time not driving as much or not flying as much, just not consuming as much energy. So the survey findings are really interesting. We found that people were very interested in having a hydrogen boiler in the house to produce heat rather than a natural gas furnace or potentially having solar or hydrogen storage for power in their homes and potentially buying an electric vehicle or having solar panels on their roof to the level of 75% of the respondents that we talked to. And that's a very significant shift derisking. So, again, extreme weather events continue. We are seeing lots of spikes in terms of energy demand. We think that a lot of our energy through poles and wires. We've all seen these big wires running across our continents and our countries and through the countryside, they're susceptible to power outages and high winds, floods. They're susceptible to hurricanes. And we're seeing more intense and frequent weather events of that magnitude. We've also seen bushfires in places that are created by power lines, in some cases that have devastating effects on local populations. So there's an increased emphasis on island and some of this activity and having more having a more distributed set of networks. Which leads me to distributed the future of energy really looks like democratization of energy, energy available availability at the residential level where we can actually control what we're use generating and what we're using as part of a more equitable and smart and just transition. So how does hydrogen play into this? Well, renewable energy is intermittent. The wind doesn't always blow. The sun doesn't always shine. We need to be able to store energy in addition to generating it, if that's what we want to do. There's lots of technology out there right now that it's allowing this to happen at at the local level so that we can actually participate in hydrogen as one of the ways of storing energy rather than batteries. And hydrogen offers an advantage for being able to store energy for a longer period of time. So how is this achieved and what are the factors that are important for hydrogen? Obviously, we need technology. It has to exist. It has to be affordable. It has to be available to us. It has to be simple for homeowners to utilize, has to be controllable, and it has to actually have some financial component to it that shows some type of saving over time. The good news is technology is now available. There are technologies in the world such as the Lavo system or the Japan system that are out there that are allowing us to actually store energy inside our houses in the form of hydrogen. So imagine rooftop solar storing electricity in the form of hydrogen in your house. This is the type of future that we're looking at now. In terms of cost. We have to remember the example of solar. Solar power 20 years ago cost a lot of money, and I don't think we ever thought it would come down in cost to the level that it has. Now, the most economical way of making electricity in the world and just a fantastic evolution of that particular technology. A lot of people have on their on their houses right now. These technologies are also going to see things like household solar, hydrogen storage are also going to see downwards pressure in terms of cost. We're already seeing this in things like electric power, electric vehicles. There is a significant uptake in that market because the cost has come down and they have become more affordable. In terms of availability. I personally think it would be fantastic if one day I could go in my electric vehicle, perhaps to the local hardware store and I could buy a kit that allows me to put solar panels on my roof very easily when I don't have to employ a contractor and I can buy hydrogen storage so that I can then connect to that rooftop solar system so that when I when the sun is shining, I'm storing energy and I can then take that energy out of that unit when I want to or when I need to. I think that kind of choice in the consumer level, where this is the type of appliance we can readily access, just makes it so much more available to everyone. And it allows us as consumers to really make informed choices. We can make a choice about when we want to do this, and we can participate in a system that makes it really easy for us to do this. I think that's what the future is going to bring in terms of hydrogen. Now, I don't want to say that hydrogen storage in the home is a magic bullet. It's not. It's one part of a very big attempt to push on decarbonization. The oil and gas companies are decarbonizing. Many countries are setting net zero goals. This is about allowing consumers to also participate in the future at the residential level, where we can control what we do and how we set up our homes. And I think that's what the future is going to look like is all these big decarbonization efforts happening in parallel to the things that we can do by ourselves in our own homes. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure talking to you.