Octopus Energy Tech Summit
I am going to try to live-skeet some of this event today https://energytechsummit.co.uk/ block the hashtag if that's annoying
Octopus have previously run an energy technology summit with about 400 attendees from government etc, but instead we decided 4 weeks ago was invite 3000 cutomers to attend instead
we want energy to work for and with people, not somethign that is done to us - instead of turnign our back on net zero, lets make it better for people so it's cheaper and makes our cities better
we live next to a monstrous source of energy - the sun. This sends us more energy than we could ever use.
The single largest release of energy in human history was the Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb that the Soviet Union dropped in 1961 - a 50 Megaton bomb
About 5% of energy in the USA currently goes to data centers, and that is expected to go up to 12% in the next few years with the growth of AI
Ukraine are at the forefront of protecting Europe from aggression and before we talk about energy, I want to say how much the UK supports Ukraine
Maxim is building our renewable energy in Ukraine while his power stations are under military attack. In the last year Ukarain has installed 1GW of rooftop solar - about 4% of their supply
If we can inspire the Uk energy systems to learn from Ukraine and be more agile and bring costs down that helps everyone
We are proud to announce a partnership with Octopus with our Resilient Independent Solar Energy in Ukraine
National security is energy security - it's not by accident that Ukraine's energy infrastructure has been targetted by Russia. We're investing in rebuilding Ukraine and bringing other investment
What Ukraine shows is that continued reliance on fossil fuels is a liability for any country, and we need to build out renewables more
The Russian Invasion of Ukraine showed how exposed we were to fossil fuels - we weren't using Russian Gas in the UK , but the price increase affected us too
the Net Zero economy is growing 3 times faster than the rest of the economy and it is delivering jobs and growth as well as energy independence
when this war is over, Ukraine will have the most modern, most resilient and probably most robust energy system, built around clean energy. After wars countries often grow back stronger
Ukraine is a huge opportunity for investment now, and also for learning - the tech innovation that they have had to do is ahead of what we do here
I'm the CEO of the Climate Change Committee https://www.theccc.org.uk/ working out how to meet the net zero targets
The biggest things we need to do over the next 10 years are replacing gas heating with electric heating - it's already ecnomoically cheaper, so just replacement costs
similarly replacing IC engine cars with electric cars is already cheaper to run, so when you change cars this is the sensible choice
when you replace your heating system, geta. heat pump - it's cheaper as well as better
Electric energy is already becoming carbon-free, but the big chunks in the next era is transportation and heating. in the next decade we can tackle farming and food production
60% of emissions reduction from here to 2040 is electrification - replacing other powered things with electricity. We know how to do most of this
Modern electric technology is much more efficient that the technlogies that it is replacing, so there is a secondary effect of electrification replacing the inefficiency overhead
Electricity is more expensive than it needs to be beccsue of policy choices - we have loaded transition costs onto electricity rather than gas
In Sapiens you said that what separated us from the rest of the world is that we tell stories about ourselves
we took over the planet not because we are more intelligent, but becasue we can cooperate through story telling. Money is one of the best stories we have told
Now there is another thing on the planet that could be a better storytellers than us
You're talking about AI as a better storyteller than us - Emily Bender says that it is a stochastic parrot and we are the ones who make sense of them
When I start talking I don't know what will be the next word I say either - I feel that I am reeling out words without knowing what will be next.
Now you can ask AI how it thinks and see how it is froming sentences [you can't ask it and get a truthful answer, you can look at the models - this is deeply wrong- km]
Geoffrey Hinton says that we can't predict what AI will do, and we don't know what is going on inside. [you can't predict a dice either, that doesn't make it intelligent -km]
Ai is no longer artificial - it is nto an artefact that we control. With each day it is becoming less artificial and more Alien [this is daft sophistry - again, a roulette wheel is unpredictable too]
Green investents generate 3 times as many jobs as fossil fuel investments
it's easy to fall captive to inertia, but we have all the solutions we need today to make the energy transition work
Part of my job is to go round the world and talk to people at the cutting edge of technology
I have seen experimenters who have trained pigeons to recognise malignant versus benign tumours, and they do as well as machine learning models, but we don't have a huge campaign worrying about PIgeons taking over the world
Electricity is the perfect just-in-time delivery service. Excess or shortage are both a problem. If you get off frequency, things start to go astray
20 years ago we had 4000 generaton points, now we have about 1.5 million as we now have rooftop solar etc
we can no longer turn generation up and down so much, so we end up with consumers needing to help be more flexible
I spent the first 3 weeks reading the electricity suplly licence wichwas 300 pages then @gjuk.bsky.social: it's 1200 pages now, hope you've kept up
I asked Greg who does your PR? He said - if a journalist ever phoned, I'd talk to them.
We have a president saying Drill baby Drill, how do we combat that? @gjuk.bsky.social: we have an exponential technology which can compete with revivng old technlogies
Texas is now the most renewable state in the uS, despite Trump pushing coal and oil. Rooftop solar+ battery is 10x cheaper than grid in Africa now, We just need to keep building it
In order for this technology shift to happen, we need a mindset change. We forget when we look back that technology adoption is a sigmoid curve
There were electric cars in the Edwardian era. Becasue they were cleaner, they were mostly bought by women, the male-coded petrol engine embodied sexism
if you remap a speedometer as minutes per 10 miles, it makes a lot more sense visually as speeding things up doesn't help much
James Watt invented the unit of horsepower as a marketing term to sell steam engines by telling mill owners how many horses they could make redundant
When they put rhen roundel on the Overground, after improving throughput, usage went up 400% - we need tis kind of epiphany for green energy
what you need to do to force a paradiigm shift is come up with a creative idea rather than modelling veriables and looking at constraints
How do you make using a train journey more enjoyable then using a car? [ this is the secret sauce of electric bikes - they are more fun tham electric cars-km]
in 1969 Volkswagen Beetle showed a photo of the Lunar Lander with the slogan "it's ugly, but it gets you there" [also both initially built by Nazis]
Paradigm shifts are not easy to achieve becsue you can't quantify every single piece of it
we're spending billions to reduce range anxiety in electric cars by increasing range, we should instead make chargers more visible. Maybe by putting them at petrol stations
Petrol stations are the peacocks of roads; electric chargers are hidden away behind industrial parks