A reverse energy perspective
Achieving Net Zero and beyond will come down to the everyday decisions we all make: e.g. what food we buy, how and where we travel, how we manage our homes. This will be really hard – it is really hard – as everything is so complicated for consumers. Which is where the inverted pyramid comes in.
I first came across the inverted pyramid from someone who had just turned around a failing hospital. When asked what was the most significant thing that enabled her to do this she replied “the inverted pyramid”.
One of the first things she was shown when joining the hospital was the management structure. The CEO was at the top and the porters, nursing assistants and receptionists at the bottom. So, she inverted it, put all patient facing services at the top and herself at the bottom. She then reinforced that managements’ role was to support patient facing staff and to make the life of patients easier.
I suggest we need to do the same with energy. The grid has done an excellent job of doing this to-date, but de-carbonised energy is different. It will require significantly more electricity to be generated, and green at that. More of a challenge, consumers will need to understand what products to buy – electric vehicles, renewable heating, solar panels, smart devices, smart tariffs, home batteries, V2G, Peer2Peer trading… the list grows year by year. We also know that manging the intermittency of renewables is a real challenge as is managing the likely local grid peak demands. One study estimated that as little as 6 EVs charging at the same time on the same transformer could be enough to trip it: hence the need for smart chargers.
So, this is our inverted energy pyramid. It is designed to make it as easy as possible for consumers to make the everyday decisions needed to help deliver Net Zero. Net Zero isn’t just about building off-shore wind farms, carbon capture and storage and low carbon hydrogen. These big business initiatives have their place but so does the everyday decisions of consumers - small and large. It is why consumer-facing distributed energy is so important.
Author: Simon Anderson