Last week, I was asked to join the Advisory Board of UK100, an organisation promoting clean tech and smart energy systems in the country’s largest cities and towns.
Those who had the misfortune to be at the Burnham-on-Sea hustings in May will know I’m pretty passionate about smart energy systems so it’s exciting to be joining politicians, businesses and NGOs in promoting the vales of clean tech to communities across the country.
There will be a few readers who will already know well what is meant by ‘clean tech’, some will think it means wind turbines and solar parks, whilst others won’t have heard the term at all.
Certainly renewable generation is part of it, so too are electric vehicles and technologies like heat pumps, LEDs and myriad other things that allow us to heat, cool or light whilst using less energy.
However; the really clever bit is the way we enhance the energy system itself by adding energy storage, demand response and digitised switching.
Those that struggle to see the need to decarbonise will say this is all mumbo-jumbo: An expensive folly that screws the consumer to achieve something that we don’t really need to do.
The debate over climate change is for another day but the value of smart energy systems in our towns and cities is not about decarbonising.
Smart Cities are also about achieving lower energy costs because employing technologies to minimise our energy use whilst using other tech to maximise the time we can use the very cheapest (and cleanest) forms of energy.
Whatever your views on climate, flattening energy supply chains through energy storage and flattening demand curves through digitised demand management, is surely just progress towards achieving energy security, lower costs and decarbonisation too.