Every year, the team at Martyn Fiddler like to reflect on what happened that year, see if there is anything we can learn – or even learn to forget!
Healthy debate and alternate views are welcome here at Martyn Fiddler. Our newsletter and social content always get a great reaction. So, this year, for the first time, we are including opinions and reflections from people outside of Martyn Fiddler in our reflection’s series.
With this in mind, we welcome Patrick Edmond from Future Energy Global to dive deeper into the ‘Make Energy Great Again’ chapter. Patrick brings a fresh perspective and consistently challenges us to think differently about sustainability and this conversation was no exception.
From Patrick Edmond, Future Energy Global
There’s no ‘again’ in making energy great. Literally everything we do has always involved energy, and humanity’s energy use is growing ever faster. We all know that climate change has shone a global spotlight on the emissions associated with humanity’s rapidly growing energy usage, in particular the CO2 that the burning of fossil fuels releases into the atmosphere. There’s nothing unrealistic about taking that into account in thinking about how we want our children’s and grandchildren’s world to look.
If I ran an oil company, I would be having Kodak/Nokia/Blackberry nightmares. How do you go bankrupt? Slowly at first, then fast. However, the decline of the oil industry will be over a much longer timescale.
Jan Rosenow, the Professor of Energy and Climate Policy at Oxford, tells the story that in 1993, a group of German utility companies placed full page adverts in German stating that “renewable energies like sun, water and wind will not be able to cover more than 4% of our power demand, even in the long term.” How did that work out for them? Well, by 2023, renewables were providing over 50% of German electricity.
If we want to talk about ‘realism’, the reality is that over 90% of new generation capacity being added to power grids worldwide is wind or solar, not gas or oil or coal because wind and solar is cheaper.
One in every five cars sold worldwide is electric (and one in two in China). That change isn’t going away.
As renewables continue to get cheaper and to play a bigger role, more and more energy will be in the form of electricity. For those of us in the aviation world, that may mean electric aircraft, initially small regional planes but growing fast (Elysian Aircraft in the Netherlands is already developing a 90 seater electric aircraft targeting service entry in 2033). It may mean power to liquid fuels, also known as e-SAF.
One day it may even mean hydrogen, obtained by electrolysing water.
I know that the aviation industry will continue to be at the forefront of innovation in this new energy world, and I hope that we’ll be able to let the fossils (whether fuels, CEOs, or baseball cap wearing stable geniuses) rest in peace.
Ultimately, the future of energy, and aviation’s role within it, will be shaped not by slogans, but by open minded collaboration, innovation and a willingness to evolve. While perspectives may differ, the shared goal of building a more sustainable, resilient energy landscape is something we can all rally behind.
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