SUSTAINAGILITY PRESS RELEASE:
£25 Trillion Green Tech Boom - how technology will help protect our future
- Politicians ignore £25 trillion green tech boom
- Why UK is falling behind in the green tech race
- How climate change challenges will be overcome in an affordable and profitable way
Commenting on the election battle, Patrick Dixon, author of SustainAgility said:
"The answer to climate change is innovation. All three party leaders are bickering over issues such as nuclear power, but are blind to the real challenge and opportunity.
"The £25 billion Green Tech Boom is the greatest new market that our world has seen in 30 years, will dwarf spending on the dot-com revolution in 1999-2000, and has the power to transform British industry.
"Innovation will provide the answers to global warming that our world so urgently needs. The problem can be fixed. Human genius will transform our future, to protect our world in profitable and affordable ways.
"UK companies need urgent help to develop green tech products, scale up production, create jobs and protect our future world. We are being rapidly outpaced by America, Germany, China and other nations in the race to dominate this mega-market. Each of those governments has taken giant steps to grow their own green tech industries.
"Most green tech pays for itself in a few years so the main issue for purchasers is usually financing. Take street lighting for example, which consumes 5% of UK electricity. Low energy lamps pay for themselves in just four years, creating profit for local authorities over the following six, but capital is required. 120 million street lights need replacing in Europe - a new market worth £2 billion a year. Who is going to seize it?
The same is true for refitting heating and cooling systems in old office blocks, where we also see four year pay back periods - another market worth several billion pounds annually.
"The recent announcements of special tarrifs for home owners generating their own electricity are helpful, together with grants to replace old gas boilers, but they are not enough.
"The pace of innovation is astonishing. We already have the technology not only to power all of Europe from solar arrays covering 60 miles by 200 miles of Sahara desert during the day, but also to be able to store enough energy to power Europe electricity from energy stores throughout the night. We just need to scale up what we have. Next-generation electricity grids can carry power several thousand miles without significant loss of energy, and pilot solar generators are working well in Spain. The reality is that many new sources of energy will underpin our future, but solar is much more important than most people realize.
"Manufacturers are adapting fast. Take British Sugar, which generates its own power from a gas turbine, using heat to process sugar, while carbon dioxide exhaust is pumped half a mile away into a vast green house, to grow an extra 37 million tomatoes a year - double what was happening before. Every person in Britain has eaten tomotos grown from carbon dioxide exhaust gases.
Some parts of steel production are 10 times more efficient than a few years ago. Proctor and Gamble has halved energy use per unit of production since 2002. Marks and Spencers, Tesco, Asda and Sansburys have made huge strides in reducing energy use and packaging.
"People often ask how we can afford to change how we live. The fact is that most of the technology we use today, whether gas boilers, cars, fridges, computers or phones, will be need replacing in the next 10-15 years, and new models will be much more efficient as well as lower cost. These purchases will happen anyway and are not an additional load on our societies.
"And as green tech scales up, prices will fall further. For example the price of roof solar panels falls 10% every time production doubles. On current trends we can expect solar panel electricity to be the same price as that from gas power stations by 2020-2025.
"Cost is the Number One issue. If green technologies were cheaper than the rest, we would not be able to prevent a stampede to buy these things. The fastest way to bring costs down is to provide pump-priming grants or subsidies so that industries can scale up. Another way is to change a regulation, for example in the building industry, to force rapid adoption.
"Whoever wins the election will be faced with big and urgent decisions about green tech. Their task is being made harder by conflict between different activist groups over the right balance between coal, gas, wind, solar, wave, tide and nuclear energy, and over the location of new installations. These disputes are preventing large-scale, radical change and must be settled rapidly.
"The time for debates is over. We need strong action now with a combination of new regulation, subsidy, grants and taxes.
"Our future world depends on it - but so does the UK economy."
- Patrick Dixon is co-author of SustainAgility, his 14th book, and widely regarded as Europe's leading Futurist. Chairman of Global Change Ltd, advisor to many of the world's largest corporations, he has also been ranked as one of the 50 most influential business thinkers alive today (Thinkers 50 2005). His website / blog has had 12 million unique visitors with over 2.7 million video views and 31,000 Twitter followers. http://www.globalchange.com; http://www.youtube.com/pjvdixon; http://www.twitter.com/patrickdixon
- Contact Patrick Dixon: mobile: +44 (0) 7768 511 390 or patrickdixon@globalchange.com
- Johan Gorecki is co-author of SustainAgility, Founder and Chairman of Globe Forum, an internationally recognized marketplace for sustainable innovation, bringing together innovators, investors and multinationals. He is also Founder of the Globe Forum Sustainability Award. As an entrepreneur himself, he worked with the founding team of Skype.
- http://www.globeforum.com
- Contact Johan Gorecki: +46 (0)8 586 199 00 Johan.gorecki@globeforum.com
