about eight years ago I was fresh out of
university and searching for meaning in
my life I had a job lined up at a
prestigious international engineering
consultancy and I was due to start there
that summer a few weeks before I began
the job I got a call and it was from my
future employer who told me that because
of the global recession they were having
to reconsider the offers that they had
made to some of their graduates so my
career started with me getting fired
before I even began my first job I think
that’s quite an achievement but actually
it’s probably on reflection one of the
best things that could have happened to
my career and it gave me an opportunity
to think about what I really wanted to
do to maximize my impact in this life
and it was around this time that I
discovered this image I don’t know if
you can see it very well but this is a
photograph that was taken on Valentine’s
Day in the year 1990 by a NASA space
probe called Voyager 1 as the photo that
was taken from about 6 billion
kilometres away and just about in this
photograph you can make out a pale blue
dot that is earth that’s us that’s right
here and what really struck me about
this image is how isolated we are in the
vastness of the universe and how we have
to be self-sustaining it ignited a
passion and sustainability for me to
understand really how we could achieve
that it’s probably a good thing
that this photograph was taken from so
far away because given it was
Valentine’s Day you never know what
might have been caught on the photograph
if it was been from too much closer but
herein lies the problem as I see from
this image if you think about it
everybody who’s ever lived or died in
the entire history of mankind has done
so on that pale blue dot all of our
achievements everything we’ve ever done
has been on that pixel so it’s really
important that we think about how we
manage this going forward the earth has
been around
for about 4.5 billion years Homo sapiens
maybe 200,000 and it’s really only the
last 200 years that humanity has grown
and prospered and it can be traced back
to the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution the invention of the steam
engine and by association our ability to
generate electricity from steam this
made energy more useful and accessible
than ever before we were able to light
our homes warm our homes to travel to
communicate to improve our productivity
in ways we could never do before
but of course these resources come from
fossil fuels the Industrial Revolution
was powered by fossil fuels and coal gas
and oil are by very definition finite
they took millions of years to form and
we’re using them at a rate of decades
now we can debate how long we have left
of them but what we cannot debate is
whether they will run out they are by
very definition unsustainable forms of
energy and so we have to be thinking
differently about this if we are to
create a self-sustaining
pale blue dot and unfortunately we have
within our solar system an energy source
with over 5 billion years worth of fuel
left in it I am of course talking about
the Sun the Sun sends about 174 Pesa
watts of energy to the earth average all
the time now a petawatt is an immense
number it’s 174 with 15 zeros after it
this is like a quadrillion watts it’s
not far off a ballpark of the number of
grains of sand that are estimated to be
on earth and granted a lot of this
energy is lost in the process of
reflection or in the efficiency of
capture through renewable technologies
but even if you account for those losses
then the supply still far outweighs our
primary energy consumption on the left
in this diagram you can see the
different types of renewable resources
that we get on average every year from
the Sun and on the right you can see the
fossil fuels which we still have fairly
so
natural reserves of but these do not
renew every year these are one use only
and the bubbles will shrink each year we
use them but to me this tells us where
we should be focusing our attention
unfortunately the two largest bubbles
there of renewable energy solar and wind
are also already cost competitive today
the cost of these technologies has
fallen to a point where in many
countries they are already the cheapest
forms of electricity generation and that
trend is set to continue solar has
fallen roughly 25 percent in cost for
every doubling of installed capacity
that we’ve seen historically
and it still only makes up a relatively
small percentage of our total generation
so this trend has plenty of room to
continue and it forms an important first
step of a plan where we could actually
live sustainably within our means we
have to accelerate the adoption of
renewable energy in the global market
but it’s not where the story ends
because even if we do accelerate
renewables electricity is not all of our
energy consumption we have to electrify
everything as well heat and transport
are predominantly provided from fossil
fuel generation today if we can move
those energy consumptions onto
electricity as well we know already that
it’s technically feasible to provide all
of that energy from renewables and this
would be self-sustaining and again this
trend is happening we’re seeing it
happen he is moving on to the
electricity grid through electric heat
pumps and transportation through
electric cars in 2025 Bloomberg New
Energy Finance project that the cost of
an electric car will fall below the cost
of conventional combustion engine and
this is just the upfront cost over the
lifetime in an electric vehicle the cost
of production of energy to run it is far
far lower than of a petroleum car so
this change is happening far more
rapidly than maybe many people actually
realize but there is of course one more
critic
a piece that’s holding back this clean
energy revolution it’s kind of an
obvious problem the Sun doesn’t shine at
night and dealing with the intermittency
challenge of renewable energy the
variability of wind and of solar is one
of the major challenges that really
attracted me in the last eight years to
focus my career on to understand these
issues and how we might overcome them
and you can probably tell what I’m
building to that we need to let go of an
outdated notion our whole electricity
infrastructure has been designed on the
premise that energy cannot be stored and
this is fundamentally wrong energy
storage holds the key to transforming
our entire energy system with the
ability to store energy we are able to
completely transform the way we approach
the design of an electricity system like
we have never done before now there are
many different technologies that can
enable this transition the many
different types of storage but one of
the most versatile and widely adopted
today is the humble battery I had a
conversation on this exact I had a
conversation on this exact topic about
six months ago
with with this guy I don’t know if you
recognize him it’s Bruce Dickinson he’s
the lead singer of Iron Maiden and he’s
also a commercial pilot investor and an
energy enthusiast and it was in that
last role that I was honored to be
introduced by him at a conference in
Colombia one young world giving a
delegate keynote speech to about 1,300
people on the topic of sustainability
and it was at this event that I got
talking to Bruce and he was reflecting
one of his concerns or issues with
energy storage he told me a story about
his childhood where he always used to
run downstairs on Christmas Eve
Christmas Day sorry and open up the
presents under the tree and find on the
back of those toys phrase which you’ve
probably all seen before batteries not
included
and it’s this exact phrase that has prey
that has plagued the renewable energy
industry as well having an inability to
store electricity has bought has held
back the clean energy revolution but
this is changing and it’s not actually a
very new idea if you look back into
history the battery was invented first
in 1799 by Alessandro Volta it’s not
even a new idea to use batteries on the
electricity system this is a extract
from a journal publication over 120
years ago Thomas Edison’s electric light
company in New York you may not be able
to see it very well but what this is
doing is showing a battery charging and
discharging they were using energy
storage over 120 years ago to decouple
supply from demand for efficiency
reasons while strong the topic it’s not
actually a new idea to do any of the
other things I was talking about either
the electrification of transport people
maybe supplies to see that back in 1900
120 years ago again almost 40% of all
vehicles in the United States were
electric now I find that amazing but
neither of these technologies scaled at
that time the reason they didn’t scale
was the technology wasn’t ready but
batteries have fallen significantly in
cost and improved in efficiency and
density since those days if you look at
lithium-ion batteries at one chemistry
alone in the last five years they have
fallen over 70% in cost and that trend
is set to continue the more the battery
energy storage costs fall the more jobs
they can economically displace
conventional technologies conventional
solutions providing and I’m going to
talk about just one of those here is one
of the challenges that we typically
associate with renewable integration
this is the average profile produced by
a solar farm on a sunny day so
intuitively you get most of your
electricity in the middle of the
afternoon when the Sun is highest in the
sky now being creatures of habit
typically we consume our electricity in
the evening and this creates a mismatch
the energy from
Solar falls away to zero just as when we
need it at the highest amount and the
way we’ve dealt with that historically
has been to pay not to use free zero
carbon energy we pay to turn off wind we
turn down solar it’s economically
ridiculous to do that and then we pay
again if that wasn’t bad enough to run
dirty fossil fuel generation into the
evening period to fill in the gaps
this is chronically inefficient and what
we should be doing instead and what we
can be doing is storing the excess
energy in the day when it’s available
and shifting it just a few hours and
discharging it into the evening period
and this is not a theoretical idea
my company fluence energy is doing
exactly this with projects around the
world most substantially a 100 megawatt
400 megawatt hour battery in California
which is being built as we speak to do
exactly this help absorb renewable
energy in the day and provide a
controlled dispatch into the evening
period now I realize this if it’s new to
you it’s probably quite an abstract
concept so I’d like you all to close
your eyes just for a second and try to
imagine what one of these systems
actually look like when I’m talking
about a megawatt sized battery that can
serve tens to hundreds of thousands of
homes what’s actually in your mind what
does it look like how much space does it
take if you’ve got something roughly in
your head then open your eyes this is
one such system that we’ve deployed and
I don’t know if it’s surprising to you
or not but it rather looks like a modern
data center it’s a warehouse type
building and you have server racks but
instead of hard drives wrapped into them
you have rows and rows of battery
modules the individual cells that go
into those battery modules they can look
rather like the doublea’s that are
inside this clicker but maybe a
different size they may look like the
ones that you have in your mobile phone
or your laptop they’re not very
dissimilar but you have many hundreds of
thousands of these put together and some
power electronics equipment that links
the battery charging discharge to the
actual jobs that need to be done on the
grip
but the point is fundamentally you could
be living next to something like this
instead of a smokestack instead of a
pika and there’s a lot of reasons why
you should be doing that if we compare
energy storage head-to-head with peaking
generation it wins out in almost every
way the first is in terms of scalability
batteries you can have right down at
domestic level potentially in a
residential dwelling all the way up to
these very large data centers in the
central part of the grid peekers are
very difficult to locate anywhere
because no one wants to live near them
understandably the second point is how
quickly they can be deployed storage can
be deployed in a matter of months it can
take years or even decades to get a pika
with planning permission because of all
the environmental issues because of the
objections because of the various
permitting issues that they face third
batteries are always doing something
useful they respond faster than the
human eye blinks and that means that
they’re able to constantly be helping
balance supply and demand regulating
frequency helping with voltage issues
helping with providing capacity during
key times whereas a pika takes minutes
maybe even 15 minutes before it’s fully
up to speed and providing a useful
service on the grid and for that reason
on a utilization standpoint batteries
are almost 100 percent at the time
making money for you they’re doing
something useful that’s valuable for the
electricity system peakers on average in
the United States spend about 95% of the
time sat there doing nothing and your
money is paying for those through your
electricity bill so this is just one
illustration of how energy storage
delivers a much more effective solution
than traditional ones in the past and
it’s a whole new paradigm that’s going
to transform the way we power our world
and it’s important that you have a
vision of what it is look like if you
don’t have an open mind as to what the
future of the energy system could look
like you’ll always be imagining it as it
is today we need to start thinking about
some of the jobs that need to be done
and not the methods by which we achieve
them if we can do that energy storage
can displace
many of the traditional roles that we’ve
seen other solutions play on the
electricity grid in our past the pika is
just the tip of the iceberg and if we
can do that then we’re on track for that
three-step plan to accelerate renewables
to electrify everything and to transform
the grid with energy storage that is the
blueprint for a self-sustaining pale
blue dot clean reliable and affordable
energy for all forever and yes it will
come batteries included thank you [Applause]
university and searching for meaning in
my life I had a job lined up at a
prestigious international engineering
consultancy and I was due to start there
that summer a few weeks before I began
the job I got a call and it was from my
future employer who told me that because
of the global recession they were having
to reconsider the offers that they had
made to some of their graduates so my
career started with me getting fired
before I even began my first job I think
that’s quite an achievement but actually
it’s probably on reflection one of the
best things that could have happened to
my career and it gave me an opportunity
to think about what I really wanted to
do to maximize my impact in this life
and it was around this time that I
discovered this image I don’t know if
you can see it very well but this is a
photograph that was taken on Valentine’s
Day in the year 1990 by a NASA space
probe called Voyager 1 as the photo that
was taken from about 6 billion
kilometres away and just about in this
photograph you can make out a pale blue
dot that is earth that’s us that’s right
here and what really struck me about
this image is how isolated we are in the
vastness of the universe and how we have
to be self-sustaining it ignited a
passion and sustainability for me to
understand really how we could achieve
that it’s probably a good thing
that this photograph was taken from so
far away because given it was
Valentine’s Day you never know what
might have been caught on the photograph
if it was been from too much closer but
herein lies the problem as I see from
this image if you think about it
everybody who’s ever lived or died in
the entire history of mankind has done
so on that pale blue dot all of our
achievements everything we’ve ever done
has been on that pixel so it’s really
important that we think about how we
manage this going forward the earth has
been around
for about 4.5 billion years Homo sapiens
maybe 200,000 and it’s really only the
last 200 years that humanity has grown
and prospered and it can be traced back
to the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution the invention of the steam
engine and by association our ability to
generate electricity from steam this
made energy more useful and accessible
than ever before we were able to light
our homes warm our homes to travel to
communicate to improve our productivity
in ways we could never do before
but of course these resources come from
fossil fuels the Industrial Revolution
was powered by fossil fuels and coal gas
and oil are by very definition finite
they took millions of years to form and
we’re using them at a rate of decades
now we can debate how long we have left
of them but what we cannot debate is
whether they will run out they are by
very definition unsustainable forms of
energy and so we have to be thinking
differently about this if we are to
create a self-sustaining
pale blue dot and unfortunately we have
within our solar system an energy source
with over 5 billion years worth of fuel
left in it I am of course talking about
the Sun the Sun sends about 174 Pesa
watts of energy to the earth average all
the time now a petawatt is an immense
number it’s 174 with 15 zeros after it
this is like a quadrillion watts it’s
not far off a ballpark of the number of
grains of sand that are estimated to be
on earth and granted a lot of this
energy is lost in the process of
reflection or in the efficiency of
capture through renewable technologies
but even if you account for those losses
then the supply still far outweighs our
primary energy consumption on the left
in this diagram you can see the
different types of renewable resources
that we get on average every year from
the Sun and on the right you can see the
fossil fuels which we still have fairly
so
natural reserves of but these do not
renew every year these are one use only
and the bubbles will shrink each year we
use them but to me this tells us where
we should be focusing our attention
unfortunately the two largest bubbles
there of renewable energy solar and wind
are also already cost competitive today
the cost of these technologies has
fallen to a point where in many
countries they are already the cheapest
forms of electricity generation and that
trend is set to continue solar has
fallen roughly 25 percent in cost for
every doubling of installed capacity
that we’ve seen historically
and it still only makes up a relatively
small percentage of our total generation
so this trend has plenty of room to
continue and it forms an important first
step of a plan where we could actually
live sustainably within our means we
have to accelerate the adoption of
renewable energy in the global market
but it’s not where the story ends
because even if we do accelerate
renewables electricity is not all of our
energy consumption we have to electrify
everything as well heat and transport
are predominantly provided from fossil
fuel generation today if we can move
those energy consumptions onto
electricity as well we know already that
it’s technically feasible to provide all
of that energy from renewables and this
would be self-sustaining and again this
trend is happening we’re seeing it
happen he is moving on to the
electricity grid through electric heat
pumps and transportation through
electric cars in 2025 Bloomberg New
Energy Finance project that the cost of
an electric car will fall below the cost
of conventional combustion engine and
this is just the upfront cost over the
lifetime in an electric vehicle the cost
of production of energy to run it is far
far lower than of a petroleum car so
this change is happening far more
rapidly than maybe many people actually
realize but there is of course one more
critic
a piece that’s holding back this clean
energy revolution it’s kind of an
obvious problem the Sun doesn’t shine at
night and dealing with the intermittency
challenge of renewable energy the
variability of wind and of solar is one
of the major challenges that really
attracted me in the last eight years to
focus my career on to understand these
issues and how we might overcome them
and you can probably tell what I’m
building to that we need to let go of an
outdated notion our whole electricity
infrastructure has been designed on the
premise that energy cannot be stored and
this is fundamentally wrong energy
storage holds the key to transforming
our entire energy system with the
ability to store energy we are able to
completely transform the way we approach
the design of an electricity system like
we have never done before now there are
many different technologies that can
enable this transition the many
different types of storage but one of
the most versatile and widely adopted
today is the humble battery I had a
conversation on this exact I had a
conversation on this exact topic about
six months ago
with with this guy I don’t know if you
recognize him it’s Bruce Dickinson he’s
the lead singer of Iron Maiden and he’s
also a commercial pilot investor and an
energy enthusiast and it was in that
last role that I was honored to be
introduced by him at a conference in
Colombia one young world giving a
delegate keynote speech to about 1,300
people on the topic of sustainability
and it was at this event that I got
talking to Bruce and he was reflecting
one of his concerns or issues with
energy storage he told me a story about
his childhood where he always used to
run downstairs on Christmas Eve
Christmas Day sorry and open up the
presents under the tree and find on the
back of those toys phrase which you’ve
probably all seen before batteries not
included
and it’s this exact phrase that has prey
that has plagued the renewable energy
industry as well having an inability to
store electricity has bought has held
back the clean energy revolution but
this is changing and it’s not actually a
very new idea if you look back into
history the battery was invented first
in 1799 by Alessandro Volta it’s not
even a new idea to use batteries on the
electricity system this is a extract
from a journal publication over 120
years ago Thomas Edison’s electric light
company in New York you may not be able
to see it very well but what this is
doing is showing a battery charging and
discharging they were using energy
storage over 120 years ago to decouple
supply from demand for efficiency
reasons while strong the topic it’s not
actually a new idea to do any of the
other things I was talking about either
the electrification of transport people
maybe supplies to see that back in 1900
120 years ago again almost 40% of all
vehicles in the United States were
electric now I find that amazing but
neither of these technologies scaled at
that time the reason they didn’t scale
was the technology wasn’t ready but
batteries have fallen significantly in
cost and improved in efficiency and
density since those days if you look at
lithium-ion batteries at one chemistry
alone in the last five years they have
fallen over 70% in cost and that trend
is set to continue the more the battery
energy storage costs fall the more jobs
they can economically displace
conventional technologies conventional
solutions providing and I’m going to
talk about just one of those here is one
of the challenges that we typically
associate with renewable integration
this is the average profile produced by
a solar farm on a sunny day so
intuitively you get most of your
electricity in the middle of the
afternoon when the Sun is highest in the
sky now being creatures of habit
typically we consume our electricity in
the evening and this creates a mismatch
the energy from
Solar falls away to zero just as when we
need it at the highest amount and the
way we’ve dealt with that historically
has been to pay not to use free zero
carbon energy we pay to turn off wind we
turn down solar it’s economically
ridiculous to do that and then we pay
again if that wasn’t bad enough to run
dirty fossil fuel generation into the
evening period to fill in the gaps
this is chronically inefficient and what
we should be doing instead and what we
can be doing is storing the excess
energy in the day when it’s available
and shifting it just a few hours and
discharging it into the evening period
and this is not a theoretical idea
my company fluence energy is doing
exactly this with projects around the
world most substantially a 100 megawatt
400 megawatt hour battery in California
which is being built as we speak to do
exactly this help absorb renewable
energy in the day and provide a
controlled dispatch into the evening
period now I realize this if it’s new to
you it’s probably quite an abstract
concept so I’d like you all to close
your eyes just for a second and try to
imagine what one of these systems
actually look like when I’m talking
about a megawatt sized battery that can
serve tens to hundreds of thousands of
homes what’s actually in your mind what
does it look like how much space does it
take if you’ve got something roughly in
your head then open your eyes this is
one such system that we’ve deployed and
I don’t know if it’s surprising to you
or not but it rather looks like a modern
data center it’s a warehouse type
building and you have server racks but
instead of hard drives wrapped into them
you have rows and rows of battery
modules the individual cells that go
into those battery modules they can look
rather like the doublea’s that are
inside this clicker but maybe a
different size they may look like the
ones that you have in your mobile phone
or your laptop they’re not very
dissimilar but you have many hundreds of
thousands of these put together and some
power electronics equipment that links
the battery charging discharge to the
actual jobs that need to be done on the
grip
but the point is fundamentally you could
be living next to something like this
instead of a smokestack instead of a
pika and there’s a lot of reasons why
you should be doing that if we compare
energy storage head-to-head with peaking
generation it wins out in almost every
way the first is in terms of scalability
batteries you can have right down at
domestic level potentially in a
residential dwelling all the way up to
these very large data centers in the
central part of the grid peekers are
very difficult to locate anywhere
because no one wants to live near them
understandably the second point is how
quickly they can be deployed storage can
be deployed in a matter of months it can
take years or even decades to get a pika
with planning permission because of all
the environmental issues because of the
objections because of the various
permitting issues that they face third
batteries are always doing something
useful they respond faster than the
human eye blinks and that means that
they’re able to constantly be helping
balance supply and demand regulating
frequency helping with voltage issues
helping with providing capacity during
key times whereas a pika takes minutes
maybe even 15 minutes before it’s fully
up to speed and providing a useful
service on the grid and for that reason
on a utilization standpoint batteries
are almost 100 percent at the time
making money for you they’re doing
something useful that’s valuable for the
electricity system peakers on average in
the United States spend about 95% of the
time sat there doing nothing and your
money is paying for those through your
electricity bill so this is just one
illustration of how energy storage
delivers a much more effective solution
than traditional ones in the past and
it’s a whole new paradigm that’s going
to transform the way we power our world
and it’s important that you have a
vision of what it is look like if you
don’t have an open mind as to what the
future of the energy system could look
like you’ll always be imagining it as it
is today we need to start thinking about
some of the jobs that need to be done
and not the methods by which we achieve
them if we can do that energy storage
can displace
many of the traditional roles that we’ve
seen other solutions play on the
electricity grid in our past the pika is
just the tip of the iceberg and if we
can do that then we’re on track for that
three-step plan to accelerate renewables
to electrify everything and to transform
the grid with energy storage that is the
blueprint for a self-sustaining pale
blue dot clean reliable and affordable
energy for all forever and yes it will
come batteries included thank you [Applause]
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