How quickly can we decarbonise our lives?

With wildfires blazing through California, it’s now a good time to bring up the discussion of moving to clean & sustainable energy and why it’s starting to make sense both environmentally and financially. It won’t be boring, trust me.

Connected to both solar panels and the grid, it stores excess energy in the battery during the day and powers your home and charges your car at night. Solar used to be expensive and impractical because you couldn’t use it at night. But that’s not the case anymore.

By just investing approximately 10 grand in a Powerwall or any other battery storage system, you can reduce your dependence on the grid and have guilt free clean electricity for the foreseeable future. When you realize that you wouldn’t have to pay massive electricity bills to your energy provider every quarter, it suddenly becomes extremely attractive.

Australia is filled with natural resources, but the one resource we often take for granted is that, it is one of the sunniest continents on earth. And we’re yet to really leveraged that position. The technology surrounding battery & energy storage is getting cheaper every year for us to take the first step towards Renewable Energy and reduce our carbon footprint.

Now that we know we can store excess energy in batteries that is reusable anytime of the day, the next possibility that comes to our mind is — what if we traded the excess energy we didn’t need? Sell that to our neighbors who might need it more? What about selling it back to the grid during peak hours at premium prices? Yes! Now we’re asking the right questions.

The finances of moving into low/zero carbon renewable energy is getting ever more attractive. With a P2P system, we’ll finally be able to break away from our dependence on the Grid. By trading energy, we can quickly pay off the initial investment of the Powerwall, support the grid with clean solar power and potentially make a passive income profit.

There’s quite a few challenges ahead for this to become mainstream but there’s enough disruption in this space for us to take another look.

Imagine a cable running between Australia and Singapore and it’s delivering Clean Energy in the ASEAN region. Wild!

Take what we’ve learnt till now and picture it on a national level. Australia is one of the sunniest and windiest continents on earth. In a Carbon-constrained world, by exporting these sustainable natural resources to other less fortunate parts of the world, we should be winners.

This is a winner take most situation. Given our geographical advantage in the Southern hemisphere and technological advances, we can expand projects like this to the more Winter-y areas of the world in the North and potentially create a monopoly that will take others years to catch up. We can create a new export industry and set our economy up for the future.

Crazy to think this is an industry that didn’t really exist a few years ago. And with an exponentially growing industry comes tons of opportunities to build companies, create jobs and invest capital. It’s hard not to get excited by the prospects of it.

You can’t really have a conversation about Renewable Energy and not bring up Electric Vehicles. Around 2016 forecasting agencies predicated around few hundred thousand units of EV will be sold by 2020. Fast forward 3 years, that number has ballooned up to 2.1 millions by 2019. These numbers are expected to grow exponentially by 2024 to potentially 37 million according to the research by ARK Invest.

Why? Price. The price difference normal vs EV has been too high for the average consumer like us to afford an EV. But it’s becoming more & more affordable as we go. Two reasons why:

1/ Battery prices (largest cost component of EV) are going down in line with Wright’s Law — for every cumulative doubling of units produced, battery cell costs will fall by 18%.

2/ There’s increasing competition in the EV space where you’re seeing traditional automakers are jumping on the bandwagon. Extra competition will be driving down the price.

Sooner rather than later, owning an EV will be a necessity, not a luxury as it is today.

To close off this thread, we’ll take a look at things on a more macro level — looking at the bigger picture. We’ve barely scratch the surface of opportunities and disruption in the article till now. The scale of engineering and innovation needed in order to de-carbonize our everyday life is massive. But a clear trend is emerging, technology is at the heart of it.

If you look closely enough and try to connect the dots, you’ll see all the disruptive technologies & innovation platforms are converging and fast. Cloud computing, Blockchain, Energy storage, Deep Learning aren’t their own silos as they were before, they’re starting to complement each other.

One of the biggest risks to all of this is slow adoption and lack of awareness. Every Australian bushfire season in the coming years is going to get worse, wildfires will make many more cities look apocalyptic like California. Moving to cleaner energy, taking steps to de-carbonize, reducing chemical waste isn’t THE solution but it’s the right starting point. There’s a lot more to do.

For this, we need advocates, thinkers, innovators, activists, investors, risk-takers and most importantly public awareness. The more financially viable renewable energy gets, the easier it becomes to de-carbonize our lives and the sooner we can get towards adopting this way of living.

Watch this space.

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