THE ENERGY INTERNET
Transcript
00:00:10,200
Nicholas Dunlop (Nick): ÔMy son was born in the year
2000, and he can reasonably expect to see most of the 21st century. Now
scientists are telling us that by the 2050s, on the high fossil fuel path weÕre
on, the temperature of the planet will be up 3 degrees; by the 2070s perhaps 4
degrees, by the end of the century 5 or 6 degrees. If we follow the fossil fuel
lobbyists up that curve, my son and all the children who are alive today who
see out this century, are going to see a world no human has ever seen since the
dawn of human evolution. ItÕs a world no human should ever want to see. And I
tell you, they will not thank us for passing that world on to them. We will leave
them a trashed planet.Õ
00:01:04,120
Commentary Anuradha Vittachi V/O (V/O AV): ÔNick
Dunlop is a man on a mission to change the game on global warming.Õ
00:01:10,360
Nick: ÔWhat we want to arrive at is that when people
think about the climate problem, they donÕt think, ÒOh my God, this is just too
impossible. I donÕt know what to do, so IÕll think about something else.Ó They
think: ÒBuild an energy internet.ÓÕ
00:01:29,100
Prof Zhang: ÔBasically we have this sort of magic
element to bring the whole worldÕs energy supplies in together.Õ
00:01:36,540
Damir: ÔAnd the same way, when we built the internet,
the internet, it was the same thing.Õ
00:01:41,080
Nick: ÔA global solar consortium, a global energy
internet - these are just very nice ideas we can discuss in meetings like this.
It needs a push from the top.Õ
00:01:51,080
Titles: ÔTHE ENERGY INTERNET
Anuradha Vittachi meets Nicholas DunlopÕ
00:02:05,280
V/O AV: ÔNick
Dunlop works as a new kind of diplomat Ð a diplomat not for a single country
but for the planet as a whole. HeÕs passionate in the cause of climate justice
for all.Õ
00:02:20,410
Nick: ÔIf we put the planetÕs temperature up 4 degrees,
scientists tell us that grain production will plummet 30 or 40% in the tropics.
You know what that means. It means that there will be no food on international
markets, even if your country could afford it. EverybodyÕs going to be doing
whatÕs already happened in periods of extreme weather, slamming the door shut to
exports if they happen to be growing enough food, and in country after country,
we are going to see famine. Now why are we going to do that to the three
billion people who live on 3 dollars a day or less? Why do we want to do this?
I donÕt want to. Do you want to? Nobody wants to! The only reason weÕre doing
it is a combination of greed and vested interests - and, frankly, lack of
leadership by governments.Õ
00:03:13,820
V/O AV:
ÔHere in the Philippines, there is stark evidence of the effects that climate
change is already having Ð especially on the lives of the poorest families.Õ
00:03:29,120
Lydinyda Nacpil: ÔThe first struggle is to really
survive, to put food on the table. Climate change was no longer simply an
environmental issue, it is very much an issue of survival for many of the
communities in the Philippines. Crops being destroyed in the rural areas. In
the cities, whole communities just being destroyed because their houses are
swept away. People begin to think, ÒOh, thatÕs the way the world has always
been, and will always be, and we canÕt really do anything. So thatÕs one of the
first we need to address. That there is something we can do, and things can
change, and will change.Õ
00:04:07,620
V/O AV: ÔTo power this change out of poverty, poor people need easy access to energy
Ð and it must be clean energy - avoiding the pollution from dirty fossil fuels like
coal, oil and gas, which cause climate change and its devastating effects.
But where is this clean energy to come from?Õ
00:04:28,340
Nick: ÔWe have a nuclear power station safely situated
93 million miles from the earth, which is a good distance, that will supply our
needs forever.Õ
00:04:40,420
V/O AV:
ÔIn fact the sun offers us more energy in one hour than we use in an entire
year. But some people say renewable energy is only cheap
because it is subsidised - forgetting the far greater subsidies to the fossil
fuel industry.Õ
00:04:57,080
Nick: ÔOur governments are spending, according to such
a conservative body as the International Monetary Fund, roughly 2 trillion
dollars a year of our taxpayersÕ money to make fossil fuels look artificially
cheap.Õ
00:05:17,280
V/O AV:
ÔThe price of solar energy has fallen dramatically -
to less than half the price of coal. Paddy Padmanathan, the biggest renewable
energy developer in the world, thinks countries keeping their existing coal-fired
power stations going are simply wasting money when solar energy is so cheap.Õ
00:05:36,800
Paddy Padmanathan: ÔÔPretty much anywhere, itÕs less
than 3 cents now. We can deploy wind energy at about the same levels. And there
is now the ability to capture the heat of the sun and store it in molten salt
and deploy it at night. So we are able to do despatchable solar energy, day and
night. And these are not theoretical exercises, these are contracts we are
delivering. I think that the technology that has now brought us to this energy
transition and the Green Energy revolution, what is it promising us? It is
promising us reliable, low cost energy, in abundance, both centrally generated
and distributed, which allows us to transform economies and ultimately it is also
allowing us to save lives! People who are dying because of the pollution, because
of the mining coal dust - and of course the climate change, which will have an
unimaginable impact.Õ
00:06:39,850
V/O AV:
ÔSo renewable energy seems
to offer the way out. It's abundant, itÕs cheap, and it's totally pollution-free.
But some people still see a problem. The sun doesnÕt always shine, the wind doesnÕt always blow. So is this intermittency
its fatal flaw?Õ
00:06:59,220
Nick: ÔI think the problem is that most people are
thinking too small scale. Most people are thinking about renewables just within
their nation state. We have to think in continental terms. We have to plug
everyone into the solar power and often good wind power that you find in
deserts. Just imagine that you drew a box in the desert 150 kilometres by 150
kilometres and fill that box with solar power stations, you could produce all
the electricity that Europe produces today from all its sources, from all its
power stations. From a technical point of view, itÕs perfectly easy to power
the world from renewable energy. What you do is you build long distance
transmission lines, using high voltage direct current lines, that can transmit
power over thousands of kilometres with very little loss, to link us all to the
areas where renewable energy is most abundant.Ô
00:07:55,820
V/O AV:
ÔSo intermittency wouldnÕt be a problem if we could get our energy from wherever
the sun is shining, or the wind is blowing Ð places far away. But is
this just a futuristic idea or something thatÕs possible now? At Birmingham UniversityÕs Energy Institute, Prof Xiao-Ping Zhang explains
how far long distance lines can reach these days.Õ
00:08:22,420
Prof Zhang: ÔFor the distance, weÕre talking about up
to 6,000 kilometres. Ô
00:08:29,680
V/O AV ÔBut the electricity flow needs to be controlled precisely. How can
we switch it, from wherever itÕs most abundant and therefore cheapest, to
wherever itÕs most neededÉ at any given moment of the day or night - and with
split-second precision? The answer is Òsmart gridsÓ. And in Professor ZhangÕs
lab, they are developing smart grids that can control these energy flows very
precisely. These are already in use, for example between France and Britain, so
when France has more electricity than it needs, the excess can be switched
seamlessly to Britain Ð or vice versa.Õ
00:09:10,296
Prof Zhang: ÔWe can precisely control the power flow.
We can see the power flow here, between the British system and the French
system. We can share it. We can share it precisely.Õ
00:09:25,620
V/O AV:
ÔSo if you combine clean energy with long distance power lines and smart grids,
you get the Energy Internet. And if this vision is realized, it will be able to
supply electricity, day or night, across Asia and Africa and the Middle East,
all the way into Europe, the Americas and the Antipodes.Õ
00:09:48,000
Nick: ÔAnd the
electricity grid needs to become more like another grid we all take for granted
now, and thatÕs the Information Internet. In the Information Internet, anybody
from the largest provider of information, Google or Amazon, to the smallest
individual blogger can feed in information to the global network; anybody can
take out information from the global network, wherever they are. And it needs
to be the same that anybody can feed in from their rooftop solar panels or from
a giant desert solar power station, and anybody can access the renewable energy
thatÕs being fed in, in the same way. And the Information Internet crosses
borders. ItÕs a global creation that we now all use Ð and it has to be the same
with energy. We have to think beyond the nation state, share our clean energy resources
in order for everyone to have reliable supply of unlimited, cheap, clean
energy. Ô
00:10:53,940
V/O AV:
ÔOne of the leading scientists working on energy
futures is Professor Catherine Mitchell. WhatÕs her assessment of this idea of
globally interconnections?Õ
00:11:05,040
Prof Mitchell: ÔFor a flexible, secure energy future,
which I see as a cost-effective one, and as a sustainable one, then
interconnection is just an absolutely central part of that, and it is clear
already that the technology and the cost of that interconnection is there, and
we should be able to move over to a decarbonised energy system.Õ
00:11:30,560
V/O AV:
ÔSo the Energy Internet does seem a key to the future, now that the main
obstacles to clean green energy have been exploded as myths Ð if intermittency isnÕt a problem, if cost isnÕt an issue, nor
subsidies, then what is the problem with switching to renewables?Õ
00:11:50,220
Prof Mitchell: ÔWhat is stopping that is those old companies,
usually fossil fuel-based - sometimes they have a bit of nuclear in there, but theyÕre
fundamentally fossil fuel-based - they are without doubt trying to slow down
that change in order that they maintain their market share for as long as
possible.Õ
00:12:10,980
Nick: ÔIt simply makes me very angry, to think that
just to protect the profits of some large fossil fuel corporations and please
some government leaders who are raking in the cash from the fossil fuel
industry, or just because other government leaders canÕt be bothered
confronting vested interests to change the energy system, we have to impose
utter disaster on nation after nation Ð starting with the poorest nations. The
people who are the first victims of climate change are the poorest because they
have no resources to fall back on. So Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations of
the world in which we work, is facing utter annihilation from the rising seas,
combined with floods coming down from the mountains as the ice melts. Why do we
have to cause famine, disaster, super-storms, floods, and have whole nations
disappear? There is absolutely no need for it. We are just doing it to please
certain vested interests.Õ
00:13:16,020
V/O AV: ÔSo who will counter these powerful interests?
Be a champion for renewable energies? Back
in 2008, MPs in the UK did take a decisive step, passing the worldÕs first Climate Act - virtually unanimously.Õ
00:13:31,820
Simon Maxwell: ÔAnd why was that? It wasnÕt because
they all got up on the morning of the vote and realised this was the right
thing to vote for. It was because there had been a lot of work over a long
period, explaining, persuading, raising the understanding of the issue,
building alliances.Õ
00:13:49,180
V/O AV: ÔSo Nick Dunlop had a striking idea. What if he could get together a group
of governments from the global south to become the new champions of renewable
energy? Its member countries could help each other fully understand the
planetary crisis, and this Climate Parliament could help implement its
breakthrough cure: building the Energy Internet.Õ
00:14:12,400
Nick: ÔWe need a group of governments to say: ÒThis
can be done, hereÕs how, and weÕre going to get on with it.Ó And that will
change the game. Particularly if we have some pretty serious governments, like
China.Õ
00:14:31,860
Xi Jinping translator: ÔChina will propose discussion
on establishing a global energy internet to facilitate efforts to meet the
global power demand with clean and green alternatives.Õ
00:14:44,740
Hussein Shah, MP from Pakistan: ÔBefore attending, I
had no idea what was going on, to be honest, because this is not my field. We
will definitely go back and put a calling attention notice that there should be
a certain amount of percentage in the budget for renewable energy.Õ
00:15:00,040
Keith Taylor, MEP: ÔIÕm Keith Taylor, IÕm a Green
Party MEP for the south of England. And this is fantastic. This Climate
ParliamentÉ ItÕs my first time here, and IÕm really impressed with the
information and the determination. Õ
00:15:14,460
Beatrice Shellukindo, MP from Tanzania: Ô So we are
going to do it, and we are going to start in Tanzania. As a group, after
lobbying the presidents, weÕre going to lobby other members of parliament.Õ
00:15:21,960
Barry Gardiner, MP from UK: ÔClimate Parliament has a
very specific aim, and it is to work with parliamentarians to make sure that there
are enough experts in each country who understand these issues and who are then
galvanised into taking action on them.Õ
00:15:42,580
V/O AV:
ÔThe UN too had been trying to galvanise the worldÕs governments to tackle climate
change Ð for 22 years by the time of the Paris Climate Summit. So why, with all
the UNÕs power and prestige, had it still not succeeded? Because the same
vested interests were constantly there, whispering in the politiciansÕ ears, and
drowning out the cries for climate justice from the campaigners, outside.Õ
V/O AV:
Ô00:16:16,960
ÔAnd
the text of the Paris Agreement kept being watered down till it became much too
feeble to stop the planetÕs life-sustaining boundaries are being crossed.Õ
00:16:28,680
Campaigner:
ÔThe red lines are the limits for a livable planet. We all have our red lines
and they're being crossed by the text. We can't allow them to sign a death
sentence for the planet and people.Õ
00:16:40,400
V/O AV:
ÔThe more pressure politicians feel from voters, the braver they will dare to be.
And they will need to be brave to launch an energy revolution: one that moves
us away from fossil fuels and the catastrophes they bring, to a new and hopeful
future for life on Earth. The UN canÕt be that bold because it is hobbled by
yet another impediment: it must get agreement from every country in the world - 100% consensus - before it can make a
decisive move. And so that it wouldnÕt get vetoed by the countries wanting
Ôbusiness as usualÕ, the Paris Agreement had to be fatally unambitious.Õ
00:17:25,740
Nick: ÔYou've got to remember that it's a low common denominator
process becase youÕre reaching consensus among almost 200 governments, many of
which are oil companies in effect dressed up as governments. I think of the US
Congress, many of whose members are basically in the pocket of the US coal and
oil industries.Ô
00:17:45,440
V/O AV:
ÔUnlike the UN, the Climate ParliamentÕs great
advantage was it didnÕt have to persuade 200 countries before it could make a move.
It could make a transformative difference to the world simply by encouraging a small
group of handpicked countries to commit to one critical action: building the
Energy internet. One of
these key countries was Costa Rica Ð and in Paris, there was a chance to pitch the
idea to its Energy Minister in person.Õ
00:18:14,980
Nick: ÔThis is what they're proposing which is a
global Energy Internet to trade renewable energy across borders Ð and for Costa
Rica this works on two levels. One is that Costa Rica, as a major renewable
energy leader, can benefit from the interconnections and can often be an
exporter, but also can have more energy security, because, when itÕs cloudy or
not windy, you can be importing.Õ
00:18:39,120
Costa Rica Energy Minister: ÔI like the idea.Õ
00:18:41,040
Nick: ÔWe found a kindred spirit in the MinisterÉ and
um, he said yes.Õ
00:18:49,960
V/O AV:
ÔAnother country key to building the Energy Internet is India: now rapidly developing
a massive, green-energy network, right across the country - and beyond. They
know that the energy revolution must happen now, not later. ÔLaterÕ is
officially over Ð as IndiaÕs Energy Minister made clear, in his response to the
Climate Parliament initiative.
00:19:16,420
Indian Minister: ÔOur government is very clear in its
mind about our obligation to the coming generations. About our need to leave
behind a greener planet for our great-grandchildren. ThatÕs what this
revolution is about. And thatÕs why, yesterday, when Nicholas met me, I said
that we are so happy to partner with you. Because you are engaged in a cause
which is important for the whole planet. So the time is now. And thatÕs why I
believe, Nicholas, that your initiative is important - and urgent.Õ
00:19:48,980
V/O AV:
ÔSo is it game over now for dirty energy? After decades of cavalier ecocide, could
fossil fuels be dethroned at last by the Energy Internet? In the unlikely
setting of Wilton Park, the country
seat of the UKÕs Foreign Office, Climate Parliamentarians come together ready to
connect the pieces and eradicate the root cause of the climate emergency.Õ
00:20:17,960
Nick: ÔClimate change is a really easy problem to
solve - that's what's so irritating about it. We have the technology we need, right
now, to fix this problem. And we have no shortage of renewable energy resources.
We could power ten world economies on solar power alone. We could power ten economies
on wind power. And when you add in hydro and geo-thermal and so on, we have an
abundance of resources Ð but: and this comes to the purpose of this meeting
that brings us here today. We can only harness that massive potential if we
have enough long distance transmission lines that connect all the major
consumption centres, the cities and the factories, with the best locations for
renewable energy. And now we've finally got the process going at this meeting. And
we have to work out ways to do this really, really fast.Õ
00:21:17,08
Bo from GEIDCO: ÔFrom Sichuan to Shanghai, which is
actually more than 2,000 kilometres longÉÕ
00:21:22,320
Mika from Japan: ÔSo our plan is to connect Kyushu
with the Busan, and also Busan to connect to Matsue. And then China-Korea is
like this one, that we are planning.Õ
00:21:36,580
Hussain from Pakistan: ÔAnd we're talking of
connectivity from this area, the Gulf area into Pakistan. Then going up north from Gwadar to Gilgit to Xinjiang Province - 2,500
kilometres. I think that could be doable in the next 5-7 years.Õ
00:21:53,980
Bo from GEIDCO: ÔAnd then Central Asia countries, and
then, where's Munich, Munich, Munich? Somewhere like this.Õ
00:22:02,760
V/O AV:
ÔBut arenÕt many of these countries threatening war with one another? IsnÕt it far too risky to be sharing your
energy supplies with your enemy? Surprisingly, some of the participants feel
that energy-sharing is an opportunity for creating peace. ItÕs one of the
upsides of the initiativeÕs quiet diplomacy. Beneath
the sabre-rattling that attracts news headlines, parliamentarians in these hot-spot
countries are collaborating discreetly to solve their national energy and climate crises by sharing clean,
green energy.Õ
00:22:41,680
Barry Gardiner: ÔThere is real simplicity in this when
you boil it down. Politics is simply about how we live together. Climate change,
at its core, is a question of justice. And if we donÕt live together fairly,
justly, equitably, then of course we will never live in peace.Õ
00:23:03,820
Nick: ÔToday we share our knowledge through the
internet. And now we need to share our fantastic renewable energy resources
through the global energy internet. So if you pull back and look at the big
global picture - in amongst all the gloom and doom and all the forces arrayed
against us, the forces of the old energy system, the oil companies and the coal
companies, and Donald Trump and all his ilk - weÕve been waiting for world
leadership on the issue of climate change, for someone to say we need to speed
this whole process up and make the energy transition at warp speed. And you
know what, now we have a world leader.Õ
00:23:50,540
Greta Thunberg: ÔSome say we are fighting for our
future. But we are not fighting for our
future. We are fighting for everyoneÕs future. And we will not stop until we
are done.Õ
00:24:06,060
Nick: ÔWow. This is what weÕve been waiting for. And
if we can keep building that public pressure - especially from the young, who
have the most at stake here because they are expecting to see out this century Ð
then, you know, at some point, the combination of climate impacts, cheap
renewable energy, and angry young people, might just give our government
leaders the kick up the pants they need to really get going on a serious effort
to prevent dangerous climate change.Õ
00:24:38,900
Credits:
THE ENERGY INTERNET
With thanks to:
The Climate Parliament
The United Nations
UNFCCC
GEIDCO
Smart Grid Denmark
Philippines Children Action
Massachusetts State Police
Kongkon Karmaker
Daniel Dunlop
Wilton Park
Producer
Anuradha Vittachi
Video Production
Peter Armstrong
Empathy Media
MMXIX