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Oxford net zero climate in the balance. I'm Steve Smith, the executive director of the Oxford Net Zero Initiative.

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And each week, I get to talk to leading thinkers here at Oxford about what it will take to reach net zero emissions of greenhouse gases.

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Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Nick Air to discuss zero carbon energy specifically.

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Now, many of you will probably know Nick already.

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For those of you who don't, he's professor of energy and climate policy in the Environmental Change Institute,

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as well as being co-director of the Programme on Integrating Renewable Energy at the Oxford Martin School here.

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He's been at the forefront really of research from energy systems for the last couple of decades,

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really throughout the course of carbon and climate emerging as issues here in the UK for the energy system.

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So he was director of strategy for the Energy Savings Trust, director of the UK Energy Research Centre UK and is now currently director of Credits,

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which is a national centre for research into energy demand solutions.

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So next, going to give us a big picture view to that the energy system, but it's worth knowing.

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He's also a climate change science adviser to Oxford City Council,

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so has a real understanding of how these issues look right down at the local level, where the rubber often hits the road as well.

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In case you want to ask him about that and we do want your questions today, so you can ask throughout the talk,

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and I'll be picking out your questions as we go along and asking Nic throughout the talk, hopefully, and also at the end.

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So to ask a question, you must be logged in on crowd cost rather than watching on YouTube if you've logged into crowd customer watching there.

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Hopefully, you'll see an ask a question button at the bottom right of the screen, and that will open a window in which you can write.

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And also importantly, you can type the questions that you'd like to so you can see which ones are popular.

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And we are recording this event, and it will be available to watch on YouTube afterwards via the Oxford Martin School channel,

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along with all the other conversation in this Oxford net zero series. So without further ado, I'm going to pass over to Nick Nick over to you.

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Thanks, Dave. How people can see that slide on full screen now.

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So I want to cover in the next hour of these five questions.

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Why do we want to move to zero carbon energy? What does that imply for energy systems and what we get from energy systems and then

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address two sub questions within how we get to a zero carbon energy supply system?

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And how do we use less energy and use it more efficiently because those turned out to be two very important questions.

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And then end by looking at what are the key challenges really much, very much from the perspective of an energy research on climate researcher.

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So starting with July zero carbon energy,

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and I'm going to be very quick here because I suspect most of the people listening

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know very well what we need to get to something close to zero carbon energy.

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There are talks in the series which will explain that a lot better than I can do.

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But this is my quick and simplistic view of the matter based on work undertaken by Irakli and of us,

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but lots of similar diagrams and well respected academic papers.

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What are the implications of the Paris Agreement? Well, basically there are two key commitments in the Paris Paris Agreement.

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One is to get to to constrain global average temperature rise to two degrees or 1.5 degrees.

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That implies rapid decarbonisation starting now.

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The green pathways on this diagram show you less than two degrees, the blue 1.5 degrees.

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In either case, we need rapid decarbonisation starting now, and the net zero commitment,

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which this series is principally about, means that we need to reach net zero emissions.

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Now, when we reach net zero emissions is a different question,

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but that the combination of rapid decarbonisation and reaching net zero emissions

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means that we need to reach net zero emissions by mid-century or not long after.

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What does that mean? What's the relationship of this to energy?

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Oh, this is a diagram taken from the last full IPCC report looking at where great

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global greenhouse gas emissions come from rising in the period 1970 to 2010.

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Not every year, but pretty consistent rise over the period.

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Then you can see that the the biggest contribution by far is CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning with CO2 from land use,

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the red ball another substantial section and then the other greenhouse gases, methane, antero and gases.

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I'm not going to say anything about those of the greenhouse gases today, nor am I going to look at CO2 from land use,

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which was very well covered in the in the last talk in this series and one focussing on fossil fuel emissions.

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And the implication of net zero, I think, is that we need to get pretty close to zero in CO2 emissions.

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You can argue that we might be able to do some negative emissions,

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either within the land use sector or through the use of geoengineering or other negative emotions technologies.

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But realistically, everybody thinks that we also have to get back to see that yellow locked down to close to zero five by 2050 or not long after.

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I think the working assumption for those of us who work in energy has to be

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that we need something approximating net zero carbon energy by mid-century.

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Yeah. And Nick just is probably worth as being clear at the start what we mean by energy and energy systems as well,

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because I know there can be some confusion on this point contact, whether it's whether we're talking about electricity or something broader than that.

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And maybe on top of that, you could also give us a flavour. We're talking about net zero by 2050.

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What does that really mean in terms of time scales? So how does that compare to, you know, a power plant or critical parts of the energy system?

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That's the first question is, yeah, it's an important one state. It's people commonly interchange energy and electricity, which is very unhelpful.

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So by energy, I mean, anything that uses an external energy source that could be fossil fuels,

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it can be nuclear, it can be renewables, but it has to provide energy service.

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So the sorts of things that we get from energy are warmer buildings, the ability to move around, the ability to to make things.

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So the energy system is the whole system that provides for those.

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And so it's a pretty broad concept and certainly broader than electricity because we need to arrange it.

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And thus in this context, it's the energy system. That's important because we can eliminate carbon emissions from electricity and we need to do that.

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But that's not sufficient.

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We need to eliminate it from all the other things that we use energy for, such as heating buildings and transport timescales of time scales.

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So the critical challenge and the reason that most people think there's anything quicker than 2050

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is really very challenging is because part of the infrastructure are around for four decades.

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So typical car would last for 10 years to go power station 20 or 30 years to go,

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building perhaps a hundred years so longer than the timescales that we're talking about.

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So we are talking about really very radical changes to the infrastructure on something like the lifetime of those infrastructure systems.

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Let me move on, then, to what zero-carbon implies for energy systems and the first but critically

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important point is that global energy systems are dominated by fossil fuels.

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You can see there from the International Energy Agency.

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The global energy supply looks like dominated by oil.

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The big orange section at the bottom. Natural gas and coal.

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The blue sections at the top. Smaller contributions from biofuels and waste that that stuff.

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The size of that often surprises people. But please don't run away with the idea that that's modern, clean biofuel plants.

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Most of that is biofuels being collected by very cool people, usually very poor women in the global south and used for cooking and heating.

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So probably not something that most people would say is sustainable for desirable.

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There are smaller contributions from nuclear there and grain and hydropower and blue, which have been around for a long time.

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And those of you with good eyesight can see a small yellow section in the middle.

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That's new renewable energy sources, largely wind and solar.

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So I'm going to be talking quite a lot about those today,

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but I think it's really important to understand at the outset that those are contribute a very small share of global energy supplies.

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At the moment. We're to rely on them a lot more. It is a big change.

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The second point I want to make is that the energy system is hugely important,

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affordable and reliable, and modern energy services are basic human needs.

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That doesn't mean everybody has them. We still have three quarters of a billion people on Earth with no access to electricity.

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And over two and a half billion without access to clean fuels for cooking and sustainable go.

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Sustainable Development Goal seven is aiming to get those numbers down to zero by 2030,

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which is a really important but challenging ambition in in high income societies.

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All our basic infrastructure or public services are critically dependent on reliable energy supplies without energy.

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We would oh, we couldn't run off grid system or water system, our health system or education system.

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So energy is critically important. I think what that means is that some simplistic slogans like stop digging up fossil fuels.

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Well, yeah, that's why we need to end up, but it's not a credible strategy on its own.

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Indeed, I would say, as the outcome of a systemic change in the way that the energy system works,

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the way that we provide energy services, rather than the starting point for, for, for, for analysis.

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So what does the energy transition need to look like?

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Well, clearly there's there's huge amounts of research going on into that.

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I'm going to try and summarise it in one diagram of the the numbers in these charts come from an influential paper by a group.

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I know this from from 2018, but there are some similar analyses by other people.

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And the key messages are we need to do two things we need to reduce energy demand and we need

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to shift demand from fossil fuels to renewable energy so you can see the left hand job.

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They're projecting that global energy demand needs to fall by something like 40 percent more than that in the global north,

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more like 50 percent in the global north to allow for growth and service demands in the poorer countries in the world and on the right hand side,

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the share of primary energy supply. This is a useful chart.

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It goes right. The way back to nineteen hundred allows you to see the growth of this burning

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coal and then oil and then gas during periods during the industrial revolution.

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And you can see the change in supply mix that's needed with growth in wind and solar hugely rapidly over the next few decades.

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So those transitions happening happening much faster than the transition to oil and the growth in oil and post-Second World War and energy systems.

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That's why this is a challenging process and those are the global numbers.

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If you look at UK numbers from the Committee on Climate Change, they look pretty similar.

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They look like a 50 percent reduction in UK energy demand by 2050 and at least

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six fold growth in supply of renewable energy from the numbers that we have now.

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And one key point that actually links the reduction in demand in the shift to renewable energy is its electrification.

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Both of these points in the direction of increased electrification, a bigger role for electricity in the overall energy system.

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That's because the key renewables, wind and solar largely produce electricity, so we expect to see the supply side shift in that direction.

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But also the energy efficiency improvements implied on the left hand side require fuels that can be used more efficiently in electricity in general,

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can be used much more efficiently than fossil fuels can directly.

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So these two changes reducing energy demand and shifting renewable energy are all linked in that way.

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So I want to go on now to talk a bit more about about each of those, and we'll start with the shift to renewable energy.

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So how do we get a zero carbon energy supply? There are three broad options.

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Renewable energy, fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage and nuclear power.

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And if I've been giving this talk even 10 years ago, I think would have been a more even emphasis on those.

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I think now what has become clear is that renewable energy sources are likely to be the dominant contributor to that.

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I mentioned the importance of electricity. If we look at electricity systems this, this looks a bit similar to the chart I showed earlier,

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but this is about just electricity globally as opposed to the total energy system.

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Again, you see coal in blue and natural gas in green, playing a very large role.

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At the moment, oil dark blue plays a much smaller role in electricity production.

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It's used primarily in transport.

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And you see bigger relative roles for four four four four nuclear and hydro as the state of fuel used largely for electricity production.

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And on this chart, the good news is that you can see wind and solar.

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They're actually a big enough share to get a label.

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So wind and blue, solar and purple, the bottom starting from the very, very low shares again again, but now rising quite quickly.

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So a lot more cause for optimism when you look at this diagram.

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So that can renewables.

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These four hydro historically has been a very important part of electricity systems almost since their inception in the late 19th century,

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biomass is potentially important and can be stored more easily than many renewables,

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but raises questions about the impact of production with the terrestrial biosphere on the food versus fuel debate.

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I think anybody who heard the talk last week bye bye,

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Natalie and Cecile will will will have realised if they didn't know before that that the idea that we can grow

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very large amounts of biomass just to produce carbon that's good for the environment is overly simplistic.

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But nature based solutions that point towards monoculture of biomass plantations, which are generally used for producing bioenergy.

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So we're left with wind and solar. The good news about both of those is they have the resource base is huge for wind.

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It's very large lake that remains untapped. It's variable across the world.

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In the U.K., we have particularly good wind resource that could easily supply all of our energy up to this time of year.

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We have not such a good solar resource, but it's still not bad.

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What we've seen in recent years is dramatic cost reduction in the price of solar, which making it making it a much cheaper resource.

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This This slide shows the scale of what's happened to solar costs in the last 35 years, starting in 1976.

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It's and if you look carefully, it's worth noting that the y axis is a logarithmic scale, because that's the only way you can sensibly show this.

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There's been a 200 fold reduction in the costs of solar modules in that period.

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So in 1976, the modules for a typical two kilowatt household system would have cost you something like £100000 thousand hundred thousand dollars.

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Now they cost you something like five hundred dollars. So they've gone from being a technology that essentially would be used in spacecraft

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to one that is accessible and affordable to many people for electricity generation.

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But and indeed, if you look at the range of renewable technologies,

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this is a somewhat more complex charge taken from the International Renewable Energy Agency,

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showing all the major electricity generating renewable options and the change that that's been over the decade from 2010 to 2019.

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And you can see that biomass, geothermal and hydro absorbing cost effective for quite a long time, but the resources are limited.

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But solar and wind have become economic, not only becoming amongst the cheapest of the low carbon options,

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but increasingly the cheapest of all electricity generating options and certainly in many countries close to the equator.

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Solar is now the most economical way to generate electricity,

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which means we can do carbon emissions reduction at a negative cost, of course, which is a hugely important change.

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So a couple of questions, actually. That's right, because we've got plenty coming in.

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Maybe I'll just pick out a couple that are sort of unlinked points to what you've just covered.

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And Rosalind asks, have we had enough energy without fossil fuels and nuclear?

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So I think you touched on the fact that when wind and solar have a lot of potential,

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so are you confident that issues of potential are not a problem here to meet demand?

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And also, we've got a question from Dr. Mark Robinson saying, Do you have any views on small scale or mini nuclear options?

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I think you focus quite a lot on solar and wind and and the cost reductions there.

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But do you see a role for innovative new nuclear? Yeah, OK.

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So if I take each of those, the short answer is there is the solar resource in the world is huge, even in this country.

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We could supply all our energy from solar. In principle what we would want to supply or energy from solar,

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but we could do it using a very small fraction of the land area of the UK now have been claims in the past that isn't the case,

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but they simply are not correct. Is it that the solar resource that hits the Earth's surface is thousands of times

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more than the energy that we need when it's different in different countries?

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But if you're in the central plains of the US or western China, as well as, say,

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the Atlantic Seaboard or the Pacific Seaboard in other countries, then the wind resource is also very large.

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It's not a size of resource problem the nuclear.

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Despite being a nuclear physicist on a less nuclear bomb, some other issues.

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It's very clear that existing nuclear technologies are not going to be cost effective with wind,

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and so if you look at the costs of nuclear, they've not been coming down.

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If anything, that's been going up as the safety precautions have increased and they are on the to or eight times as expensive as renewables.

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There are claims that smaller new designs of nuclear could change that,

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but I think it's almost inconceivable that they will do so on the time scales needed to address climate change by 2050,

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because things essentially are designed that have not yet been built.

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So to go from not built to making a major contribution to supply, that's challenging even for wind and solar.

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But I don't see many nuclear contributing very much to that.

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And I think so, some of the interesting questions moved beyond the questions of our potential

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towards how you integrate these together in a system which I think you'll come to,

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won't you? But I may just slip in one more question while we're on it.

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Good question from Holly Devitt asking about other countries, particularly large countries in sub-Saharan Africa,

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because you touched on the fact that energy access is really a human right.

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And clearly, they're going to be increases in demand there.

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And you talked about the falling costs of some of these technologies, but Holly asks, do you think countries like Nigeria and Kenya,

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for instance, can avoid carbon lock in, given they're not developing as quickly as China or India, she says.

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And do you see these relatively big economies as a threat in the sense that they will be big emitters in the future?

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I think if those economies grow to be big emitters, then we absolutely will not achieve.

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The targets that have been set out in Paris is perhaps it's imperative.

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To to us all, not only that, we escaped our own carbon lock him,

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but that would prevent carbon locking and setting in those countries where us as the question size demand is, is going to grow and ought to grow.

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Is it Paul? It is, I mean that the costs of solar generation in those countries are now lower importing coal or gas,

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which normally would be imported in in in East Africa, or at least not not not in West Africa.

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There is no reason other than vested interests for countries that don't have strong

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electricity systems at the moment to to invest in anything other than renewable technology,

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given that those are the cheapest options. It's a much more stark answer than it used to be,

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and I think it probably people probably haven't fully digested the sort of scale and changes and costs that we've seen in the last decade.

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And, of course, Nick, my vested interest point was thrown in there, but I mean,

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I think it is it is an important point that a lot of the inertia is due to the fact that for certain interest groups next to the fossil fuel industry,

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but also the things that make their power generating flood levels blockchains.

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This is this is a big sell. Of course it is that we can't deny the.

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As you say, the situation has changed really quite recently,

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and perhaps then some companies and policymakers still have to catch up with the new reality and say To keep bringing in your questions,

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I'll let you get on with the next section of your talking and I'll fire a few more at you.

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Yeah. So I mean, I think.

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It's it's important not to run away with the idea that this becomes easy because all these technology,

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even if they are relatively cheap, are capital intensive.

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And so the the capital investment required, which I'm not going to go into in any detail, is still large.

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So it is important that we use less energy and use it more efficiently.

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And the good news is that we've been doing that for quite a long time.

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This is another challenge from last IPCC report,

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and it simply looks at the full contribution to the overall carbon emission, the so-called clear identity.

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For those of you know what the population GDP per capita energy intensity of GDP and carbon intensity of energy.

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And in principle, most but all of those two get together gives you carbon emissions.

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So this chart shows the change in each decade due to each of those factors of the globe.

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And as you would expect, population increase and GDP per capita growing and they tend level to increase emissions.

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Carbon intensity of energy changed change depress us.

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That which is the red ball has been changing, was depressingly slow today,

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actually in these four decades and even in the wrong direction and in the decade from 2001 to 2010.

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But that change being because of the rapid industrialisation based around coal and some countries in that decade.

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And what that means is to the extent that we've addressed climate mitigation and done anything to reduce carbon emissions.

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It's been through improved energy intensity of GDP, partly due to changes in structure of the economy,

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but largely due to technological improvements in energy efficiency.

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So we have done something in this area and we are we are doing something.

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This is just to illustrate that in a bit more detail based on UK experience.

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So this is a preview of some data from a forthcoming plan for Bobby and Liz and myself.

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And it's looking at how the UK has reduced its emissions over the last 30 years.

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We did it because the two of us were involved in a paper that went to the UK cabinet in 1999,

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so we thought it would be good to look 30 years back and let's see what happened.

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And you can say that both been substantial contributions from fuel switching and electricity,

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both coal to gas and renewable electricity, but by far the most substantial contribution has been through increasing use efficiency.

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That's slightly changing. To put it all in one.

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And it's actually industrial energy efficiency, building energy efficiency and transport energy efficiency.

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And all of those have contributed. But you can say that I I intend to use this chart to annoy people who work in both the nuclear

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industry and the sex industry that their contributions have been negligible over the same period.

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So energy efficiency has been doing something, this is to pre-empt the question of how much more can it do?

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Taken from the work of Julian A. Jonathan Karl and Julian Allwood,

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the short answer is that thermodynamically way out, what a way away from the optimum energy efficiency.

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We can do something like a six fold improvement to deliver the energy services that we want from the energy that we currently use.

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Some of that is the conversion of improved devices, improved engines, etc. improved light bulbs.

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But a lot of it is also improving the broader system.

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So things like insulating buildings, using public transport instead of of of private cars.

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When you combine all those, you get to a very big potential.

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And one other charge from the I think say this is what the IPCC calls a simple chart.

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You don't want to see the complicated ones, and what it's trying to do is show how different approaches to carbon mitigation in energy supply,

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energy demand reduction on land use change relates to the Sustainable Development Goals.

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And the broad picture is that energy demand seems to have more synergies with the other

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sustainable development goals and fewer trade offs than other ways of reducing emissions.

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And particularly the energy supply side changes so that there are often very good reasons other than climate change to look hard,

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improving the efficiency with which we use energy.

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So I think, Nick, you've you've made a good case in answer to actually one of the questions asked by Onyour about,

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in your opinion, does reduced energy demand equal growth?

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I think you you said fairly clearly that you think it is possible to reduce energy demand in the UK,

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for instance, and not have a material impact on the quality of life. Maybe you want to say a bit more directly to that.

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And also one thing that I hear talked about in different fora is the idea of a rebound effect to energy efficiency.

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So if you if people save energy and save money by having a more efficient car, for instance, they might want to buy more.

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And so you get a rebound in terms of more demand,

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or it might be indirect demand and they save money in other ways and they spend that to fly somewhere else on holiday.

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So I've personally seen quite mixed messages about that.

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I've seen some people who say that's all pervasive and makes efficiency a pointless exercise.

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I've heard others say that it's tiny and immaterial. Do you sit on that debate?

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So let's start with with de-growth. I mean, I showed the effect of growth on emissions growth.

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Those tend to increase emissions because there's no doubt about that.

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But the things being equal growth increases, energy efficiency increases emissions.

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But as you said, Steve, we can reduce energy demand without economic growth.

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That's not to say we should. I think that's a perfectly respectable debate to be had about the growth,

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but it's not necessary for us to reduce energy demand in those numbers that I've shown from both

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internationally and from the Committee on Climate Change or assuming continued economic growth.

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So I think those two debates are all slightly different.

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The degree of debate is not not one for me, particularly, it's not one I would fancy taking to national governments at the moment.

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The the point about energy demand is that not just by improving efficiency, but also doing what you might call a progressive lifestyle changes.

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So changes that allow us to access each other without troubling something, we've all got a lot better in the last 10 months.

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Know we've do what we can do. We can change the nature of the energy services that we consume without being worse off.

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A rebound effect. Yeah, it's a big question the you can think of it in two broad types of rebound, the first the ones that you described,

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Steve, which are if if I save money, what do I spend it on those that increase energy use again?

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To some extent, yes, it does. The most energy intensive thing we know about, though, is energy.

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Not surprisingly, energy is one hundred percent energy.

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So if you save energy and spend it on, something else is to be less than 100 hundred percent energy, and therefore you don't spend the odds of that.

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Saving energy means you spend your money on a whole mix of things.

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It's possible. Possible, of course, that all the money you spend save in sight getting more efficient,

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lighting you would spend on travelling by air, and in which case you probably would increase your energy use.

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But if you look at the mix of things people buy, you tend to find that direct rebound effect is of the order of 10 percent to 30 percent.

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So the higher end of that range often for poorer people, if they are, say, insulating a house that's cold and light perfectly,

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reasonably, take some of that benefit as a warmer house or on the lower fuel bill.

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That's a I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.

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That seems to me that lies in the notion of sustainable development somewhat.

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There's a broader and more complex area to do with the macroeconomic effects of energy saving, and this actually feeds back into growth.

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What is the effect of improving our energy efficiency on our own growth?

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That's a more complex question. And it could be at times in history.

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Improving energy efficiency has so much increased economic growth it has offset savings.

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That was Chevron's original idea. This was originally called Jevons Paradox on Japanese.

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I observed that increasing efficiency of coal use in steam engines thus far goes back was was increasing the use of coal in Great Britain.

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And so I think the conclusion is that for technologies that are rapid stages of development,

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where efficiency is very important to them but can increase energy use, at least in my local area on that technology.

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And I think the evidence is that's where we are always with information technology of the moment.

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The efficiency of I.T. has grown by orders of magnitude, the energy efficiency of processing, but so is the amount of processing with society.

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So there are some exceptions, but the general rule is it's a 10 to 30 percent effect, probably.

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So not to be ignored and indeed good policy analysis now, just take this into account, for instance,

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home energy efficiency programmes in the UK take into account when I calculate the carbon savings that we will get warm homes by doing.

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Shall I move on stage to the key challenges? Please do.

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OK, so you want to talk about a couple of key challenges that arise from this really substantial

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change that's being envisaged to a highly renewable and much more efficient energy system.

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The first is the challenge of the variability because solar and wind are all variable.

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This is, of course, because we are moving solar and wind implies using the flows of natural energy that come to us,

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rather than digging up energy that's been captured from those flows over millions of years, which is what we're doing with coal, oil and gas.

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So it's a good thing that way in terms of sustainability of electricity systems do

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need to be balanced and they need to be balanced on really quite short timescales.

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Talking about second, the supply on the demand needs to be balanced on that sort of timescale.

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So the transition to renewable increases the need for flexibility in electric systems is a significant challenge.

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The second challenge really, really relies outside the electricity system.

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Clearly, some of our uses of energy or at electricity, things like lighting,

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and some can be relatively easily switched to electricity and decarbonised them that way.

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The obvious example, which we're beginning to see, is electric vehicles, but other uses of energy can't be electrified as easily.

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It's hard, not impossible, but it's hard to electrify aircraft or or cement films.

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And therefore, we may need to think about the cold or the zero carbon vectors or other ways that energy can be moved around in the zero carbon form.

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So briefly address each of those challenges like they sort of illustrates.

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The balancing problem is some data taken from Germany.

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It's about five years old now, so it's got even more profound sense than the chart shows.

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Generation and from solar and wind blew is offshore and green is onshore wind yellow solar in the month of August 2015,

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and you can see that very characteristic daily variant variation and solar the

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size of the uncloudy is and then much more apparently random variation in wind,

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but with windy and windy periods typically being of the order of days.

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Rather, it was.

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The net effect was that the summer of wind and solar output varied from about two percent to 70 percent of total demand in Germany in that moment.

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And the rest of the system had to balance that.

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Now, when you think that Germany wants to treble its renewables from that level to to meet its climate targets,

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you can rapidly say that you get periods of of the of the day most days in summer,

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when solar in particular, has the capacity to supply more than 100 percent of demand.

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And indeed, it's one of the oddities of this problem of variability that whereas people have

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often thought about the main problem being what happens if it isn't sunny and windy,

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how do we where do we get our energy from? Which is a real issue.

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I'm not attempting to deny that the first problems that are being met are actually

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while we've got too much energy when it's sunny and windy that prices fall to zero.

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And in some cases, grid systems have difficulty coping with too much energy.

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But we certainly do need to look at how we cope with that.

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The guy with colleagues have been involved in the Oxford Martin programme on interior integrating renewable energy.

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Integrate has been doing that for the last few years.

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I'm not going to try and describe our work in detail. This is almost a summary slide.

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There are potential solutions. You can have a flexible older generation on the system.

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You can store energy, you can interconnect to other electricity systems and you can use demand response,

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i.e. very demand in time, depending on what supply looks like.

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And clearly, information technology is giving us more potential to do that.

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But in each of those cases, it's not just a technical problem. That's the thinking that underpins integrate.

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It's it's an economics and markets problem.

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There are clear social issues, particularly with distribution, storage and demand response, and the whole policy framework may need to change as well.

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So please do take a look at our website.

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If you're interested in a map, there's a huge amount of work that's been going on.

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It have to solve these problems and we do think they are in general soluble.

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But it will be possible to have electricity systems with very, very high levels of intermittent and variable generation on them.

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So that we think is largely soluble is just one exception to that, which were, I think more work is probably needed.

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So this looks at that particular area of energy storage in the chart, you can see for the price of lithium ion batteries,

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very reminiscent of what we seen with with with solar costs in the earlier slide.

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The price of batteries is May. Set to fall below $100 a kilowatt hour now being made in huge the greater amount than they used to be, of course,

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particularly for the growing electric vehicle sector, and that potentially makes batteries a game changing technology for dial storage,

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for storing for a few hours, and therefore really does change the economics of stand alone solar systems for developing countries

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because it means that you can use solar energy to provide night-time night-time energy services.

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But batteries will not be suitable for longer term storage that remain too expensive and in particular

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for international energy storage in coal countries or even relatively cold countries like the UK,

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we use far, far more energy in winter than in summer.

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On how to move energy from summer into winter remains an essentially unresolved problem and the problem in fossil fuel energy systems.

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We relied on piles of coal and other types of oil.

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It was easy within in renewable dominated systems.

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We will need to look for new ways of doing that, and that remains a significant research and development challenge.

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The second area of the challenge, I think, is what I call the hard to decarbonise sectors,

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although we talk a lot about electricity and I've been doing that here, we need to remember 80 percent of foreign lands.

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Demand at the moment is some fuels of electricity.

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And although things like light vehicles and a lot of space ageing can relatively easily be converted to electricity,

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though, I mean, not that easily these are big economic shifts.

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There are sectors which look actually technically quite hard to decarbonise aviation shipping

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heavy road vehicles where batteries might just be too heavy for folks to put out lorries.

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So industrial processes like promise do taking on cement and even peak demand for first place heating, which electricity might not do.

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Alright, so. And so we need to think about how we're going to decarbonise those.

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As I indicated, that point towards using some of the vectors,

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there's a range of things being looked at for other ways of moving energy around that don't impose a carbon.

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This benefit hate or it used extensively, of course, and can be stored for four days but hard to store hot temperatures not suitable for so many uses.

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Hydrogen, I guess, is the front runner in at the moment and thinking about these hard to decarbonise sectors,

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it can be made either from natural gas with carbon capture and storage.

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I think this is probably the principal area of interest for carbon capture and storage a technology now, or it can be made by electrolysis.

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And if you think about that chart from Germany talking [INAUDIBLE] on the air with huge spikes of of of excess electricity at times

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that points to using that spare electricity that would otherwise just be essentially thrown away for electrolysis for hydrogen.

393
00:49:05,220 --> 00:49:15,810
There are other factors that are perhaps somewhat easier to move around and use that hydrogen needs to

394
00:49:15,810 --> 00:49:26,250
be brought to very low temperatures or rise to very high pressures to make it easily transportable.

395
00:49:26,250 --> 00:49:38,970
And I think ammonia, a lot of work going on in Oxford on ammonia, I think particularly looking at shipping as one of ammonia might be a good field.

396
00:49:38,970 --> 00:49:46,680
And then in aviation in particular, other synthetic carbon based fuels, they would be the easiest to plug in,

397
00:49:46,680 --> 00:49:53,460
essentially to make some some artificial kerosene to replace aviation fuel.

398
00:49:53,460 --> 00:50:01,710
But if that's to be net zero energy to come from a sustainable biological carbon source,

399
00:50:01,710 --> 00:50:10,770
so back to the questions about the sustainability of bioenergy,

400
00:50:10,770 --> 00:50:16,380
and you will see that these questions about what vectors we might use for difficult

401
00:50:16,380 --> 00:50:21,330
to decarbonise sectors are linked to the questions about longer term energy storage,

402
00:50:21,330 --> 00:50:24,900
and that fuels a lot of hydrogen.

403
00:50:24,900 --> 00:50:34,750
Ammonia might be used for boats, and I think that's the link between those those those two areas is important to approval at the moment.

404
00:50:34,750 --> 00:50:42,400
Understudied. So I mean, those are my conclusions, I'll just whip through them very quickly.

405
00:50:42,400 --> 00:50:47,890
And its services are critical to any modern society, but our main source of greenhouse gas emissions,

406
00:50:47,890 --> 00:50:51,970
that's why energy is such an important topic we're probably going to get to.

407
00:50:51,970 --> 00:50:58,300
They need to be close to zero, and that implies a major change quickly.

408
00:50:58,300 --> 00:51:04,150
We sort of know the broad picture of that improve efficiency and switch to renewables.

409
00:51:04,150 --> 00:51:10,630
And it seems feasible without huge cost to the economy, but still very high investment.

410
00:51:10,630 --> 00:51:20,410
But there are these huge major challenges around changing to a system based on variable natural flows of energy away from the store.

411
00:51:20,410 --> 00:51:24,160
Non-sustainable, sustainable sources. We use the moment. And what?

412
00:51:24,160 --> 00:51:28,780
What are you going to use for to replace fossil fuels in some of the more difficult

413
00:51:28,780 --> 00:51:37,100
applications where electricity doesn't seem like it will be appropriate?

414
00:51:37,100 --> 00:51:41,810
Thank you very much, Nick. That's a great overview, and we've had lots of questions,

415
00:51:41,810 --> 00:51:47,930
which unfortunately we won't have time to get all the way through, but I'll do my best to group a few.

416
00:51:47,930 --> 00:51:53,680
We've had several questions about specific the role of specific technologies.

417
00:51:53,680 --> 00:51:57,320
Probably too many to go through in detail because they're all interesting in their own right.

418
00:51:57,320 --> 00:52:06,680
But for instance, people have asked about the role in electricity, specifically about carbon capture and storage, about tidal power.

419
00:52:06,680 --> 00:52:10,550
Others have asked that we've discussed briefly about nuclear power,

420
00:52:10,550 --> 00:52:17,570
and some others have have asked about potential ideas, such as converting CO2 directly into aviation jet fuel.

421
00:52:17,570 --> 00:52:22,490
So I don't know if you want to pick up on any of those specifically, maybe.

422
00:52:22,490 --> 00:52:26,660
But also, I might just roll this in with with Miles's question.

423
00:52:26,660 --> 00:52:31,490
Just in case you want to attack this in the same way that Myles Allen asks,

424
00:52:31,490 --> 00:52:38,150
how can we design policies to ensure that low carbon energy options compete for investment with fossil fuels rather than with each other?

425
00:52:38,150 --> 00:52:42,890
Because for me, at least I may be involved wrongly here, miles.

426
00:52:42,890 --> 00:52:47,330
But for me, there's this interesting question between these specific individual technologies,

427
00:52:47,330 --> 00:52:54,110
and it's quite easy to get fixated on one answer versus a sort of technology neutral approach on the role.

428
00:52:54,110 --> 00:52:59,480
The difference in emphasis between going for new innovative things versus sticking with rolling out what we know.

429
00:52:59,480 --> 00:53:05,600
So yes, maybe you can sort of pick out any and very specific technologies you want to address,

430
00:53:05,600 --> 00:53:09,800
but comment more generally on what you think of the policy framework should be

431
00:53:09,800 --> 00:53:16,120
to give as level playing field as is needed to deliver the overall target.

432
00:53:16,120 --> 00:53:20,570
Yeah. OK. I mean, just a quick word on some of those individual technologies.

433
00:53:20,570 --> 00:53:27,580
Tidal yeah, I mean titles interesting, but it's never going to be available on a scale,

434
00:53:27,580 --> 00:53:35,230
but that's anything but the scale of of total total energy demand facing us.

435
00:53:35,230 --> 00:53:40,180
I think I've said I don't think six has got much of a future in electricity generation.

436
00:53:40,180 --> 00:53:47,500
I think they're far more interesting questions about six on some of these difficult to decarbonise processes like blast furnaces,

437
00:53:47,500 --> 00:53:56,380
iron cement kilns, though it's far from trivial on those questions about CCS for hydrogen production.

438
00:53:56,380 --> 00:54:09,820
If we think I do think we will need something like hydrogen for for quite a few purposes on the overall policy framework.

439
00:54:09,820 --> 00:54:19,750
Well, I guess I would just push back on why the technology neutrality is quite the right way to think about it,

440
00:54:19,750 --> 00:54:28,180
because this is a systemic problem on, for example, a combination of wind and solar.

441
00:54:28,180 --> 00:54:46,060
We know much better balances the the the the demand for electricity in the UK than either wind or solar is not true in many countries.

442
00:54:46,060 --> 00:54:55,240
And you may find that you want a balance of relatively what's called in the jargon, dispatchable energy sources.

443
00:54:55,240 --> 00:55:05,260
So things like bioenergy, geothermal, things that you get the way you could switch the power station off and on wind and solar, which aren't.

444
00:55:05,260 --> 00:55:12,760
So you may actually deliberately want to trade some different resources differently.

445
00:55:12,760 --> 00:55:21,010
And certainly when you get into these difficult to decarbonise sectors, you will have to look at other resources.

446
00:55:21,010 --> 00:55:25,540
So not not not all units of energy are of equal value,

447
00:55:25,540 --> 00:55:32,590
partly because of time considerations when they're available, but partly because what you want to use them for.

448
00:55:32,590 --> 00:55:41,710
So I think it's a bit more complex than we need to be technology neutral, which is I enjoyed the standard economic sense, too.

449
00:55:41,710 --> 00:55:47,790
Everything is like Steven Law and standard economics on most things is it's a bit simplistic.

450
00:55:47,790 --> 00:55:50,980
Well, as a physicist, I can possibly respond.

451
00:55:50,980 --> 00:55:58,990
Well, I don't argue that either, but I tend to try to shoehorn in three more questions actually before we go because there's lots of very good ones.

452
00:55:58,990 --> 00:56:08,140
One. Ask a bit more about the demand side of the picture that you talked about demand reduction specifically from Eric Neal.

453
00:56:08,140 --> 00:56:13,870
He says that you do that necessity for reduction in demand reduction in the coming decades.

454
00:56:13,870 --> 00:56:19,420
Is that really a realistic assumption there access to markets increased in the past decades?

455
00:56:19,420 --> 00:56:28,510
How do you practically reduce demand in First Nations? My understanding actually is that in several First World Nations now, demand is reducing.

456
00:56:28,510 --> 00:56:35,560
But perhaps you can talk to that and explain how you can achieve as much standard quiz question with a large

457
00:56:35,560 --> 00:56:42,050
audience is to ask the impersonator to ask them how much energy demand has gone up in the UK in the last 15 years.

458
00:56:42,050 --> 00:56:48,730
The answer, of course, is gone down 15 percent. So this is part of energy efficiency working.

459
00:56:48,730 --> 00:56:52,870
So is it realistic to reduce demand? Yeah, hugely.

460
00:56:52,870 --> 00:57:01,120
I mean, the Committee on Climate Change Projections are based on what is feasible on economic and realistic.

461
00:57:01,120 --> 00:57:07,060
And I think what is of people often miss is that if you're electrified vehicles,

462
00:57:07,060 --> 00:57:13,180
that's not just switching the fuel, it's improving the efficiency of that vehicle by a factor of three.

463
00:57:13,180 --> 00:57:20,080
If you shift from a gas boiler to a heat pump, you're improving the efficiency by a factor of three or four.

464
00:57:20,080 --> 00:57:28,810
So some of these changes that are now thought to be inevitable and necessary produce huge improvements in energy efficiency.

465
00:57:28,810 --> 00:57:33,910
And indeed, it's almost impossible to contemplate just going on using the amount of energy

466
00:57:33,910 --> 00:57:41,150
that we are if we move away from fossil fuels towards largely electric systems.

467
00:57:41,150 --> 00:57:46,040
Very interesting. Thanks, Nick Panopto, my question from Max Boycott's,

468
00:57:46,040 --> 00:57:51,980
a bit more of a geopolitical question here about energy systems and what are your thoughts on early signs from the US Biden

469
00:57:51,980 --> 00:58:01,230
administration and how they might influence the feasibility for moving to zero carbon energy in the UK and around the world?

470
00:58:01,230 --> 00:58:14,910
Hello, Max, nice to hear from you. I think you'd be better placed to answer that than I am, but I think I mean, we're all delighted that day.

471
00:58:14,910 --> 00:58:23,760
It's. I think the signs are good. The signs are that Biden wants to engage with international negotiations,

472
00:58:23,760 --> 00:58:30,090
but also that he seems to be serious about the nuts and bolts of sort of boring

473
00:58:30,090 --> 00:58:34,350
things in energy efficiency like compliance standards and vehicle laws,

474
00:58:34,350 --> 00:58:42,090
and the East realise that the oil pipelines are on need and that renewables are cheaper.

475
00:58:42,090 --> 00:58:48,360
So I think both internationally and nationally, it looks pretty good.

476
00:58:48,360 --> 00:58:57,390
Fingers crossed. But yeah, the devil will, of course, be in the detail when he stops to meet the vested interests.

477
00:58:57,390 --> 00:59:00,870
Great final question, as we come to the top of the hour,

478
00:59:00,870 --> 00:59:09,120
it's actually the most devoted question and it's a great one from Ali bringing it all directly to us in our individual contacts.

479
00:59:09,120 --> 00:59:17,630
What's the most effective way for individuals to reduce their footprint? Yeah, that's a great question, a lot, most great questions.

480
00:59:17,630 --> 00:59:20,960
It doesn't have a very simple answer.

481
00:59:20,960 --> 00:59:31,730
There's a if we got a way of of pointing people at particular papers, there's a great paper by a colleague of mine.

482
00:59:31,730 --> 00:59:38,720
And if an over of those which actually reviewed the whole of the literature to try to

483
00:59:38,720 --> 00:59:43,490
identify the top 10 areas which are inevitable that can't remember off the top of my head,

484
00:59:43,490 --> 00:59:56,000
but I'm very happy to point people. There is no one thing because we use energy in our food systems and in our buildings, in transportation.

485
00:59:56,000 --> 01:00:07,540
We need action in all of those areas basically to. I'm speaking at a party where it's best or we can reach the time.

486
01:00:07,540 --> 01:00:10,810
I'm not sure how it got out, but great question.

487
01:00:10,810 --> 01:00:18,100
Yes, thank you and thank you very much to all of you, as as well as to Professor Nick Carter for joining us today.

488
01:00:18,100 --> 01:00:26,470
Join us again next Monday, at which in the next one of the series, we'll be discussing the concepts of sensitive intervention points for net zero.

489
01:00:26,470 --> 01:00:31,780
We'll be with Professor Cameron Hepburn, Cigar Industry Master and myself.

490
01:00:31,780 --> 01:00:40,006
If you're on track customer moment, you can register by clicking the green button under the video screen, but in the meantime, have a very good week.