An excerpt from The Edge by Jonathan Maxwell
First published by Business Leader magazine September 2023 at: https://www.businessleader.co.uk/bookshelf-the-edge/
‘Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.’ – Otto von Bismarck
Focus on the best available technologies in the time available to implement them
There is no zero carbon or limitless energy source; every energy generation technology has its limits
We need to balance and diversify sources of energy supply
And we can’t just add to the system – we need to reduce
Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, a radio technology pioneer who developed the early warning radar for the Royal Air Force to counter the rapid growth of the Luftwaffe, a system that helped win the Battle of Britain, promoted a ‘cult of the imperfect’, summarised as: ‘Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes.’
While politics is sometimes about second best, so with power. As Voltaire said, ‘the best is the enemy of the good’. Put another way, planning carefully and realistically, we must avoid sacrificing the good on the altar of the perfect. So-called ‘transition’ fuels, such as natural and recycled gas displacing coal, do have a role to play, particularly if they can be designed to accommodate lower-carbon fuels when they are available at scale. Some more ‘conventional’ solutions may also be needed to accommodate and balance renewables in the short to medium term, while the system changes are implemented.
In the meantime, the process of decentralising and focusing on energy efficiency may, in practice, have the biggest impact in the short term while we transform our energy system to renewable energy in the longer term. Otherwise, we risk sacrificing major, achievable, and enduring achievements and efficiencies now in favour of planned, hoped for, or even imagined improvements in the future. We will not win if our plan depends on solutions that will simply come too late for the problem.
There are technical, economic, and physical limits to the generation of renewable energy and the ability of the energy system to absorb and manage it. Time is another key factor. While it is highly probable that many of these limits expand significantly over time, the timeframes involved to deploy renewable energy at a global scale that substantially displaces fossil fuels will take several years at best and, most probably, decades.
Within the context of the potential depletion of our carbon budget by the end of this decade, urgent energy security problems affecting the lives of hundreds of millions and energy costs that matter for billions of people, time may in fact be the key. While we must plan and invest for the future now, we also have to accept that renewable energy will help less with today’s problems and more with tomorrow’s. We must take time into consideration and, in the meantime, use the best available, and most efficient, technology today on our journey through the energy transition.
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