10 Steps in 10 Years to 100 Sustainable Energy
Below is a conceptual plan for achieving the goal of 100% renewable energy by 2020. This has been quoted from Julian Darley's blog and adapted by ReGenTech to reflect a Scottish perspective. We have reproduced this as it accurately reflects the views and goals our company is working towards.
Not just fossil fuels but energy overall and raw materials, almost all of which require energy to exploit and transport. Reducing consumption is vital in achieving 100% renewable energy. Use less need less.
This reduces the renewable energy required reducing its installation costs. The reduction is best planned ensuring new renewable energy jobs and opportunities are brought as some jobs dependent on cheap, abundant energy are removed by fossils depletion. Scotland needs to become energy smart and self-reliant again once defining aspects of the Scottish character.
Sharing things we do not use all the time will reduce consumption. We can reduce the energy we use for transportation by sharing both trips and vehicles. Such savings are already being achieved by ride-sharing and car-pooling, and more recently by membership-based car-sharing services.
Public transportation, especially when widespread, frequent, cheap and regularly scheduled and thus widely used is also a highly efficient form of sharing vehicles. Besides is much easier to power with electricity and or hydrogen . For example a Hydrogen powered tram. Hy-Tram
Diversify sources of energy, both in terms of generator size and location, concentrating on whatever renewable resources are locally available, such as wind, sun, hydro, biomass, geothermal, tides, and waves. There is no single silver bullet renewable energy technology that works everywhere all the time; therefore harnessing efficient, practical, and abundant local sources will be vital. In Scotland we greatly underestimate the resources we have within our community.
Distribute energy production so households, businesses, and communities produce more of their own power. This reduces transmission losses, is good for the local economy, and builds community resilience against shortfalls and price spikes of any one energy resource. Achieving this distribution will require many creative and large-scale means of financing, often involving government help. It will also require fast-track planning, changes in legislation and the power grid to allow easy grid access, as well as changes in the structuring of many existing utilities.
Store energy: There are times when our local environment can produce more energy than we require at that moment. This energy can be stored locally for use later locally. It can be stored in batteries, flow batteries, pumped storage, compressed gas and hydrogen gas. The technologies for doing so are available now though expensive but these costs are falling and will continue to do so and new systems are being developed all over the world.
Reinvest the project of rebuilding Scotland's local electricity and energy infrastructure . The investment costs conventionally are enormous but they need not be. This infrastructure investments pay tangible dividends for entire communities and for many generations’ unlike speculative investments that only create temporary paper wealth for a few. Investing in a restructured power grid will require positive and active government involvement.
For your community consider a “Community ESCO”
Re-localise rebuilding the local production and manufacturing economy, particularly food and energy, while shortening supply chains will reduce transportation energy, while creating jobs and supporting local economies. Re-localising will cultivate community resilience and self-reliance at home, and a nation independent of fossil fuels and able to maximize generation of local renewable power.
Localised production retains this cash within the economy. This is the Money Multiplier effect. Each pound retained is recycled to create £7-8 worth of economic benefit
Reengineer the infrastructure of our communitied, starting with the power grid. Even without the need to leave fossil fuels behind, Scotland’s electricity grid is in urgent need of overhaul. It needs to be repaired, strengthened, and in many cases dramatically re-wired to allow areas with large wind and solar resources to feed the demand centres. Though this will still entail long-distance transmission, it is far better to have large wind and marine farms than nuclear or coal plants, neither of which is clean or renewable. The new grid will also need to make it easy to add and stabilize small and medium-sized distributed generation sources.
The retrofitting of Scotland’s buildings is another vitally necessary form of re-engineering. Most of the built environment in the Scotland was designed in an era of cheap, abundant energy. Scottish buildings account for nearly half of all energy use. Scotland, particularly the North, urgently needs homes and businesses that remain warm in winter and cool summer with the minimum of energy consumption, with the aim of achieving zero-energy buildings wherever possible. This will reduce demand for both electricity and all fossil fuels.
Reskill Scotland’s workforce for the thousands green-collar jobs that will be created by our transition to renewable energy. Especially for our young people many of whom face year of unemployment in the current environment. Tis will help retain young people and rebalance rapidly aging remote communities.
Quality jobs in projects that include re-engineering the grid, installing millions of solar panels and wind turbines, retrofitting tens of millions of buildings, and rebuilding Scotland's fractured manufacturing sector and industrial supply chain.
These skills will be needed in every community. Reskilling will require coordination between government, education, business, and industry in an unprecedented shift toward reduced job specialisation and greater ability to develop local supply chains using more local resources. This will include a return to local manufacturing of many vital lighter goods, and regional manufacturing of heavier goods and industrial feedstocks, such as steel. This historic change has already begun in some areas.
10. Remobilise:
Our transportation system needs to run on renewable electricity and human power. This means deploying electric/Fuel cell vehicles of al forms.
automobiles with related renewable generation and charging infrastructures, reviving and re-investing in electric trolley buses, streetcars, and electric rail - both light and heavy. We also need to revive and re-invest in pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and bring in light neighbourhood electric vehicles (NEVs) for both personal and shared use. These measures all have the aim of replacing the petroleum-powered car as quickly as possible in order to produce a transport system designed for the 21st century.
This will require nothing short of a fossil-free transportation revolution, including an electric rail revolution. Cities redesigned for human muscles and electric motors will thrive long after we have run out of fossil fuels.
1. Reduce
2. Share
7. Re-localise
8. Reengineer
3. Diversify
4. Distribute
9. Re-skill
10. Re-mobilise
5. Store
6. Reinvest