Over the past 10 years in the UK, we have made a significant change to the way we generate electricity and about half of our generation is now from non-emitting sources. If we continue developing the generation system at the same rate, then by 2050 we will have around 50% more electric power than we have today. Data on the efficiencies of today’s motors and heaters allows us to estimate that this will be enough to power about 60% of today’s energy using activities (apart from flying and shipping). However, because energy has been so cheap and abundant in the past 100 years, in many cases we could make small changes to existing technologies to make much better use of less energy.
In July 2020 we held the Energy Systems Innovation Workshop for Absolute Zero to explore the opportunities for innovation consistent with changes in energy supply and demand anticipated by the Absolute Zero analysis.
