Transcriber: Martina Tortorici Reviewer: Silvina Katz
Alright.
When I was at university, I wanted to help change the world, right?
Like so many other students, maybe some of you,
I had these big but kind of vague ideas and goals
about trying to help people, right?
Make a difference.
And I knew a bit about climate change and a bit about renewable energy.
So, I thought: OK, that could be a pretty good place to start, right?
Climate change,
big problem might come kill us all if we don’t do something about it.
I might as well start there.
So, I knew one of the main ideas,
which was:
we have to stop burning fossil fuels to get all of our electricity.
We have to get it from renewables instead, right?
So, things like solar, wind or nuclear.
And I though: OK, that’s nice.
But what am I supposed to do about that?
I wasn’t studying engineering or chemistry.
I didn’t work at some big energy company.
It was going to take me years
to get qualified and educated enough
to try and bring more renewables into the world.
And...
So, I started asking everyone I knew who knew about this kind of thing
and going on Reddit and Google and all over the internet,
just trying to research:
what can I do about this?
And I found out about this concept that was completely new to me.
It was this idea of pro-sumers.
You see, what most of us do is, we just...
We just use electricity, right?
We just watch “Come Dine With Me”
or plug in our phones
and do things like that, we’re using electricity.
but prosumers,
they don't just use it, they make it as well.
So they're producers and consumers of electricity, right?
They’re prosumers, get it?
Nice. I thought that was pretty fun.
Anyway...and people have been doing this for a while, OK?
They have things like diesel generators and they’ve been burning diesel
to make electricity, which is cool.
You know, you can get some electricity in some pretty remote places like that.
But nowadays, we can do that all with renewables as well.
You can use solar panels
so you can get zero emission,
no fossil fuels,
no smoke
but still make your own electricity.
And people were doing this
and doing amazing things with the electricity they made.
So, they were in really remote parts of Togo, or Kenya, or Pakistan.
And they didn’t have a lot of resources
and they weren't actually making that much electricity either.
But they had things like these little solar lights.
OK? So, just a mini solar panel.
It creates electricity from the sunlight, charges up a battery,
and that battery powers this light.
And you can use that light at night.
And you can use it for amazing things.
People were using it
to ward lions away
from their villages or their farms
because these lions were going to come and kill
their goats or their cows, OK?
Or they were lighting their homes and allowing some of their children
to read and study late into the night
and improve their educational prospects.
Or they were keeping their shops open for longer
and generating more sales like that.
So, they were completely changing their lives,
just generating a little bit of their own electricity.
And again, I thought: OK, that’s amazing,
but I’m here living in London.
I don’t need to do that, right?
I can just plug my phone into that socket there.
You know, I don't need to make my own electricity.
Why would I get involved with this?
Like, what is the point of doing this prosumer thing in places like cities,
where more than half of the world’s population now lives?
Why would we do it?
To answer that question, I did a little experiment of my own
and I got really hyped up and I bought myself a solar panel, OK?
And I...
I was at UCL at the time and I went to the UCL management
and I said:
“Hey, please let me put this panel on top of your roof, OK?
And I’m going to give you some really good data.
What we can do with that data is,
we can show how much electricity we’d make
if we did this all over the university.
And then that would show us
how much carbon we could stop emitting,
how much we could reduce our footprint
and also how much money we could save long term on our electricity bill.
And that looked a bit like this, OK?
So, this is Bidborough House, just a back office building at UCL,
you probably don’t even know it. They didn’t give me a good one.
There’s me and my panel on my budget looking box
for the bricks and wires,
and I’m going to be straight up:
this was a bit of a failure, this experiment, OK?
I only got a couple of months’ data.
Some of my equipment really overheated and got quite damaged.
My hair was meant to come out silver, but it looked like that,
the whole thing was just a mess, OK?
But, luckily for me,
there were a lot of other students
who were interested in doing something similar at UCL,
and like us at other universities around us.
And the students, they worked with the management staff.
And the students would do things like site surveys.
So, they’d go up onto these rooftops, with permission
and they’d look and they’d say:
“OK, we can put a solar panel here, a solar panel there.”
They’d do the financial case, if they were economics students.
They would crunch the numbers
and make sure this actually would save money.
Things like that...
and the management staff,
they loved it and they rolled with it,
and they actually helped deliver together
a really successful project.
It’s on top of Langton Close, one of the accommodation blocks around here.
They put almost a 100 panels up there.
So, it was a massive success
because they actually got a lot of students engaged with this.
They were saving money
and they were reducing emissions, right?
Like the holy trinity of...
of good stuff.
And...
You know, I was proud of my community.
I was proud of this UCL community of prosumers.
And I was thinking: “Yeah! That was awesome”.
And then...
And then I left,
I left UCL and I went and got a job in the energy industry
and I thought, OK, well, that prosumer thing was kind of fun.
It was cool.
I got to do some fun stuff, but that's it.
Like, it just seems so small scale to me, right?
It was just maybe one university, one rooftop or a couple of houses,
or even just a small village or a farm.
I thought: to reduce emissions,
we’ve got to change this big system of electricity.
That big system is the electricity grid,
and that’s where all our emissions are coming from.
That’s what we need to change.
We don’t need to do small things like that. Prosumers?
I couldn’t see how prosumers fit into the big system,
but the answer was actually right in front of my face
because the company I went to work for, we do a lot of things,
but one of the main thing is,
we help,
we ensure that the electric buses charge up at night, OK?
So, like a London bus, it’s going around.
It’s using up the charge in its battery, comes back into the depot.
We just make sure it gets enough battery for the next day.
It sounds easy, I promise you, it’s not that easy.
Anyway, something kind of magical happens
when you plug an electric vehicle into the grid,
because what you’re doing is...
There’s a battery on that electric vehicle
and you’re directly connecting that battery
to the national power system through this charger.
And if you do that with enough vehicles at the same time,
you’re plugging all these batteries in.
It’s like you’ve got this massive battery connected to the power grid.
And if there’s a lot of demand for electricity,
there’ll still be some energy left in those batteries at the end of the day.
And what you can do is, rather than pushing energy out of the grid
into the vehicle batteries,
you can push it the other way as well.
You can use that energy you have stored still
and go and power homes or offices
or people watching “Come Dine With Me”,
using that energy from those batteries.
And this is actually going to have a massive,
massive impact on the big system
because it addresses what is arguably the biggest problem
of managing an electricity system,
and that is peak demand.
So, 5 pm, when everyone comes home
and plugs in their laptops and turns on the TV
and puts the kettle on and everything like that,
there’s a massive spike for demand for electricity
because everyone wants to use it at the same time.
And actually, it’s forecast to get a lot worse as well.
So right now,
at the moment in 2020, that grey bar there, that’s where it was.
And in some scenarios, it could look like this big red bar, right?
So, more than twice as high this level of peak demand.
Now, if we have enough prosumers,
enough people with electric vehicles,
and they’re willing to do this kind of smart charging, right?
By pushing energy out of their batteries
or changing the way they’re charging their vehicles,
we could have a 22 % reduction in peak demand by 2050.
So, let me put that another way.
What is arguably the biggest problem of modern energy,
if we have enough prosumers, we just use this one prosumer idea,
we can make 22 % of that issue go away.
OK? So, now I was getting really, really excited about this
and I was thinking: OK, look, I got to write this talk.
I’m going to slow down my hand motions when I do it,
I just got to...
You know, how can I convince these people that this is going to go mainstream?
Because they’re not seeing it in the world.
You know, this is hidden away in bus depots, on rooftops,
or in farms in Togo.
People aren’t seeing this.
How? When is it going to go mainstream?
And I realized it’s already happening.
So, I don’t go on Twitter much,
but when I do, I always find the best tweets.
And here’s BBC News. Scotland News, still, it counts,
BBC News talking about Coldplay,
who on their next tour, OK?
They’re going to have these kinetic dance floors,
Right? So, those are dance floors that are powered.
Oh, sorry, not they’re powered,
but they generate power from the movement of their fans.
OK? So, it doesn’t matter if you’re rocking out to Viva La Vida, OK?
Or just openly weeping to The Scientist. I’m in that latter category.
You’re going to be generating electricity.
You’re going to be a prosumer.
So, the barriers to entry are down here.
You know? You don’t need to have a business
or solar panels on your home
or an electric vehicle to be a prosumer,
to be part of this movement.
If you just have a little solar light, or if you just go to a gig,
you could be part of this.
And what’s next?
I mean, we could have gyms
where all of the exercise equipment is generating electricity
and charging batteries or powering the lights.
And even if you’re like me and your bike workout lasts like six minutes,
it’s all going to add up.
If you have enough spin classes, they add up.
But what’s more, it gets people talking about this as well.
Engagement is a key part of any movement of this whole climate mission
and definitely of this prosumer thing as well.
What if people didn’t talk about how many calories they burn?
They talked about how many kilowatt hours of electricity they were generating.
That’s how they flex on the ground, you know?
It could be completely different.
And you know, you could have something as basic as the floor,
litterally the most basic thing in the world, the ground, OK?
We’ve seen we have dance floors,
you could just have normal pavements with some kind of pressure pad
that’s going to generate electricity every time you take a step.
It sounds ridiculous. It sounds wacky.
But I’m sure electric vehicles sounded wacky to a lot of people.
I know kinetic dance floors, by the reaction of this audience,
sounded wacky to a lot of people.
The bigger the idea,
the more engaged people are going to be with it.
And then we do have more prosumers.
You got more renewables on the grid,
and that means you have less emissions and less smoke
and less fossil fuels.
Right?
This whole thing,
at the end of the day,
is about our planet.
It’s our planet and it’s our future.
And we do talk a lot about
having to change the big system and the big companies,
big organizations, all of their behavior.
And that’s true. That’s a 100 % what we need to do.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t act as individuals
or as communities, right?
People like you and me and communities like this one
can act and make a difference.
Do something like being a prosumer.
Prosumption is an opportunity that is accessible and effective
for stopping climate change or mitigating climate change.
And it’s an opportunity
that I really think we should try and take.
Thank you very much.