Energy Resilience – renewed urgency to transition to renewables

With their ambitious net zero targets, the UK government has been praised for legislating the path to a greener, more sustainable energy infrastructure. Yet the reality of achieving those goals is still a long way off. Even as an increasing number of investments in hydrogen, wind and solar projects are being made, for now the UK is still very reliant on fossil fuel imports and this leaves the UK vulnerable.

Case in point is the natural gas imports from Russia which are now under the spotlight. Can the UK government heed international calls to put an immediate stop to the imports in an effort to slow Putin’s military efforts??If the UK were further along in its transition to renewable energy it might be possible. Instead they’ve announced a throttling back on gas imports with a target date of end 2022.

How can the UK accelerate a green energy transition?

Many European countries are transitioning to a combination of wind and solar generation. Green hydrogen is also in the mix and could help accelerate this transition. Already there are proven technologies to power construction vehicles with hydrogen. In the Midlands, a major hydrogen research project is being set up with the aim of expanding use cases of hydrogen as an energy source.

But it isn’t just energy generation that’s an issue. The UK’s energy infrastructure is aging and constantly being damaged by extreme weather events. Events that are increasing in both frequency and ferocity.?Plus there’s a need for more efficient energy storage to reduce the reliance on generation capacity. In order to accelerate a transition to renewables, projects addressing energy infrastructure and storage need to be developed in tandem with energy generation projects.

Energy resilience starts at home

For centuries, the development of energy infrastructure has prioritised reliability and meeting growing and fluctuating demand over sustainability. Carbon emissions and the use of fossil fuels only became a consideration in recent decades. Even then it’s taken a full blown climate crisis to instigate change. The targets indicate that the UK is headed in the right direction. The question now is how to accelerate the transition to renewables?

It’s becoming increasingly obvious resilience can’t be achieved if there is still reliance on fossil fuel imports. The best possible solution is to continue to develop, at pace, local renewable projects by leveraging utilities and infrastructure expertise to engineer the best solutions.