The energy sector: what are we here for?

You’re at the negotiating table for a power purchase agreement, but you’re bogged down in the details. You’re trying to sort the cable route for an offshore windfarm, but there’s a SSSI to get through. You’re trying to forecast increases to electric demand to plan network investment, but the spread of scenarios is just too big.

And you ask, “Why am I doing this? What am I achieving?”

I want to take a step back and look at the bigger picture of energy for a minute. Picture this: someone in a cave, huddled around a fire of sticks. What comes to mind? Primitive caveman? Getting close to nature? Someone who’s stayed out too long on a Saturday night and lost their keys?

This may have been the way of people in days gone by, but it’s still the reality for many in the world, whether it’s a community without electricity or gas, or a refugee sheltering from bombs in a basement.

But whether it’s sticks on a fire or central heating pumping through a modern house, the need is the same: warmth. When we are warm, we stay alive, we survive. But more than that, when we are warm, we can do other things: tell stories, paint murals on the cave wall, repair a tool, read a book, crochet a doily.

This is what the energy sector is all about: to help people survive, but more than that, to help them thrive. Survive and thrive.

Have you noticed that it’s not about the energy itself? Energy isn’t an end in itself; it’s always there to do something.

In the ‘woodfire energy sector’, the systems are fairly basic. Wood is collected, wood is burned, ash is removed. Repeat. Maybe it gets more sophisticated, such that trees are grown, harvested, cut to size, dried, and then burned. But notice that the wood itself is not what is needed. All the effort is done to keep warm, to cook, to have light. No one really wants the wood.

It’s no different in our highly complex energy sector today. Energy is collected (it can never be created), transformed, transported, and stored. The varied methods of converting prime sources of energy are incredible: the internal combustion engine, gas boilers, solar farms, windfarms, geothermal generators – the list goes on. Increasingly complex networks transport energy across large distances to millions of customers.

But ultimately people don’t want the energy, they want what the energy can do, to use it for something. They (I should say ‘we’, as I am also a person, despite what anyone else might say…) want warm homes, lit homes, ovens and hobs; power drills, power showers and Austin Powers streaming from their 50-inch (too small?) ultra-HD TV; iPads, iPhones and eye patches produced from the factory down the road (which, guess what, needs energy as well).

It's a humbling thought, but the best compliment anyone can pay the energy sector is to forget that we are here. If the lights stay on (at a reasonable price), and no one thinks about us, then we’re doing the right thing. If we help our society stay alive and allow it to flourish, then we’ve done our job. Maybe that should be the motto of our sector: to allow society to survive and thrive.

As you go about your power purchase agreements, cable routing and capacity planning, you are helping your friends and neighbours stay alive and flourish, survive and thrive. So keep going – you’re doing a good job.