The Search for Big Ideas in Sustainability

Earlier this summer, I attended the Breakthrough Energy Summit in London. Breakthrough Energy was founded by Bill Gates in 2015 – the same year that Siemens became the first global industrial company to pledge to be carbon-neutral by 2030.?

Flash forward to today, and Siemens is collaborating with Breakthrough Energy to help achieve our own climate goals and bring big ideas to scale. That’s where Breakthrough Energy is really driving change – by working to mobilize capital and ecosystems so new climate technologies can become just as cost-competitive as current technologies.??

For example, Breakthrough Energy connected Siemens to Luxwall, a company that offers an alternative to traditional glass for windows, one that can reduce energy usage by up to 45 percent. We’re now planning to install it in a new manufacturing site in Texas.?

And that’s just scratching the surface. As we discussed during the summit in London, we’ll need to harness the power of ecosystems to solve for the built environment – not only because it’s good for decarbonization but because it also makes good business sense.?

This week, on my podcast The Optimistic Outlook , I dove into this theme of how scaling innovation strengthens the business case for sustainability, something that we’ve seen in our own work with customers. I used solar as an example. Here’s an excerpt:?

In 1958, if you wanted to power your home with solar power, do you know how much it would have cost in today’s dollars???

Your utility bills would have been 300,000 dollars. Per month.????

Today, solar is easily cost-competitive with fossil power, and there’s still plenty of room to make it even more affordable.??

The question now is: How do we scale this???

Solar currently produces about 4 percent of U.S. electricity. If we look out to 2045 to a nation that’s achieved its climate objectives, solar will represent about 45 percent of our electricity.???

Thing is, we actually have made some progress with scaling it. Last year, the U.S. installed more than 33 gigawatts of solar power. But to get where we want to be in 2045, we still need to be installing faster – more like 60 gigawatts annually.??

I go on in the podcast to share some thoughts on how we can meet this challenge for clean energy, but the basic idea is this: We have to scale innovation at the grid edge. The grid edge is where power meets the end user – all the connection points between buildings and the power grid.?

And we’re already seeing what’s possible there. In another recent episode I shared how ComEd successfully switched on America’s first neighborhood-scale microgrid. Serving a community of about 1,000, the microgrid will empower the community to use renewable energy and battery storage. If the grid faces a disruption, the microgrid will keep power flowing. You can learn more about it and Siemens’ involvement here .?

This is where ecosystem-thinking really becomes powerful. We know microgrid technology is proven to reduce emissions. But what if we used this moment to bring it to communities across the country? What if we worked together to scale microgrid technology so that every community can reduce emissions while receiving affordable, reliable power??

We’ll translate big ideas to big impact.??

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Thanks for reading. As always, let me know in the comments what you think about this topic and others you’d like to see covered in the newsletter and on the podcast. You can subscribe to and rate The Optimistic Outlook on your favorite platform.?