So, back to work after COP27
As COP27 wraps up and exhausted delegates fly home I suspect I’m not alone in feeling slightly underwhelmed but unsurprised at the outcome.
The faint praise provided by the BBC during COP27 and now in the analysis of its aftermath and likely impact, offers this blunt assessment of our odds of keeping 1.5C alive: “There's a fifty-fifty chance over the next five years that we'll go over this important marker of temperature increases compared to pre-industrial times. We're likely to pass it permanently by 2031.”
Since COP1 in Berlin, 1995, delegates have been aware of a number of apparently simple global solutions: Stop extracting fossil fuels, livestock farming and cutting down trees; Continue building out renewables as fast as you can; Start taxing greenhouse gas emissions in proportion to the costs they impose on others.
The trouble is, these same global solutions present intractable choices to individual nations who, to a greater or lesser degree, depend on continuing production and use of fossil fuels and industrial scale agriculture to build and maintain their economies, fund their renewable energy transition plans, and to adapt to the brutal challenges of a rapidly and chaotically warming climate.
In the UK, as elsewhere in the world, none of us are bystanders. The choices we make every day often trade climate impacts against other factors: Who you choose to vote for (not sure), where you shop (online, mostly), whether you eat meat (sometimes), the car you drive (an old diesel), how you heat your home (right now, a woodburner), how often you fly (more often than I’d like) and where you work (we’ll get to that).
I don’t feel too bad about most of these choices because everyone’s circumstances are different and context matters (in a couple of hours when electricity is cheap, an air source heat pump will kick to keep the house warm for tomorrow; solar panels will cover a trickle of daytime electricity use; and my car stays at home most days when I cycle to work - is it really worth making a new BEV to sit in my driveway?)
But I feel pretty good about where I work, and what we do. Together with an extraordinary team of engineers in Sheffield, UK, Libertine creates Linear Generator technology. Linear Generators produce clean power from renewable fuels, complementing intermittent renewables on the grid and complementing battery electrification in those transport applications where recharging is not sufficiently practical, economic or renewable. Linear Generators have the potential to combine the efficiency of fuel cells with the cost and durability of conventional engines, and - crucially - offering the flexibility to use existing fuels that are in widespread use today – without locking in their use for longer than we need them.
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Our mission at Libertine is to bring forward the widespread use of Linear Generators in distributed power generation and transport applications. We do this by creating a technology platform that combines high performance linear electrical machines with power electronics, motion control systems and developer tools to help OEMs accelerate and de-risk their Linear Generator product development.
A few years ago, Linear Generators would have been described as ‘hard technology’ and viewed with trepidation. But they work, and in the US they are already entering commercial use.
If we are successful in our mission, power grids around the world will be able to accommodate more renewables and become more resilient, powered on demand by renewable fuels such as biogas, other fuels made from agricultural wastes and residues, and maybe even synthetic fuels made from green hydrogen. Electrification of trucks, buses and tractors – especially in the high growth economies such as India – will proceed more rapidly thanks to the economics and flexibility of hybrid powertrain architectures using Linear Generator technology and powered by renewable fuels.
Alongside solar, wind, batteries and electrolysis, Linear Generators are one of a portfolio of technologies which in combination have the potential to both mitigate climate change and help communities adapt to the climate challenges on the journey to 2050 and beyond. This is why our mission matters, and why despite the mixed success of COP27, there is a path to 2050 that we can help to deliver.
Another 27 COPS and it’ll be 2049, when we’ll get to find out how we all did.