We can’t do it alone… will you join our sustainability expedition?

In 2012, the explorer, Robert Swan OBE said: “The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will fix it”[i], and he’s a man who should know being the first person in history to walk to both the North and South Pole – all by the age of 33.

Those words are ever more prescient today. Six years after world leaders agreed to limit global temperature rises to within 1.5 degrees of pre-industrial levels, we’re still not fully on course.

Swan is a man who knows first-hand the impact of climate change. While walking across the Antarctic, his eyes turned from blue to grey, which he later discovered was due to the hole in the ozone layer that lies above the continent.

But our problems are much larger than this. Summers that are too hot and dry and winters that are too wet and cold affect our ability to grow crops to feed the population; catastrophic flooding and wildfires devastate communities as well as rising sea levels which threaten whole countries – climate change is contributing to all these issues.

Everyone on this planet has a role to play in fixing this and the energy industry is no exception. In fact, we’re going to need to lead the way. But honestly, we can’t do it alone.

This week we’ve issued our company-wide sustainability report. It shows we’re making progress in reducing emissions, but there’s more work – no, a lot more work – to do.

We have a job to do in our own operations, supply chain and through partnerships with our customers to further the energy transition.

If I look first at our own operations, our activities are guided by the United Nations’ 17 Sustainability Development Goals, part of its Agenda 2030. Basically, we put sustainability at the heart of our business strategy, and we intend to implement the ‘decade of action’ that was referred to at COP26.

The data is key to this and what’s clear is what gets measured gets managed so as an organisation we’re tracking all the data to make decisions about the company direction and how, what and when we do things. But is this enough? Probably not.

One key area where we’re going to have to make real progress is in our Scope 3 emissions – those of our supply chains and our customers. We’re going to have to partner and provide support, share our knowledge and expertise and maybe even our resources so these companies, integral to the countries we operate can also reduce their environmental impact.

Externally, the message from the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report is clear: we need to make changes with speed and scale. And if we’re going to make a difference we need to act now.

I’ve said it countless times before in articles and interviews that there is no single silver bullet for the energy transition. We will need a diversity of technologies and for a transitional time, we will need conventional technologies. Particularly those offering a lower carbon alternative, today. We have to build a bridge to get to net-zero and some conventional technologies will help us continue to generate power, lower emissions, and give us time to transition for the long-term, because net zero won’t happen overnight.

What is going to make a big difference is having the right business models to be able to implement change in our communities, as well as creating partnerships and using the skills and knowledge to first make incremental changes and then to bring forward new innovations.

Having said that, our portfolio is absolutely going to change going forward. We focus our R&D investments of €1 billion every year on technologies that are relevant in a decarbonised energy world.

As the leader of the Siemens Energy business in the UK&I, I can see the great work that’s going on, which means we’re leading the energy transition.

Coal fired power has reduced to some 2% of electricity generation and will disappear completely from the UK in the next two years, from at least 25% five years ago. ?But it isn’t enough. The reason our emissions have reduced is because we moved from one fossil fuel to another – but one which was less polluting.

If we’re looking at the incremental change needed to reduce global emissions, we need to look at how we can use gas (including abated gas with Carbon Capture and Storage or even hydrogen blends) to reduce emissions in the short and medium term, until zero carbon fuels are available. We don’t have the time to wait for a perfect solution, so while it won’t be the answer in 10 years’ time, it could be an answer now to set a course.

Of course, the answer is more renewable power and last week’s Scotwind announcement[ii], allocating the next areas of the seabed to be developed for offshore wind, is a huge step for clean power generation in the UK. If all developments are realised this could add 25GW of offshore wind generation – for context, this is more than twice the operational offshore wind in UK waters to date and more than half the total globally.

But it isn’t just the energy sector’s job to reduce emissions. Transport. Industry. Domestic heating… everything needs to change.

As Swan said the greatest threat is believing it is someone else’s problem to fix. So, will you join our sustainability expedition as we charter a new course to lead the energy transition? Because we can’t do it alone.

[i] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/robert-swan-antarctica_b_1315047

[ii] https://www.crownestatescotland.com/news/scotwind-offshore-wind-leasing-delivers-major-boost-to-scotlands-net-zero-aspirations