The best thing that could happen to the energy industry | Matt Tilleard
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. The clean energy era is here and it will be an age of radical abundance, says renewable entrepreneur Matt Tillyard. In his talk, he shares why it's time to retire the narrative of energy as a zero-sum game. showing how the renewable revolution is shifting power from those who hoard fuel to those who innovate and deploy technology. Hear why he thinks it's the best thing that could happen to the energy industry.
Our modern world was built on fuel. History has been determined by who finds, who controls and who burns the dominant fuel of the age. So the past makes sense when you look at it wearing fuel-tinted glasses. And these are not just a really great fashion accessory for this year's Fyre Festival. They are, in fact, essential safety equipment for our leaders as they seek to shape history. In the 1970s, for example, the oil cartel OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, tried to cut off the supply of oil to the United States. It caused an instant panic, a recession within months. Trump was 27 when those lines of cars snaked around the block. Putin was 21. Xi was 20. Our leaders understand in their bones that power comes from fuel.
But now we're in the midst of the next great energy transition. So who will control the future of clean energy? Who will be the Saudi Arabia of this transition? Well, through fuel-tinted glasses, the answer seems obvious. It's whoever controls the copper, the lithium, the graphite, the cobalt, the rare earths, the critical minerals that we need. But our fuel-tinted glasses are broken, because this is the first transition not to another dominant fuel, but to a technology. And that changes everything. Now, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what this means. Our team is building one of the largest distributed renewable energy utilities for Africa. CrossBoundary Energy uses on-site solar, batteries and wind to bring cheaper, cleaner and more reliable power to businesses.
And cross-boundary access uses the same technologies to bring first-time power to some of the 600 million people living on this continent without it. And here is what I have learned at the silicon face of this transition. Unlike fuel, technology is less as extensional.
What is the best thing that could happen to the energy industry?
It's more circular. It's more fungible. And it's more abundant. So I can use one of our projects to explain how this works. This is Tolognaro in Madagascar. It's a remote town of 55,000 people next to a major critical minerals mine. Power for the mine and the community until recently came from heavy fuel oil generators on the mine site. Now, CrossBoundary powers the mine with a renewable energy microgrid made up of solar, wind and batteries. Soon, we hope that we will be able to phase out the generators altogether. Now, let me tell you a story. Imagine two cartels. One is real, OPEC, which seeks to control the price of oil. The other is an imaginary alliance of the major miners of copper and lithium today, Chile, China and Australia.
Now, if you want to run a good cartel, everyone knows you need to have a great acronym. And so let's call it the Pisco Sour Peking Duck Fosters Cartel, or PPF for short. Now, let's imagine that each cartel, OPEC and PPF, seeks to cut off the supply of their respective commodity to the rest of the world. In Tolognaro, before our energy transition, this would have caused an instant crisis. Without oil, the lights in the community go out and the mine shuts down. But after the transition, nothing much changes in Tolognaro. And that's because in a fuel-based world, constant supply of fuel is existential. But in a technology-based world, without a constant supply of lithium, your old lithium batteries keep working.
You don't need a constant supply of new copper for your copper wires to keep conducting electricity.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:29
2
What is the best thing that could happen to the energy industry?
3:29–12:44
3
How is the clean energy transition changing global power dynamics?
12:44–13:03
4
Who will control the future of clean energy?
13:03–14:31
5
What are the benefits of technology over fuel in energy production?
14:31–15:04
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from TED Talks Daily
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