A message from our CEO
Renewables - Its the Economy!
Bill Clinton, once famously said, “It’s the economy stupid!”. This fundamental understanding of the importance of the US economic position went on to win him the 1992 US presidential election.
Today not many people are “Getting” the economy. But when it comes to renewable energy – its all about the economy!
The simple big thing that our States, the United States and the European States are not getting is that because the economy is driven by oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy the economy is floundering.
The price of oil goes up, the inflation rises, the economy falters. Nuclear power issues (like Fukushima or Iran), the price of energy goes up and the economy falters.
China burns a lot of coal, are making friends in Africa to gain oil, American troops leave the middle East, India and China may next move in to prop up their economic development by oil, where will this lead?
Energy politics shapes our world, shapes our economy.
A faltering economy exposes poor practices in the global finance industry, such as sub-prime mortgages and city extravagances.
With unemployment and social unrest, sometimes positive results arise, sometimes negative results. The ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 changed the face of middle east and oil politics, but there is much more to occur yet.
There’s ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and London movements with no other objective than to point out the inequality.
There’s Syrian unrest, Iran’s bid to become a nuclear nation. If there was no oil in the middle east, and it was elsewhere the global might map be different.
If the world had no oil at all, we would have never developed the advanced technology we have today so quickly, and the world would be a poorer place in my opinion – cheap energy leads to fast change.
However, now is the time to change again how the economy is driven: Underpin the economy with renewables. Starting with our own economy, if we generated our own energy, firstly a lot of cash presently going out the island on oil and electricity will stay in the island.
If less money is spent on fuel powering heating and electricity, people and businesses will have more cash in their pocket.
Harness the tides, wind and sun and sell the energy to Europe, make money from our unique island position in the sea.
Harness the potential of our offshore status, attracting renewable energy finance houses, harness the high skilled marketers, financiers and entrepreneurs who live here.
Harness the engineering , manufacturing and fulfilment talents that are based here.
Expand this new way of powering the economy and Guernsey will be better off and at a global level
the middle east will find itself with less cash and a not so powerful position.
Ultimately renewables will enable devolution of power to the individual as well as to smaller businesses and local governments.
Vast global energy institutions will be unsustainable when you can generate your energy in the back yard.
Large business will never go away and nor should it, but a transformation and paradigm shift is already happening.
The big question at the moment by governments, corporations and social thinkers is “has capitalism failed us?”. Probably not, but it needs to change to be a more caring, better capitalist system.
The US government has for years subsidised the politics of energy and propped up oil regimes and oil businesses.
That’s not capitalism is it? But it has promulgated and sustained the self-fulfilling nature of the non-renewable energy industry and those that support it, from combustion engineering technology in the likes of cars,
electricity generation, heating boilers at the expense of developing renewable energy technologies such as heat pumps, photovoltaics, solar heat collectors and fuel cells to name a few.
That sounds less like capitalism and more like socialist intervention.
Putting the politics of energy aside and reaching for that new paradigm, really a recognition we all live on one world and breathe each other’s air, share each other’s energy resources,
and knowing we need to deal with social unrest, poverty and extremities of rich and poor, and recognise we are all citizens on this one world and that that each citizen of our island
and each citizen of this world has the basic human right of opportunity to have adequate education and allow the aspirations to become to
better people, live in better homes and eat good wholesome food. Renewable energy goes a good way to assisting the world on this path.
Whilst energy prices will continue to rise, whatever we do, the difference between blindly continuing to use fossil fuels and nuclear energy and using renewable energy in its place,
is that with the ever increasing expensive unsustainable energies is that they will just keep getting more and more expensive.
Renewables on the other hand present us with a different set of economic parameters: when renewables make renewables, renewable manufacturing will slowly become free.
This is because at the moment solar panels are manufactured by using conventional energy resources, but when solar panels make solar panels and the energy generated to make them is free, energy costs will begin to reduce.
That will bolster the economy considerably and the world will become a different place.
We all have to experience deep trauma to change: a lot of people have lost a lot of money in recently years. People have lost their jobs, had to fight in terrible wars, people have lost their homes and their self-esteem.
With a renewable backed economy, growth in the economy will not come from the traditional revenues of make more, sell more (throw more away in the tip), but from internally generated local revenues where less has to be spent, because energy costs are less and because we will think differently about survival and protection.
I will finish with a recent Bill Clinton article in the Financial Times 21st January 2012. He talks about creating a culture of prosperity, enhancing profits, increasing economic inclusion giving more people a stake in a shared future.
He finishes “The most effective global citizens will be those who succeed in merging their business and philanthropic missions to build a future of shared responsibility and shared prosperity”.
My spin on this is that the wealth required to move us globally on this shared future is to create the wealth to enable this is through capitalist exploitation of renewable energy, underpinning and creating a prosperous and ongoing robust economy.
In the meantime there’s huge opportunities for the island to make some money and for Guernsey folk to get engaged in creating a better local economy as well as a better world.
Each person in each part of the world has the same opportunity.
Paul Fletcher
CEO E-Si Limited.
