Professor Averil MacDonald’s starting point was that we should face facts – even if we reach net zero, the elimination of fossil fuels etc will not be enough to slow global warming. Recent figures show that the national grid relies on 56% of power not sourced from wind or sun. In fact, total generation from green sources is falling whilst demand is rising because we are increasingly encouraged to use heat pumps and electric cars.  The result is that we rely on importing power via electricity interconnectors – high-voltage cables, often subsea, that link national power grids to enable the import and export of electricity – with double payments  for both the power production and for its transit. And the big question is – can this source be relied on in future?

We may have halved our CO2 emissions because China produces for us instead. China, though, is top by far for solar production, nuclear output and battery storage development.

We need to scale up massively, improve our grid efficiency, develop storage facilities and go for much more nuclear.  So what’s next?  There is a great deal going on:

• Better chemical storage  (eg Highview Power)
• Improved batteries using electromagnetic or thermal energy storage, floating wind power (eg Blue-green wind power – the integration of renewable wind energy (green) with aquatic or marine environments (blue), encompassing offshore wind farms and related water-based renewable technologies),
• Small or advanced nuclear reactors local to demand needs (such as the Small Modular Reactor (SMR) business being developed by Rolls Royce)
• Power from tidal devices such as EMEC Tidal Power
• Eden geothermal energy project

More way-out ideas include high temperature ceramic superconductors for efficient transmission of power, or space solar capturing beamed to earth stations by microwaves. Maybe by 2050.

But beyond technology Averil fed back ideas from a recent conference about Mitigation and Adaptation. Because climate change drives increased temperature and flooding regimes, this translates into issues to do with ill-prepared buildings, infrastructure, health, finance, land use and supply chains.

For the UK that has the world’s largest pre-1900 building stock, we would need to refurbish 425 houses per day until 2050 in order to reach the standard required. Furthermore, as cities tend to be 5 °C warmer than the surrounding countryside, they need more greenspaces, rain water gardens and plants along walls. Maybe we need to build more basements to keep cooler? Also we need to adapt food supplies to flood and drought threats and avoid panic buying and rationing (remember Covid?). There are high risks in having just-in-time supply chain thinking, and having only 131 delivery hubs handling 95% of food sales.

But we also need to adapt our personal lives.  Averil concluded that there should be more focus on household water supplies, whether in buckets or butts, and a move to decentralised distribution and localised food growing.