Picture the scene in the not too distant future.
A wealthy individual, someone who has financially benefitted from the internet/tech explosion. A kindly, gentle soul with a good attitude toward their fellow earth dwellers, possibly a vegetarian who does a lot of quiet charity work..
However, they have a large house with many solar panels on the southern aspect of the roof.
In the spacious three car garage there’s a Tesla Model S and a Nissan Leaf. Along one wall is a cabinet housing a 50 kilowatt hour battery system which can run the house for a couple of days if there’s a power outage.
This person has invested a great deal of money in house, electric cars, energy saving domestic appliances, power saving lighting and renewable energy and storage.
They can effectively live off the grid and yet still do all the things wealthy people in the privileged world can do.
Along side this picture a slightly different scene just up the road.
Someone with far less income living in a modest apartment with a battered 10 year old diesel car parked on the street and no roof space to install solar panels.
Even if they could afford an electric car they can’t charge it at home, they can’t benefit from solar PV/electric car hyper economy, they don’t have room to install large battery packs so can’t store cheap energy to use when tariffs are high.
They are at the mercy of the fossil fuel cartels, the dubious dealings of foreign leaders who can turn off the gas, coal and oil we import to sustain the life we have grown reliant on.
Both these extremes already exist of course but they are both likely to increase in the next few years
It’s not a very rosy picture and as someone who owns a house with a south facing roof, an electric car and solar panels, it’s a possible future that has increasingly worried me.
It’s no longer an argument about if electric cars work or are environmentally less damaging than old fossil burners, the undeniable fact is, once you’ve bought one, you spend less money making it go along.
So if you can afford to buy one you can carry on as you were for less.
However at present unless you have somewhere off the street to park it and enough money to buy a new car, these choices are no more than pipe dreams.
Many wealthy people have already understood that if they buy a Tesla Model S for the same cost as a Jaguar, BMW 7 series, Audi A8 or Mercedes S class, they can save shed loads on fuel costs and end up with a wonderful car that goes faster than all the others.
Not only increasing wealth disparity with the less than 1% more or less having all the money and the remaining 99% making do with the droppings, there is an increasing danger of energy disparity.
That is until recently.
In the past six months I have been busy learning about community energy groups around the country. There are hundreds of them, some in small villages, some in towns, some in large urban areas.
Groups of people from a community get together, form a small community benefit company, install larger scale solar panels, wind turbines or micro hydro-electric systems and the entire community benefits from the electricity they produce.
I’m in the process of setting one up in my small village, the project has huge local support from right across the political spectrum.
Two things are important to remember here, one, it’s not a new idea, Germany and Denmark have been using this method for the last 25 years, and two it’s more about money and energy security than being green or self sufficient.
There are over 100 community energy schemes already up and running in the UK, with over 5,000 in the pipeline.
So I am now going to ask you to imagine another near future scenario. A suburb where the very rich individual with the solar panels on his roof and the Model S in the garage is also involved with and has invested in a community renewable energy scheme. The individual in the small apartment has access to a community owned electric car that has a dedicated parking space with free charging.
Part of the scheme has included a small 4 kilowatt hour battery for every member which takes them off the grid between 5:30 and 7 pm, thus massively reducing the demand from the grid at peak time. These batteries are charged at night or from the community owned solar PV.
If one community did this it would make no difference to the UK. If 100 did, the engineers running the national grid might just be able to register the change in demand. If 10,000 communities followed this path, the entire energy and transport sector would be transformed in ways we cannot currently imagine.
As I always say, it’s not necessarily easy, but it is perfectly possible.