2024 in review - geopolitical drama, Cleaning Up relaunched, and more...
2024 has been a momentous year in politics, geopolitics, climate and clean energy. It has also been a huge year for Cleaning Up - and for me both professionally and personally.
2024 - a year to remember
As I write this we are drawing to the end of 2024. And what a year!
On the geopolitical front we have lived through President Biden’s dramatic abdication and President Trump’s re-election; the end of 14 years of UK Conservative government; the collapse of the German and French governments; the rise of nationalist parties in European elections (thankfully not yet reflected in the make-up of the new European Commission); year three of Russia’s illegal and disastrous war on Ukraine; the continuation of Israel’s pitiless assault on Hamas in Gaza and the opening of a second front against Hezbollah in Lebanon; the dramatic fall of the Assad regime in Syria; huge crowds on the street in Georgia; the re-election of South Africa’s ANC and India’s Prime Minister Modi with much-reduced mandates. And this is by no means an exhaustive list.
In the climate and clean energy space, 2024 has been yet another year of record-breaking roll-out of renewable energy, batteries and electric vehicles. Talk of a slow-down in EV sales has been shown to be largely wishful thinking on the part of those who want to see them fail. The reality is that over half of new cars in China are BEVs of PHEVs, a quarter in Europe, and one in ten in the US.
With China now the top global exporter of cars - as well as of almost every other category of climate technology - it should be clear to all that Europe has offshored not just manufacturing but industrial leadership. The US’s ability to respond hangs by a thread called the Inflation Reduction Act, perhaps about to be snipped by the incoming Administration.
The year has seen an extraordinary acceleration of the frenzy over AI. I get it, the potential is huge, I use it quite a bit myself. I’ve written a piece for Bloomberg on AI and energy, which should be out this week, and I’m an advisor to start-up data centre developer TerraByte. But the arms race to secure power supplies in the next few years for GW-scale data centres has descended into farce, with ever-more implausible proposals involving uncertified SMR designs, nuclear fusion and space-based power stations. The correction might not hit next year, but hit it will.
At least 2024 will be seen as the year the #HydrogenSoufflé definitively started to deflate with almost-daily news stories of absurd projects abandoned, and the European Court of Auditors calling for a reality check. I’m sorry for the people who have lost money or ruined their careers, but the world needs to focus on stuff that is actually going to drive the next wave of decarbonisation.
A few keynotes, in case you missed them
For those who have not seen one of my keynotes for a while, here are three from this year. Enjoy!
My keynote at Colbún’s Voces con Energia conference in Santiago, Chile in August
And, of course, my June 2024 Imperial College Energy Futures Lab Annual Lecture.
I was invited to deliver this as a response to the Lord Mayor Professor Michael Mainelli’s Ezra Memorial Lecture, in which he extolled the virtue of hydrogen in all its use cases. Despite the fact that Imperial has not promoted the video (allegedly because both the Lord Mayor and lecture sponsor Cadent complained), it has been watched by 56,000 people already :-)
Cleaning Update
One of my major projects for 2024 was the relaunch of Cleaning Up.
At the end of 2023 we lost our only sponsor and things looked bleak. I was forced to think about why it felt important to continue, and how to put it on a viable long-term footing.
What is unique about Cleaning Up is not the size of its audience but its influence - evidenced by the quality of guests and the number of senior decision-makers that listen or watch. If all I wanted was a bigger audience, I could churn out videos about the next alleged tech breakthrough, or dance around gurning on Tiktok. But what would be the point?
Instead, working with co-host Baroness Bryony Worthington and the team, we developed a business model around Cleaning Up’s unique ability to drive the debate on climate solutions. We pulled together a Leadership Circle of organisations committed to net zero; to reassure them about our professionalism and intellectual rigour, we wrote a set of editorial principles, and I invited my great friend James Cameron (the climate guy, not the Titanic guy) to chair a new Editorial Committee.
The following organisations became founder members of the Leadership Circle: Actis, Alcazar Energy, Ecopragma Capital, EDP, Eurelectric, Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL, Wärtsilä. I take this opportunity to thank them again. Over time, we will add a few more names, and by the end of next year our intention is to expand the orbit of Cleaning Up by adding a membership tier.
We also created an Alumni Network, for everyone who has ever been a guest on Cleaning Up. It’s an incredible climate solutions brains trust; the goal is to keep them involved in our activities, to continue to support them, and help them extend their networks.
It is early days, but I think we are building something important. There is a gap and we know how to fill it, by doing three things: creating a space for rigorous problem-solving; bringing together players focused on action; and using media to improve the level of public debate and to accelerate outcomes.
The relaunch is already paying off. Traffic is up by more than three times over this time last year. Overall, since its launch in July 2020, Cleaning Up has delivered 1.4 million downloads, and last week we passed through the 0.5 million milestone on YouTube. We are now averaging over 20,000 downloads per week, a run rate equivalent to 1 million downloads per year.
Our most popular episode so far was the Season 13 opener with Greg Jackson, CEO and Founder of Octopus and a member of the Leadership Circle, which has been downloaded around 50,000 times. Another Leadership Circle member, Jonathan Maxwell, founder of SDCL, is seventh in our all-time chart with nearly 20,000 downloads.
Cleaning Up events
We have also hosted our first events. We kicked off with a drinks party and dinner in New York during Climate Week in September. Last week, in London, we hosted the first meeting of our Editorial Council, followed by drinks for 100 (including around 30 members of the Alumni Network), and then a dinner for the Leadership Circle and a few of their guests.
The drinks were a particular highlight. Ed Miliband, UK Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, dropped in to say a few words. The UK’s bipartisan support for climate action - the envy of many other countries - is under stress as never before. It is no secret that Ed and I are cut from different political cloth, so I think it was a welcome signal to many present that we remain committed to the same goals, even though we may not agree on the mix of policies to get there.
For more photos of Cleaning Up’s Seasonal Drinks in London, click here
Two giants of system thinking
I’m not going to go through all of this season’s Cleaning Up guests - you can find a list of them easily enough here or on your favourite podcast platform or on YouTube, and a write-up of their episodes here. However, I am going to draw your attention to the two episodes released since the last Thoughts of Chairman Michael newsletter in November.
First up, Episode 188 with James Cameron, international climate lawyer, social entrepreneur, chair of our new Editorial Council and self-styled ‘radical in a suit’.
James has been on the show before, Episode 23, talking mainly about trade. This time, James and I mulled over the underwhelming results of COP29 Baku and the future of the COP process. With incoming President Trump almost certain to pull the US out again, with the EU mired in its long stagnation and with war on its doorstep, and with China still the wrong side of peak emissions, business-as-usual does not feel like an option.
European leaders offering to invest hundreds of billions in their strategic competitors emerging economic superpowers reads like peak complacency to me. Listening back, I was amazed how patient James was with me. No one sees the need for an international legal and diplomatic process as clearly as James.
Listen now to Episode 188 with James Cameron, international climate lawyer, social entrepreneur and chair of the Cleaning Up Editorial Council, on what just happened (or didn’t) at Baku, and the need to rethink the COP process. Or watch the episode on YouTube.
Second, Episode 189 with Greg de Temmerman, deputy CEO of Cleaning Up Leadership Circle member Quadrature Climate Foundation. Greg is a former plasma physicist and coordinating scientist at ITER, the huge fusion project in the south of France. Switching to philanthropy, he is using his keen grasp of system thinking to find the sensitive intervention points that allow a few billion dollars of philanthropic funding, dwarfed by the amounts available to governments and the capital markets, to have a decisive impact.
You will not find a more insightful thinker about the technical and societal challenges holding back climate action.
Listen now to Episode 189 with Greg de Temmerman, deputy CEO of Quadrature Climate Foundation and member of the Cleaning Up Leadership Circle, on the catalytic role of philanthropy in climate action. Or watch the episode on YouTube.
In other news…
2024 has also been a big year for EcoPragma Capital, with a number of new transactions completed and more on the way.
Perhaps most notable was the sale of industrial heat pump company Heaten to Advent International, in which we supported the selling shareholders. In addition, the pan-European truck charging business we incubated, PragmaCharge, has made significant progress this year, announcing its first project in Valencia, Spain, and its second in Kotka Harbour, Finland, as well as securing an undisclosed amount of funding from an A-list of investors.
Eavor, the advanced Geothermal company for which I act as an advisor, secured an additional €45m from the European Investment Bank for its project in Geretsried, and has begun a project in Hannover. Hysata secured $111m in Series B funding to continue commercialising its breakthrough hydrogen electrolyzer technology. XLCC, the greenfield HVDC cable company building a factory in Hunterston, Scotland, secured £20m from the UK Infrastructure Bank; it also received a £9m grant from Scottish Enterprise. Atlas Agro, a green fertiliser company, has signed a deal with Casa Dos Ventos to develop a project in Brazil, in addition to its project in the Pacific North West, where the hydrogen hub became the second to receive government funding.
My time as chair of Zeelo will be finishing at the end of the year. It has been an enormous thrill, helping Sam Ryan and the team grow the business from its very first client to the point where it has delivered over 10 million rides, safely and now (in the UK) profitably - as well as completing their first acquisition. As Zeelo turns its attention to the vast US market, it feels like the right time to hand over to someone who can provide practical help there.
Non-profit and personal
On the non-profit side, Sebastian Kind and his team at RELP, whose mission is to accelerate the energy transition in emerging and developing countries, continue to work with countries across Latin America and the Carribean, as well as Southeast Asia. This year they secured additional funding from the Ballmer Group.
I continue to work on gender and energy issues via my membership of the Advisory Boards of the Hawthorn Club and WiSER. I am also on the strategic advisory panel for the UK’s Review of Energy Market Arrangements (REMA), which I must say has taken a bit of a back seat to Clean Power 2030. Moving Mountains Forum had another successful year, the 13th since I co-founded it.
My family is healthy and doing great. 2024 saw all three kids starting to get ready for their GCE exams, and Alice’s clinical nutrition studies too went well. My mum came out to visit us over the Easter and summer holidays in Switzerland. She’s 93 and still running her antique print and map business, so if you are looking for a gift for anyone, at any time of the year visit KittyPrint.com, and yes, she does deliver globally.
News on the building front has been diabolical. About a decade ago I did a deep green retrofit of my house in Notting Hill, which was written up as an inspiring story by Ed Lucas in the Economist in 2015, and then as a cautionary tale by Pilita Clark in the FT in 2019. Well things have turned into a bit of a saga, involving water ingress, structural works, far more cost than anticipated, and an extended period living in Brent. Hopefully all a fading memory within a few more months (if it weren’t for the debt).
As if that were not painful enough, our landscape restoration project in Cold Ash, West Berkshire, on which we have worked for three years, has been referred to the planning committee. We bought 5 acres and a terribly run-down house in 2021; the Master Plan should see the project capture over 500 tons of CO2 over the next 30 years, while delivering very substantial Biodiversity Net Gain, reduced flood risk, improved road safety and restored views. However, we need to knock down the house and rebuild it on a former tennis court in the garden, which is apparently an issue, despite plenty of local support. Sigh.
Project Bo is so back!
2024 did bring one really heart-warming story. Some of you may know that a group of us have working since 2017 to provide reliable clean power to a neonatal intensive care unit in Bo, Sierra Leone, set up by the extraordinary Dr Niall Conroy - an effort we dubbed “Project Bo”.
We got the system up and running in 2018, and it performed well, although there were many lessons to learn. If you supported our crowdfunding back in the day, I thank you again. And then, during the course of the pandemic the system keeled over, and the unit had to be supplied by a diesel generator.
Well, this year with the help of the EKI foundation, a new local service provider, and funding from Cleaning Up alumna Gina Domanig out of the surplus from the European Venture Fair, we got it back up and running. We can even see it working via the system’s remote monitoring:
The unit’s power supply is connected to the grid, and you can see that in general consumption exceeds what the solar panels provide. Every so often, however, there’s a power cut and the batteries are called on - look at the state of charge, the blue line.
Not only is the system working technically, but it is saving lives. In September the journal Acta Paediatrica published Dr Conroy’s paper “Electrification and specialist training associated with decreased neonatal mortality and increased admissions in Sierra Leone”, which documented the decrease in mortality over the period when the unit started to have reliable power, despite a dramatic increase in the number of admissions. This sort of peer-reviewed evidence is vital in opening up funding from a lot of multilateral agencies and NGOs, so we are hoping that Project Bo has a catalytic effect.
Seasons greetings
So, there you have it. There is just one more episode of Cleaning Up to be released this week - our traditional year-end summary with Lord Adair Turner, chair of the Energy Transitions Commission.
Otherwise, that’s it from me for 2024. Have a great break over the holidays, recharge your batteries, and see you in the new year!
Selah.
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