By Chris Welby, Good Energy’s Commercial Director

Timeline 07:00 15th July 2050
Opening one bleary eye, William Welby (aged 43) turns the alarm off on his wind-up alarm clock.  At the same time the house comes to life as the windows automatically open on the shaded side of the house in response to the rising temperature caused by the early morning sun.

After a hot shower, using water heated by the solar thermal panels, William heads to the kitchen.  The fridge panel tells him he is currently exporting from his PV panels, and that their little electric Fiesta car has successfully charged overnight.  Good news!  It also tells him the current cost of import electricity is £3.50/kWh, and the temperature outside is already 27C. Not such good news. To avoid using grid energy, William makes his toast now, before requesting coffee from the drinks machine.  Thanks to the super insulation, the house is still cool.

As he eats his breakfast, William skims his personalised newspaper which arrives each morning via e-mail.  He smiles when he reads that shares in Good Energy (the UK’s biggest energy company) have risen again.  “Dad’ll be pleased” he thinks.  “Although if he regales me again with stories of the pioneering days at Good Energy, I swear I’ll kill him and inherit his collection of antique mobile phones”.

After breakfast, William heads upstairs to his office.  He sees his boss has already sent him a couple of e-mails.  He’s also due a conference call at 9:00.  He wonders whether to give his colleague Morwenna a buzz, to make sure she’s aware she has a conference call, very early for her!

Elsewhere in the house, his daughter is querying the location of the sun cream.  His wife, ever helpful, tells her it’ll be wherever she left it.  Then with a bang of the front door, he hears a quiet purr as they set off to school in the car.  William checks today’s energy use online.  His wife and daughter have managed to use £1.50 in electricity between getting up and leaving the house.  Had it not been for the solar PV, it would have been a lot more.

As the outdoor temperature rises, he hears the windows close and the renewable cooling system kick in.  He checks the weather forecast.  Highs of 38C, although it could be 42C in central London.  “Darn!” he thinks, knowing he’ll be catching the train there later today. However, it’ll give him a chance to try out the new high-speed train from Bristol.  45 minutes to central London means he doesn’t need to leave until midday.

After his conference call, William heads back to the kitchen and stacks the dishwasher before setting it to “Eco mode”, so it’ll start when it receives a signal via the smart meter that surplus wind power is on the network.  He notices the garden looking decidedly brown, but currently water meters are restricting water consumption.  Luckily, William’s  rainwater collector means he can keep his Veg  patch going.

Before setting off to the station, William sets the house to shutdown, which closes and locks all windows and doors, switching off all non-essential appliances. Then pulling his hat down against the sun, he walks to his local EV car club point to pick up a car to drive to the station, checking his swipe card is in his pocket to release the car from its docking point.

Dropping the car at the station docking point, William makes his way to the platform waving his credit card at the gate.  The card will be waved again at the platform exit gate in London, and he’ll be billed for the journey.  The train glides silently into the platform, not overcrowded for the time of day.

During the high speed journey, William continues to work using his handheld office.  “The speech recognition software works much better on these quieter trains” William notices.  “Less time correcting misheard phrases”.  His Dad used to lug a laptop around on business journeys, or try to type on the impossibly small keyboards on his Blackberry, or “Bloopberry” as he called it. His thoughts are interrupted by the train announcer.  “Ladies and gentlemen, we will be slightly later arriving in London due to a speed reduction imposed by a power constraint on the network.”  “Hmm!” thinks William, “probably means the dishwasher won’t run, if we have constraints”.  He’d noticed the lack of wind as he’d crossed the station car park, and with the Severn Barrage still years away from completion, power constraints were still a regular feature.  Another of his father’s Hobby Horses:  “Should’ve been built years ago, but politicians just dithered and pontificated.  Then Welsh independence got in the way.  Complete bloody shambles!”  

 “I wonder if I’ll be like that when I’m in my 80s” thinks William.  “Probably not.  Dad was always campaigning about something on energy and the climate.”

In London, William finds the underground shut due to the heat, so sets off on foot to his meeting. He’s glad he’s bought the water to drink.  Still the air is better than it used to be now carbon vehicles have been banned from the capital.  He decides to cut through Hyde Park, past the memorial to Boris Johnson, whoever he was.

Reaching his meeting, William shows his ID, and went down into the basement meeting rooms where it’s cooler.  He’s late, but so would others be with the tube shut.  “Afternoon William” says a voice behind him.  “Hi Professor” he replied.  “All ready for the history lesson?” asks the Professor “learn about the day it all started”.

Timeline 09:00 15th July, 2009
The story of a day in the future about my son may be fictitious, but the way we will live in 2050 is beginning to take shape as politicians in the UK and across the world start to get to grips with what we have to do to de-carbonise our energy supplies.

We take energy for granted.  We flick a switch and something happens.  It is human nature.  I once heard a guy talking about waste. He stated that if households had to take their own rubbish to the tip rather than have it collected, we would soon start using less and recycling more.  If we had to make our own energy, the same would apply.

The government’s roadmap to a low carbon economy brings together most of the strands of what we need to do.  We need our buildings to waste less energy (Energy efficiency, low carbon homes etc), create their own energy where possible (Feed-in Tariffs and renewable heat), change the way we use transport (Electric Vehicles, better public transport) and what energy they cannot avoid using should come from a network of low carbon sources (Renewable energy, supplemented by Nuclear and Clean coal if we must).  But this is not just about infrastructure, this is about attitudes and behaviour.  Like a bolt of lightning, human beings will take the easiest path to reach their objective.  The role of government is to ensure that the path that is easiest, is the one we need to take.  Carbon energy prices must rise.

We need to make inefficient houses without renewable energy as unpopular as houses without central heating.  (People only buy them at a discount so they can install it.)  We need to decarbonise our energy supply including everyday transport, leaving carbon-based transport to vintage vehicles, or vehicles which have to be fuelled by oil-based fuels.

Today’s government announcements are the first step on this journey to 2050.  The words are good and the ambition merited, but it will fail unless we win the hearts and minds of a cynical public, especially when they start to see their fuels bills rise.