People at the centre of energy journey, says Lamé Verre
- 22 August 2024
New energy value chains might start with critical minerals and end with electricity powering a car or a building. But for Energy Institute fellow and World Economic Forum councillor Lamé Verre, it’s the people shaping all aspects of that value chain that really matter. “Energy is life,” she says, ironically.
“What is the human side of the story of energy transition – of decarbonisation?
“Climate change, as we can see, is a global challenge. If we were to think about the world as one country, what would we do differently and how would we collaborate?
“If we’re talking about sustainability, ESG, and all of these things, we’re saying that we’re doing it for human beings, and therefore we have to put people back at the centre of what we're doing.”
People drive demand, Verre says.
People shape and make policy. People prioritise and we proselytise.
Nigerian-born Verre, a keynote speaker at this year’s Resourcing Tomorrow conference in London, has been an outspoken advocate for a genuinely equitable and just world energy transition. One based on a true world view, or at least a truly shared world view.
She has written, recently, about “five Ds” – decarbonisation, deglobalisation, decentralisation, demographics and digitalisation – that she sees shaping the world’s current economic and sustainability agenda.
“I am privileged to sit on many conversations on global stages, and the conversations around decarbonisation, or the move from high carbon to low carbon economies, are driven by a Western lens. There are different realities in many parts of the world,” Verre says.
“We start to realise that we cannot achieve what needs to be achieved unless we bring everyone on the journey.
“But everyone’s journey and pathway to decarbonisation will have to be different.
“Africa has always provided the raw materials that create socio-economic development, jobs, lives, and livelihoods. And so when you say, we’re no longer investing in XYZ, we only want to invest in ABC, you’re taking people’s lives and livelihoods away.
“If you’re thinking about this within the ESG framework, that significantly impacts the S in ESG because the social value and impact of what we do as businesses, as countries, as regions, matters.
“So when I look at where the world is going, through a climate lens, I see that Africa is being hit by those five Ds, not necessarily driven by them. Africa is going to bear the brunt of it all.
“The continent has a young population – 80% of the population is less than 39 years old – and digital access is not even across the continent. People are still digitally behind from an access point of view.
“There’s energy poverty. People don’t have access to basic energy. [The UN] calculated the basic energy-for-human-rights need as the electricity needed to power a refrigerator. It’s not a lot, but 600 million people cannot access it.
“We’re talking about 8 billion people globally and maybe 10 billion by 2050 when we’re meant to get net zero.
“If you look at mankind's history, we’ve never actually transitioned from any energy form. In the last 150 years we’ve made energy additions, such as switching from wood to coal, coal to oil, oil to gas and now renewables.
“We’re still using each one in a different format and they’re all still there in the energy mix.
“Moving away from fossil fuel is ultimately the North Star, but achieving this without suitable investment, policies, and willpower is a tall ask.
“The challenges are there, as I’ve said.
“But the challenges could bring significant opportunities if we put the right pieces together and create an enabling environment.
“Africa is one of the youngest continents in the world right now and it will be for a long time.
“As we can see, the world’s population is not as old as we think. It’s just that the people are scattered around in different places or in the wrong places for who is measuring.
“If you take China, India, Indonesia in Asia, Brazil in Latin America, and Nigeria in Africa, and even the US, that’s five countries making up half the future world's population. So you either have to bring the jobs to people or take the people to the jobs.”
Verre discusses the layers of understanding and collaboration—involving consumers, policy-makers, financiers, innovators, and others—needed to drive “real” solutions to the world’s decarbonisation, economic and sustainability challenges.
“Achieving a just transition while ensuring energy security and affordability for all necessitates historic levels of collaboration and partnerships,” she wrote earlier this month.
“Traditional energy companies must work with emerging clean-energy firms, and the Global North must align its energy transition demands with the Global South’s primary energy needs.
“A truly just transition requires countries at different development stages to collaborate on understanding and addressing each other’s needs.”
Verre says at all levels, people have got to start thinking “whole system, end-to-end” and certainly more generationally.
“Where does the beginning of your process start at the end of somebody else’s process, and where does the end of your process feed into somebody else’s thinking?
“From an agricultural perspective, for example, if you're going to do biofuel, you can't be thinking about doing biofuel without engaging with the Agri-sector because you need that waste and don’t want to compete with food production; otherwise, you have unintended consequences and create social problems.
“That energy, food and water nexus is becoming increasingly vital to understand and plan out.
“Mining, on the other hand, is energy and water intensive.
“If people don’t have access to clean energy and water, how do you balance what we need for the energy transition [minerals] and what people need for basic living and to exist in society?
“In the industrial revolution … a lot of projects were funded by state capital and public funding. Now, because the public purse in every country is very tight or maybe even empty, there’s an expectation that the private sector will take the brunt of the first impact of financing projects.
“At the moment, it feels like we have this one-size-fits-all approach that is making companies either scale back or do nothing because it’s just too hard.
“If the government and policies are unstable and the demand side is not ready to take the new product, the banks will deem it unbankable. They need everything to be perfectly aligned.
“How, then, do you create new funding models to be able to deliver the scale? Because these are huge-scale projects that will be delivered by 2050.
“In terms of industrial strategy, we tend to focus on China. However, the other people I think got it right are the Scandinavians and the Nordic countries who think long-term. Their quarters are not three months but 25 years.
“They’re thinking generationally in everything they do: public, private, and philanthropic.
“So, there are models out there, to be honest. It’s not like we’re reinventing the wheel.”
