Friday 8 February 2008

Desperation in the coal sector – The Future(gen) is dead, but industry refuse to re-think, or?

Futuregen, another clean coal power project is dead, but the coal people refuse to see the writing on the wall.

Technology exist to deliver fossil free solutions, but that require us to drop the current supply driven perspective and move to focus on the services we need. The heavy coal actors will probably never to manage this transition, but in some companies there is hope shining in through the cracks of the fossil façade.

For example, Vattenfall is working on a new business model (Portfolio Vision) that moves them away from the linear (block-on-a-block) approach that result in more coal and CCS solutions, towards a service perspective that look at what people really want (see snapshot). Not clear if this will transform one of the biggest polluter and slick climate communicators to a company that actually deliver sustainable solutions, but it is encouraging to see innovative thinking from a company that is in the forefront when it comes to locking EU into an unsustainable future.

Maybe they have read one of the many studies that show that sustainable system solutions (demand side and renewables integrated) is less expensive, e.g. one of the studies from Booz Allen Hamilton.