The Future of Power: How Decentralized Generation and Storage Will Lead the Green Revolution
What’s the Motivation to Go Green
Renewable energy, environmentally-friendly business practices, and going green: you can nary turn on a television or open a newspaper without hearing about these types of interconnected sustainability goals. But for those looking to change the world, making sure this green revolution becomes reality and not just another buzzword is paramount.
In the early days of climate action, these ideas were less mainstream and it was the die-hard environmentalist crowds that focused on them. However, today’s landscape of the ‘green revolution’ includes a refreshingly wide spectrum of players:
Boardrooms across the world are actively discussing ways to reduce emissions and embrace sustainability, with three-quarters of Boards of companies actively including climate change in their decisions.
Lawmakers across the political spectrum are adapting climate messaging, finding that a majority of voters (regardless of party affiliation) find government investment in climate change and clean energy as important.
Investors are putting pressure on major corporations to embrace sustainability, with investors managing $55 trillion in assets putting collective pressure on the most significant industrial emitters in the world to cut their carbon output.
The trend indicated by these data points is clear: taking action towards a sustainable future can no longer be considered niche, and treating green action as a fad is short-sighted. Rather, embracing sustainability is here to stay. And with good reason, as each year we are faced with climate change realities of greater severity and frequency: major weather storms, climate migration, financial disaster, national security concerns, and more.
Put them together and this collection of impacts spell out that it doesn’t matter what motivation is chosen because we’re seeing little remaining ‘opposition’ to embracing sustainability. Rather, the world has come to an agreement that these issues are critical, even existential, to address today and in the future.
Why Has Sustainable Action to Date Not Been Sufficient?
So if we’ve reached the rare collective agreement we need sustainability now, why does it seem that the necessary actions keep getting stalled? As noted, early pushes towards green and sustainable action were driven not necessarily by a mainstream push, but rather by early and progressive advocates who recognized the importance of this shift in mentality. To embrace such revolutionary actions also required acknowledgment of where the technologies and their implementations still fell short at that time in their development. And to be clear, skeptics had certain valid arguments on their side about why a full-blown adoption of the green revolution was not yet ready for primetime: