Clean Tech


if you accept the need to change you can make the wrong decisions for right reasons. Innovation in this space is coming primarily, though admittedly not exclusively, from the developing world. Every Business Plan competition I adjudicate seems to have one or more companies looking to bring reliable power or water solutions to the rural areas in parts of Africa, Asia or Latin America.


One such company is RVE.Sol, whose pilot installation is in Sidonge, Western


Kenya. They have also developed KUDURA, a rural energy hub. From waste water, the sun and animal waste, they can get drinking water, electricity, biogas and organic fertiliser.


A central monitoring


system provides remote telemetry (including diagnostics) via a GPRS wireless data connection back to a data centre. It is still early days but just getting rid of kerosene lamps improves the quality of life in such a community dramatically. Vivian Vendeirinho, the African born social entrepreneur behind the company says if the technology scales it will change rural lives forever.


Energy has been an area successive British governments have used to extol the benefits of deregulation. Since the early 1990s, the UK has provided the most liberalised energy market in the OECD. For a time, prices to the consumer were among the lowest in the EU and competition seemed to work. Twenty years later though and a lot has changed. With the price of inputs rising and the fear of a capacity crunch due to the decommissioning of ageing power stations, the government is proposing to recentralise their lauded


decentralised structure


including the bête noire for economic liberals, a guaranteed price. The Energy Secretary argues that new measures such as minimum prices are necessary to allow existing firms to invest.


The argument against this is that by setting rules, the market will distort. Better to split these companies into


26 entrepreneurcountry


Energy has been an area successive British governments have used to extol the benefits of deregulation


transmission and generation arms and allow a price to be determined via an exchange. This would set the investment towards the new more revolutionary areas such as silicon research (reduce the price of


solar cells) or carbon-capture


technologies and even storage. Of course, there are many arguments the other way. In countries like France and Spain, the political consensus is


that electricity is too important


to be left to the markets. Even in Britain where memories are fresh from a gigantic banking bailout, the last thing anyone wants to hear is a belief in light touch regulation, or the primacy of market forces. And views are not just opposing but vehement on either side. Simon Jenkins wrote in The Guardian “Energy policy is a dark underworld populated by fanatics and necromancers”. In particular, he let fly on the lobbyists who he blamed for the government’s decision to direct resources to the two most expensive options, those


of nuclear and offshore wind. In his opinion, a straight switch from coal to gas should be the priority.


The key components of any start- up ecosystem include cost effective infrastructure and a no surprises regulatory framework. These must be heeded as we move to a future likely to be renewable and digital as opposed to carbon based and analogue. I don’t have a recommendation as to how quickly we need to get there, but I am interested in seeing it done in a way that maximises the possibilities for innovation. This is


far more likely


to come from new disruptive high growth firms than from the existing industry players.


Government needs to pay attention to the price, but also give new entrants a chance to compete.


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