I'm Manveen Rana here in Davos and I'm joined by Maurice from
BCG.
How are the conversations here at Davos around climate?
I know that's one of the biggest themes here this year.
How are they going?
Yeah, well, I've been spending most of my time on the energy
and the climate perspective, which is my main area of
interest and focus.
And what I've been looking for is the linkages between COP28
and Davos, and COP28 was about some big top-level pledges that
were made.
And so for me, Davos was about OK, taking those forward and how
do you make them real.
And there's three I call out.
One is around reducing methane emissions, another one was
around renewables and the pace of deployment.
We want to accelerate that by a factor of three.
And then the other piece was around energy efficiency.
And I think I've seen some really good progress on the
first two.
There's a pretty strong consensus that we have all the
technology and all the business cases we need to get the methane
out, and the companies have made the pledges around doing that.
Around the renewables piece,
it's ambitious but I think we can do it as well, and we've
seen some really good progress already.
Just take a look at China where they are right now.
The US is making good progress.
Europe is making good progress and we can do more. On energy
efficiency, that one
I think there's a lot more ambiguity around of what it
really means.
And when we break it down and we look at industry, and we look at
transport, and we look at buildings, the answer on each of
them is quite nuanced, and I think that's where we need to
continue to spend more time and develop thinking around that.
So discussions taking place around energy efficiency.
The other themes here at Davos this year are AI and geopolitics
because it's such an unstable time in the world.
How do those, how do they merge with the idea of climate, what
are you seeing?
So I've actually seen some convergence there, right.
So if you take AI and climate together, the potential,
everybody's talking potential for AI in many areas, but the
potential to actually help us as we go through energy transition
is quite high.
There's there's a lot of operational improvements,
there's a lot of things around network optimization with
customer interactions.
Some of those use cases are already known.
But I think where the interesting ones that I've heard
about here are additional opportunities to speed up some
of the newer technologies.
I'll give you an example in direct air capture.
We know that the biggest challenge for direct air capture
is to get the cost down to something we can afford as a
society and as industry.
I've heard some really encouraging progress around
bringing those costs down even through, I would say, initial
looks using AI of how we can optimize the production
processes, how we can optimize a lot of the backend things going
on.
So those two I see coming together in quite a positive and
synergetic way.
If you think about climate and geopolitics, I've heard some
kind of new and interesting ideas as well that I think we
need to to explore a bit more.
So bringing it back to how have we used energy, and energy
policy in the past, there was this concept of energy diplomacy
which allowed countries to find common ground and things to work
around even when their geopolitics weren't necessarily
in line.
And I think the thinking right now is because we're in a bit of
a geopolitically fractious world, can we have something
similar?
So almost climate diplomacy and where can we find common ground
around standards, around technologies, around learnings,
and sharing that all countries interested in, regardless of
what geopolitical beliefs ordispositions they have.
Climate becomes the thing they rally around. And potentially
even helps them build bridges in other areas,
but let's start there for now.
And in terms of climate, I mean how is it playing out
particularly in Europe what needs to happen?
Well, I mean Europe is an area of the world where I think it's
doing a lot of the right things already.
They've got a policy structure in place, they've set goals
they're trying to meet.
So I see this as it comes to Europe as an accelerator, right.
For example, in the North Sea where we're looking to deploy
300 gigawatts by 2050, 150 gigawatts by 2030, those are big
goals.
Well, actually the COP28 commitments aligned behind that
very nicely, for example.
So I see it, if anything, as a reaffirmation of what Europe
needs to do as a kind of an affirmation that they're on the
right path with some acceleration needed, of course,
and a rallying cry, in a sense, to get industry behind it.
Well, that sounds surprisingly hopeful.
A discussion about climate.
Well, I think that's what we've seen.
I mean, look, I'd almost describe the atmosphere as one
of stoic optimism, right, where people understand there's
microeconomic challenges,
they understand that not all the technologies are at a commercial
scale to get us to where we need to go, and they understand not
all the business cases exist.
But look, I mean every 10th of a degree matters, right?
So we may not achieve every target we need to, but the
progress is what we need to keep celebrating.
Well, thanks for bringing us that bit of optimism.
Maurice, it's been a pleasure to speak to you.
Thanks, Manveen.
Good speaking to you as well.