Hill+Knowlton Strategies

As you might expect from working in an energy and industrials team, you get to hear plenty of industry buzzwords and phrases – my particular favourite at the moment is ‘energy futures’. Like a lot of buzzwords it’s not a wholly articulate term, rather it hints at the future prognosis of the energy industry and suggests a bold new future where our energy use will change radically from present.

However, it’s important to note that our development of energy hasn’t really developed so much in the past few thousand years since the great civilisations of the world started to flourish. After all we’ve known that by burning oil, gas and coal we can keep ourselves warm. We’ve known about the sun, wind and water as energy sources too despite our lack of sophistication in developing renewables. We’ve also known about thermal power for millennia – it is with great pleasure that I read yesterday that planning permission has been given to construct the UK’s first commercial deep geothermal power plant in Cornwall. By drilling 4.5km into the ground Geothermal Engineering will be able to access rocks at temperatures of 200°C accessing enough energy to power 20,000 homes.

One aspect of our ‘energy future’ that is different is nuclear energy, specifically nuclear fusion. We know the energy is there – it’s the process at the core of the sun (hydrogen nuclei collide, fuse into heavier Helium atoms and release vast amounts of energy). We know that the energy clean and limitless. In recent weeks, a major step forward was made in our development of nuclear fusion with the announcement of funding for ITER, a large-scale scientific experiment to create nuclear fusion taking place in France. A timeline for the project anticipates that the fusion reactor will generate more power than it consumes by 2025/26. Exciting stuff indeed!

Despite ITER’s critics, nuclear fusion remains the ‘Holy Grail’ of energy production and if it isn’t produced by the ITER experiment, industry experts estimate that nuclear fusion will be commercially-viable within 30-50 years, thus representing a real ‘energy future’.

I’d like to think that nuclear fusion will be one of the major technological advancements in my lifetime so I’ll leave you with a fascinating video of the US Army’s attempts to create nuclear fusion over half a century ago. As far as energy is concerned, technological advancements are usually a slow burner…