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This week’s guest is Ollie Pendered, Chief Executive of Community Energy South and founding partner of Riding Sunbeams, an incredibly exciting tech startup working with Network Rail to decarbonise rail travel in the UK. What makes it even more important is its triple bottom line approach to business and the potential it offer to link the rail network to community energy providers along the routes. I spoke with Ollie about his pioneering efforts in the early days of community energy before we moved on to his latest initiative for a deep dive into the process of powering trains with solar power. Its hard to know where to begin getting excited about this initiative which as you’ll hear is already in trial phase - reducing the reliance of rail travel on diesel, replacing the feed-in tariff for the countless communities adjacent to rail lines, and the potential spillover into other territories (India for example) and other travel and industry sectors.
Ollie also talked to me about his work at the vanguard of efforts to improve energy security, end energy poverty and decarbonise electricity especially in rural areas, as well as the evolving outlook for regional organisation of energy investment.
Talking points include
- The early days of UK community energy & the transition town movement
- Post-crash economic conditions and the financial rationale for private investment in public energy infrastructure
- City-regions and the regionalisation of green investment
- Rethinking nudges for adopting lower impact private journeys
- How the train network is powered, its environmental impact and the engineering challenge of solar
- How decarbonising policies at national level are driving grassroots initiatives
- Wider applications - powering the water industry, Environment Agency’s multi-million pound water pumping annual outlay, luxury air travel
Links to some of the groups, organisations and individuals mentioned
Imperial College Energy Futures Lab
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