We should all be as cool as Indiana Jones in the fight for green energy

Remember that scene in the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? If you haven’t seen it, this won’t make much sense, but bear with me.

Indie's sprinting through the temple, arrows are flying, the floor's collapsing, there's a boulder bearing down. At the last minute he dives under the rapidly shutting door. And then, obviously, he reaches back and grabs his hat.

I honestly think that's roughly where we are in the energy transition today. The temple is the fossil fuel economy. The treasure is cheap, clean, abundant energy. But the door's closing. The boulder is there. Politics, populism and the incumbents are doing everything they can to try and block us from getting to that future.

There are parts of the world where we are still having that fight, but there's enough parts of the world where we are already accessing the treasure. It's kind of game over. It is just a question of how long it takes for the whole world to grasp that and enjoy a much better future.

Scaring people about new technology is old hat

Every time breakthrough technologies come along, incumbents rubbish it. Good competition makes us all better, but most incumbents don't try to outcompete and deliver better solutions: they try to pull their challengers back.

When trains were invented, the horse industry said passengers would suffocate in tunnels and insisted that no human could survive 30 miles an hour. When bicycles started to become popular, the industry helped spread the myth of “bicycle face”, a permanent grimace that some doctors claimed was especially dangerous for women. In Britain when cars were invented, we had to have a guy walking in front of them with a red flag at 4 miles an hour in case they went too fast.

In 1995, Newsweek said no one would get their news online and nothing would replace traditional newspapers or, indeed, shopping. The reality is that incumbents throw everything they can at stopping progress because they are terrified of what's to come.

I recently experienced what I can only describe as a time machine. I came to New York from China, having been to Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing. The roads were quiet. All the two-wheel vehicles were now electric. Taxis? Pretty much all electric. Buses? All electric. Trucks, delivery vans and private cars were largely electric. The roads were quiet — far quieter than I'd ever known before. And actually far cleaner than they had been.

And then I arrived in New York. When you see those Chevy Suburbans sitting idling, those huge trucks belching out local pollution, for the first time ever, coming to New York did not feel like a trip into the future but a trip to an increasingly stone-age past.

Let me tell you some good news. Solar power is now so cheap that there are places in the world where it is cheaper to build a fence using solar panels than wood panels. Literally ubiquitous.

You'll be told the progress is driven by cheap labor in China or by state subsidies. The reality is, it's not. It's driven by relentless innovation in research and development. Every Chinese company I visited when I was there spent between 6% and 11% of their revenue on research and development for these technologies.

In the same way the iPhone in your pocket is 100,000 times more powerful than the first NASA space program, it’s the same curve for solar and battery. 74% of all the renewables being built in the world right now are being built in China.

I’m confident about the future

The average price of household electricity in Kenya is 22 US cents per kilowatt hour. In the US, it's 18 cents. In the UK, 40 cents. But it's possible to generate electricity from solar panels in a sunny region at 1.2 cents per kilowatt hour, and use batteries to store and use that energy.

The future is electric. It's increasingly clean and it's driven by astonishing progress in solar and batteries. So I think that as a society we should be absolutely confident. We should be as cool as Indiana Jones as we dive underneath the closing door. We should grab our hat and be absolutely overjoyed that the future genuinely is going to be solar, battery, wind, EVs, and heat pumps.