What's New > Event > World Energy Conference 2007

Energy - When The Only Constant Is Change

Dear WEC Member:

The World Energy Congress theme is "The Energy Future in an Interdependent World."  We are all interconnected today -- linked across borders via telecommunication cable, gas pipelines, electric grids, and global finance.

The new international factor facing our industry is carbon.  Power production and the transport sector create 2/3rds of global CO₂ emissions, and the public is becoming vocal in their demand for cleaner energy and fuels.  It seems certain that a 'market price per ton of carbon' will soon be enacted and will dramatically alter the cost equation for fossil fuels, and your bottom line.

As a WEC member, you are a global leader in how we produce electricity and supply transportation fuels. The rules of the game are changing.  GENI would like to pose several questions for consideration by you and your staff:

1. Renewable Potential: What's the potential capacity of all the renewable resources in your service territory, including your neighbors?  And could you meet most of your electrical requirements from these non-carbon resources?  (Five nations already do: Norway, Iceland, Brazil, Canada, and New Zealand.)
   
   
2. Interconnection: How could these renewables be integrated into your electric grid and provide the reliability, security and immediate dispatch that your customers require?
   
   
3. Fossil Fuel Transition: As existing fossil fuel and nuclear plants need replacing in the coming years, could renewables meet that replacement capacity using the same criteria?
   
   
4. Design: In the coming carbon constrained world of the future, how would you engineer and build this out? 

GENI Initiative advocates the interconnection of renewable energy resources around the world as a priority objective  We have earned the endorsement of Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, current Chairman of the IPCC and 2007 Nobel Prize winner, stating that “the environmental and economic benefits from this approach could have revolutionary significance.”

What do you think?

Peter Meisen

President