Has Gas and Oil had its day?

“Has carbon based Gas and Oil has had its day?”, asks Business Development

Coordinator for E-Si, Paul Fletcher. 

“We are witnessing a mass migration away from gas and oil to electric. It has got to the point now that we refuse to install carbon based oil or gas boilers, even if they are an efficient condensing type”. 

The future is ground source, air source and water source heat pumps. The future is off-shore tidal, wave and wind turbines and on shore solar photovoltaics and micro wind that produce electricity to power ultra-efficient heating systems. The future is also Hydrogen Gas – produced by renewable electricity and so the future is gas-powered fuel cells for cars and homes.

The challenge for the island’s energy industry is not to install carbon-based fuel gas lines but how to fast-track renewables, smart metering and ICT (information and communications technology) infrastructure to deal with the changing face of energy supply and monitoring. i.e. how to charge for varying renewable energy inputs and outputs. 

An even greater challenge is how do we harness the vast amounts of hydrogen gas trapped in all the seas around us? How do we deal with the increasing electricity load that is occurring on the network? The increasing load due to the move to electricity for heating now and then later, cars.

The International Energy Group have an amazing opportunity to get involved in

developing tidal power and hydrogen gas transport, from the Channel Islands to Europe and the rest of the world. 

Maybe we will need a gas pipeline. Whilst there will be a market for carbon based gas and oil still for some time come, in the face of recent financial collapses, middle-east conflicts and changing energy prices we need to ‘Renew Guernsey’ and become a centre for renewable energy excellence. And we should all be working together as team to make that happen. That means the States, Guernsey Electricity Ltd, Guernsey Gas Ltd, the regulators and the finance experts we have in the islands to assist raising the necessary finance to undertake such a task. 

It also means in parallel we need to maintain the valuable expertise and market position IEG have built up over the decades in the gas business, in order to deal with the upcoming solar-hydrogen revolution.

It's not a matter of how fast will technology move, but a matter of how fast are we prepared to move technology.