Video via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E68n5c6xNs

Description

"Interview with Marcus Saul of Island Power, an energy company with incredible ideas that could be world-changing, in terms of building a new kind of (commons) economy.

1. Highlights:

• The genius of the use-credit obligations approach is that it can help small businesses avoid debt, by issuing vouchers for future produce or services, and selling them at a discount, to attract customers.

• In the case of energy, it means that communities will own their own energy infrastructure.

• This addresses the fundamental issue of cost. But it’s also about job creation, and putting the heart back into communities. With production via micro-grids, we can move to a decentralised system, with lots of social benefits on the back of it."

2. Marcus Saul:

"We classify ourselves as a ‘smart energy accelerator’. We’re called Island Power because we focus on communities in an ‘island’ location – i.e. not necessarily grid-connected. This could be a literal / geographical island, or any rural location. We look at the entire energy profile of a location – not just electricity. There’s usually been a movement of people out of these areas in the last 50 years, due to a lack of economic opportunities. We’re looking to provide affordable energy. We look at the heating and mobility as well as electricity consumption. We develop a projection of what that location will need over the next 10-15 years in terms of quantity and technology – which might include solar, wind, hydro, biogas, heat pumps etc. We want to find the best solution for a particular location. For example, a lot of islands we’re working with have a lot of tourism, with buildings that are next to the sea – but they still use energy based on hydrocarbons / fossil fuels – even for things like cooling / air conditioning, when they could be using marine thermal cooling (or ocean thermal energy conversion)."

(https://www.lowimpact.org/posts/building-the-energy-commons-marcus-saul-of-island-power)