Meet the Energy Leader: Jeremy Leggett

By Dr Jeremy Leggett  -  21 February 2018
Modorator: professor Paulien Herder

Click here to watch the recordings by Collegerama

A global energy transition is sweeping the world. It is a total system change. Fast trends in clean and smart energy technologies are driving it, and policymakers, corporations and communities in multiple countries are amplifying it. Powerful elements of the energy incumbency are operating business models that are no longer viable, and both they and those who invest in them face soaring risk of stranded assets, on a scale that threatens societal coherence unless better managed than at present. Jeremy Leggett has witnessed all of this close to. Meanwhile, though the news is broadly positive in energy, developments in tech and the politics of democracy are much less so. The picture needs to be viewed as a whole.

Jeremy Leggett is an award-winning energy-technology entrepreneur, and critically-acclaimed historian-futurist author whose books include The Energy of Nations and The Winning Of The Carbon War. He is founder and a director of Solarcentury, currently the fastest growing UK renewable energy company based on international sales, developer and installer of solar in more than a dozen countries on four continents, and winner of awards including a Queen's Award for Enterprise in Innovation. He is also founder and chair of SolarAid, a charity set up with five percent of Solarcentury’s annual profit’s that endeavours to build solar lighting markets in Africa - itself parent to a non-profit social venture, SunnyMoney, winner of a BITC Unilever Global Development Award. An Entrepreneur of the Year at the New Energy Awards, he has been described by the Observer as 'Britain’s most respected green energy boss'. He was the first Hillary Laureate for International Leadership in Climate Change, a CNN Principal Voice, has won a Gothenburg Prize, and was the first non-Dutch winner of a Royal Dutch Honorary Sustainability Award. He lectures on short courses in business and society at the universities of Cambridge and St Gallen. In earlier phases of his career he was an academic earth scientist consulting in the oil industry, he founded an arms-control verification think-tank that played an active role at the height of the Cold War (VERTIC), and he served on the board of a private equity fund run by a Swiss Bank (Bank Sarasin’s New Energies Invest). An occasional writer for national media, he edits a website featuring a chronology of selected developments in the inter-related issues of climate change, the global energy transition, the opportunities and threats of technology, and the future of civilisation: www.jeremyleggett.net.