The expertise that will carry humanity towards a sustainable future is already right here, says Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy, however heavy-handed regulators and outdated infrastructure are standing in the best way of progress. The key to addressing the issue, he suggests, is to take a lesson from the historical past books.

At WIRED Impact earlier this November, Jackson requested the viewers to think about a situation by which the early innovators of the web period—figures like Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web—weren’t given the liberty to experiment. The ramifications for the tempo of growth would have been extreme, he says, and but “this is the reality for renewable energy today.”

To illustrate the gravity of the issue, Jackson pointed to the obstacles confronted by sustainable power tasks within the United Kingdom. Although establishing a wind power facility takes only two to six months, connecting a brand new farm to the grid can take seven years, because of the abundance of pink tape—a state of affairs Jackson describes as “disastrous.” “We’re talking about a revolution that’s probably more important than the internet, one that will save our planet,” he says. “But it’s being held back by the enormous amounts of central planning.”

The difficulty is partly that regulators don’t perceive the diploma of change required to satisfy local weather targets, Jackson claims (the UK has pledged to cut back greenhouse fuel emissions to web zero by 2050). This signifies that these on the forefront of renewable power growth haven’t been given the liberty to discover all obtainable choices.

It is obvious the UK energy grid is “broadly not fit for purpose—neither the infrastructure nor governance,” he says. “We need to give access to the market to all technologies that are going to transform energy.”