Traditional energy producers point out that feeding intermittent energy back into the grid would require significant upgrades and potentially a costly redesign but there may be another way to store renewable energy generated locally, sitting in the garage.
Electric cars already come with a large battery built in and it is feasible that this could receive renewable energy generated in the home at low peak times, either using it as fuel to drive the car or storing it and sending it back to the house at high peak. HSBC's Head of Climate Change Centre of Excellence, Nick Robins, says there is evidence that the transportation industry is taking this idea seriously, "increasingly the roll-out of electric vehicles is being driven, not by transport demands, but by energy storage demands."
The technology to make this work on a large scale is still at an early stage but Google have taken an interest, writing an algorithm to balance the charging requirements of a large number of electric cars connecting to the grid at once. Although this doesn't address the problem of sending energy back into the grid, many in the industry see it as an important first step.
"Climate change forces us to rethink the very 20th century ways in which we've been thinking about energy", explains Robins, "the model which is emerging is that you have a lot more decentralised generation of both electricity and heat."
There is one model that HSBC are quite keen to stick to, climate change may be a social and moral issue but one attraction for HSBC is more traditional, "the market for climate change goods and services is now $530 billion a year", says Robins, "that's bigger than the aerospace sector."
