Abstract
Late last month, the Asia Pacific hosted two very important and starkly contrasting international conferences on the region’s energy and climate choices. A very high level, invitation-only summit in Singapore declared that the region’s energy options are limited to choosing from a mix of coal, gas and nuclear, with renewable energy’s role merely marginal. But a far more diverse and innovative conference in Honolulu, one that included the US military, demonstrated that renewable energy is the region’s economically and environmentally rational choice. As we shall see, there was one key difference between these polarized positions on what is perhaps the single most important issue of our era. The Singapore event focused on the supply side of energy whereas the Hawaii summit examined the energy system in its entirety. The Hawaii event paid particular attention to the increasingly crucial role of microgrids and other enabling infrastructures that reshape the demand side as well as the supply side. This short article reviews both events and asks why the Singapore summit ignored the role of smart networks. We then conclude by showing how smart infrastructures are becoming central to climate-change mitigation and adaptation.
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