Powering Tomorrow: Roy Bedlow

Low Carbon Founder and Chief Executive Roy Bedlow explains the central mission that drives our company to make a defining contribution to move the world to 100% renewable energy.

Low Carbon is working to build a completely renewable energy system that will be a profound legacy for the generations that follow us.

Full Transcript:
Underneath the logo. It says Powering Tomorrow. So for that it's about the next generation. It's about my family. It's trying to provide a cleaner future with regards to choice of renewables. It's incredibly personal to me.
I founded Low Carbon 15 years ago to make a lasting impact on climate change. In the very early days, we focused on being a developer of large scale solar, and over the years, we actually became UK's largest developer of solar; won the biggest project with a national grid with regards to demand response delivery and continue to build. So we moved to developing batteries, to developing large scale wind.
The first projects we did were all under five megawatts. Today our largest park is about 600MW. We started originally in the UK and then over time we moved into different territories. So Low Carbon has become an international company, but all around the one thesis of making a lasting impact on climate change
For us, it's about putting more renewable energy onto the grid. Each of us need to demand that the power that we use in our homes or in our lives is renewable power, so it gives an alternative choice for those who want to and demand renewable energy. We only invest in proven technologies. We're not a venture firm. And I think it's very important with regards to the those who want to move capital into large scale projects, such as what we do. That is a proven technology that you're working with. A large US insurance company called MassMutual invested a minority stake in Low Carbon to help transition our business to become an independent power producer. We had a development pipeline of about five gigawatts today, our pipelines about 17GW. And the transition is hard because it's a mindset change. You're not just developing to move on, you're developing to own.
And by developing and constructing and operating assets, we feel that we can have the biggest impact. We partnered with MassMutual and at that time it was to say, okay, we've built a great organization over the last ten years. What's next for us? And next for us is trying to scale and grow, trying to deliver 20GW and trying to power 7.5 million homes and try to do that by 2030, which is an ambitious goal.
But we do have the feeling that we're standing on a burning platform, and we do feel that we need to go faster. So we do feel that we need to accelerate our efforts, and we do feel that we've got to bring more capital to be invested in renewable energy at scale. Low Carbon is a B Corp organization. In fact, where we're top 5% of all B Corps, which means that we set our bar very high with regards to treading lightly on the planet.
And that's it's not just about the renewable energy we produce as an alternative to fossil fuels, but it's really protecting, ensuring that the land is actually managed as well as it can be around the infrastructure that we build.
Where will Low Carbon be in ten years time. Well, for me, we would have already delivered on that goal of 20GW, and there'll be another line in the sand and saying, okay, from 20GW, what do we do next? Is it more? Yes, of course it is. Is our job finished? No. Does it doesn't mean that we have to do a lot more? Yes it does.
But you have to have more companies like ours turning its attention to trying to make a lasting impact on climate change. The challenge is with us all to do it today and to do it fast, and it's hard and what's the adage we don't do it because it's easy - We do it because we have to do it.
It's something that we must turn our attention to - Low Carbon is our solution. And long may that continue.