I have been following the development of Green technology from two different aspects; firstly, from a personal perspective, i.e I want to live in a self sufficient household. I don’t want to pay for energy supplied by a French company that increases prices in the UK by 22% whilst back in France, we subsidise their increases capped at only 2%. I also don’t want to pay Oil producers so that these Sovereign Wealth funds can come back and buy Premier league football clubs (check the guys out in the car being interviewed)!

Secondly, I am interested in the whole supply chain, what technology is leading the race and what impact is this going to have on future supply chains.

However, it seems to me that the whole production and supply of energy is completely screwed up. The future of renewable energy is impossible to predict so how then can Government intervention help this process?

I was reading this article about Green solutions and realised that the best to way intervene is to have no intervention at all! I mean, come on, 1m green collar manufacturing jobs with the investment of probably around £20m of new government money…”the first big industrial policy initiative from Labour in six years”…Joe Public is not stupid and judging by the comments at the end of this article they have seen straight through the Government ruse.

The Market and Public opinion are strong vehicles to harness change. Take a look at Tesco’s new local sourcing initiative. They launched this last year and now have revenues of £500m ($0.9bn) per year coming from locally sourced products. This is great for the local economy and radically reduces the carbon miles for each product. By 2011 they expect revenues in excess of £1bn ($1.8bn). This has been driven by public awareness, marketing initiative, and the cost of fuel. The Market is a powerful tool and is currently telling us we can no longer consume scarce resources to the degree we have been, we therefore need to look at alternatives.

Consumers now understand the opportunity cost and are now are changing their buying habits. This sentiment has increased demand for alternatives and in turn is lowering the unit cost of renewable energy. Ultimately, this makes it more accessible for the masses. The market has decided again and the Supply chain is being redesigned.