Green Umbrellas is about helping small and medium-sized organisations develop adaptive capacity to respond to present and future energy risks.

Here are some hypotheticals…

How will a small aerospace manufacturer in the Midlands deal with brown outs in the future?

How will a leisure centre in Perth cope with a sudden doubling in the price of natural gas?

How will a Pembrokeshire farm respond to regulation requiring all fuel to come from biomass sources, grown on the farm itself?

What plan of action makes sense to keep the lights on in Whitby town centre as the local electrical fails due to relentless extreme weather coming in from the North Sea

Most smaller firms have neither the time nor the resources to prepare for such eventualities and resort, all too often, to a reactive strategy. First firefighting and then, hopefully, a less than optimal short-term fix. We have first hand experience of this at Green Umbrellas. Our team comes from a background of working in and with the SMEs in the UK and internationally.

Our goal is to leverage our understanding of energy systems and technology to enable and empower SMEs to identify energy risks, mitigate them and plan for a changing energy environment.

We focus on delivering resilient, low carbon and efficient energy systems that add value to the goals of the organisation.

And here I would like to bring in a significant thinker of our times, Yuval Noah Harari. His books are very helpful to understand the strengths and weaknesses that humans have been evolving over the last hundred thousand years or so. 

In his book, ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’, Mr. Harari refers to the 4 C’s, namely: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration and Communication. We shall need to harness the 4 Cs in all areas of human endeavour. Here is an excerpt…

‘These are the skills we all need to develop and encourage as we confront a century of constant and rapid change.

These are very general skills, that focus on being able to turn your hand, and brain, and mind, to different tasks, concepts and challenges with an air of levity; no mountain too high, no river too deep.

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