Can you hear me?

2016 – 2017: Buildings (Innovation)

The main thing I learned, which is unsurprising, is that innovation projects are a lot harder to run than research projects. For a start, if a research project goes wrong, you can usually find a way to bring it back on track. That's a lot harder with innovation, where a lot of money can get spent before problems become obvious.

Then there's the commercialization problem. A technically successful project doesn't mean you've innovated. Without a route to market, new stuff just sits in the innovator's shed. To change the world, we need new things which sell.

So, building on my previous work, let's imagine that a couple of million people have used thin wall insulation, but more people can't be arsed, and nobody has a Heat-Pump because everyone has gas, and It. Just. Works. How do you get them off gas? Policy people, because they see everything in terms of policy levers, think you just need to find the right lever to pull. Maybe we can innovate to reduce the cost of Heat-Pumps (this doesn't work - nothing is simpler than a gas boiler, because as a Professor of Buildings once told me, a gas boiler is just a tube with a flame on the end. It's that simple). OK. So we can subsidise people to buy Heat-Pumps. Well, yes, but that's horrendously expensive and only rich people bother, so you are subsidising the heating bills of rich people. OK. Maybe we ban gas? Sure, I say, go ahead. Ban gas.

Energy-as-a-service (bear with my here) completely re-imagines (yeah, I said "re-imagines", so what?) energy retail. Or, put another way. Imagine I can put a small box in your house that controls heating, individually, in every room in your house, and you can programme it with you iPhone. For a fixed monthly cost (just like your mobile contract) you get whatever heating pattern you specify (just like your phone contract, the more minutes you buy -- in this case, warm hours -- the more it costs). If the boiler breaks that isn't your problem. Your provider has to fix it.

Now maybe you are tech-head. You want PV on your roof, a Tesla PowerWall in your cellar, a zero-carbon heating system and a complex low-carbon energy tariff which turns of your freezer for 15 minutes when the power price spikes. Maybe. But most people don't, and don't want to live with that level of complexity. I mean, I live and breath this stuff and I don't want that level of complexity.

In an energy-as-a-service world all those problems go away. Insulation? The service provider installs it if it saves them money (because they pay for the heating, you are paying a fixed price). Complex energy tariffs, batteries and PV? If they make commercial sense, your service provider gives them to you for free. (But they take a cut of the profit they make, of course). When you finally buy that Tesla, the box automatically charges it for you when power price is low. It's a win-win.

And if the builder who fits the insulation, the heat-pump, the batter, messes it up? Not your problem. Your service provider has to fix it, and they fit the bill. So they only employ people who do a good job.

So, we can build the box. The box can even measure how leaky your home is, so the service provider knows what monthly price to quote you. The tech to insulate your house and make it zero carbon exists (Those good builders who do a great job? Yeah, I'm afraid they don't exist yet. But they can learn).

Oh, we tested this stuff. We gave people a free iPad and 24/7 emergency support in case any of it went wrong. People love it. I think we did 25, and 23 of those 25 never wanted it taken out when the trial finished. 94% success rate? New stuff never does that well.

The problem? No idea how to roll out the first 1 million boxes. When people have got the box they won't want to go back. But how do you sell a new product to people when nobody has it, and you can't explain why it's so great?

So there we are. Great tech exists. People will love it, once they get it. It can change the world. But how do we get it to market?

Fascination

2014 – 2016: Buildings (Research)

The UK has a very heterogeneous building stock (i.e. lots of different sorts of building, designed and built in many different ways, and altered in many different ways since originally built), and it’s a very old building stock at that. Over 7 million homes without a cavity wall! We have a very high penetration of one sort of heating system (gas). This makes elimination of fossil fuels extraordinarily difficult in buildings because electric heating is expensive and impractical (we’d need about 10x more power stations to heat our buildings in the winter, but most of these power stations would only need to generate power for 5 – 10 days a year, which makes them a little … uneconomical.)

But there are solutions. Some research I kicked off (yep, I done a thing) showed that a ‘thin’ layer of insulation delivers most of the benefits of traditional solid-wall insulation (i.e. 4-5 inches of battens, insulation and plasterboard) at a fraction of the price.

So there you have it. Insulate those 7 million old buildings, plus any poorly performing more modern buildings, with a couple of centimetres of insulation, and you've already massively reduced heat-demand across the UK housing stock. The costs of installing a zero-carbon heating system (e.g. a heat-pump) are massively reduced. Result!

Who can I be now?

So, a conversation got me thinking. My new role is hardly the pivot Bowie made when he abandoned Glam Rock (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs) for Plastic Soul (Young Americans). 

As Alexis Petridis put it, “just how influential Young Americans was didn’t become fully apparent for another decade… And Bowie made the transition seem effortless”. 

(Though personally I find the transition from that to “Station to Station” to be an even more remarkable evolution)

I don’t imagine a stint as on climate science will have quite the impact that either of those albums had (and we haven’t even got to Low yet…) On the other hand, I’m ingesting significantly less cocaine than Bowie was during this period. Which is good, as we need to save up for a new kitchen.

Yeah. So, 6 years, 3-and-a-half jobs, a lot learned. I’m not going to talk about what I did (who cares?) but what I learned, which is relevant to anyone interested in climate change, particularly from a UK perspective (though doubtless some of this applies elsewhere, too). I'm going to send a version of this article as an email to my mother and she'll have to pretend to be interested...

Maggots

Maggots, on the work surface. But where are they coming from?