Looking back to look forward - Centre for Sustainable Energy

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Centenary interview

Looking back to look forward In 2014 we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the oldest of the Energy Institute’s predecessor organisations. We will be publishing throughout the year interviews with eminent figures from the world of energy, reflecting on how the past can inform the future. This month, Simon Roberts writes from his, largely demand-side, perspective with the centre for Sustainable Energy.

Simon Roberts OBE FEI is the Chief Executive at the Centre for Sustainable Energy. He has been helping people and organisations to develop effective responses to the threat of climate change and the misery of cold homes since 1985. For the last 12 years he has been Chief Executive of the Bristolbased charity, the Centre for Sustainable Energy, www.cse.org.uk Prior to his current role at CSE, Simon had senior roles at Triodos Bank and led Friends of the Earth’s national energy campaign, initiating the ‘Energy without End’ pro-renewables campaign in 1989 which helped to carve out part of the NFFO for renewables. Simon is a specialist advisor to Ofgem and to a number of academic research programmes focused on the role of communities, public attitudes, and behaviour change in transforming the energy system. He chairs the Energy Theme Group for Bristol 2015, advising on the city’s plans to celebrate its status as European Green Capital in 2015. Simon is also Chair of the Board of Triodos Renewables, a renewable energy company with more than 5,000 individual shareholders, and a Director of Bristol Energy Network CIC, a network for local community groups active on energy issues. He was elected as an FEI in 2007 and awarded an OBE in 2011. 26 Energy World | November 2014 

From your own perspective, how would you characterise the key challenges facing the energy industry and society today? I’d split this into an ultimate, global challenge and two more immediate national challenges. Finding a way to leave most of the remaining fossil fuels in the ground seems to me the best way to characterise the ultimate challenge – because it’s at the heart of dealing successfully with the threat of climate change. If we can’t do that, we are destined for an unstable, hostile world in which human wellbeing (let alone joy) will be very difficult to realise. Yet global efforts are tending to focus on capping emissions rather than what really needs to happen – which is capping the drilling and digging for fossil fuels. Of course the two are linked to one another,

but refocusing policy effort on keeping fossil fuels in the ground would expose far more transparently the business systems, capital flows and commercial interests that need to be transformed to create an energy system which operates within the capacity of natural systems to safely absorb its emissions and waste. My immediate challenges relate to this ultimate challenge in that they reflect the need to start creating the conditions in which we might stand some chance of meeting it. The first is to secure a change in the business models and commercial practices of the energy suppliers so that they are aligned with achieving the dramatically lower energy demand and more responsive electricity demand that are implied by the UK’s carbon

Centenary interview

targets. We shouldn’t assume that will happen without deliberate intervention. I think it requires a radically new approach to the energy saving obligations which have been placed on energy suppliers for the last 20 years. The second is to establish meaningful public consent for the changes needed in our energy system. We’ve got tough targets that drive that change but have failed to engage the public deliberatively in exploring what that means for their landscapes, localities, lives and fuel bills. The evidence shows that, on the rare occasions that it is done, people make sensible choices and look to become further involved. Without doing that, we risk fuelling public discontent and challenge to the developments we need. How can the industry use the experience of the past to plot the future? A trite but I think correct answer is to say ‘think about how everything you’ve done so far needs to be different in the future.’ We face many discontinuities between the past and the future, from the shift to large volumes of intermittent renewables to the huge possibilities of ‘big data’ and sophisticated IT, both of which put far more attention on the demand side. These discontinuities even go as far as the nature of retrofitting our homes – shifting from simple insulation measures that can be done in a few hours (and have mostly been done) to complex bespoke solutions like solid wall insulation. What are the main factors to solving the energy policy ‘trilemma’ of balancing supply security, affordability and sustainability? We still don’t focus enough on the demand side. This is at the heart of solving all of these problems, not least because it’s still the case that we can save a kilowatt-hour of energy far more cheaply than we can supply it. Yet we talk about supply gaps, rather than demand overloads. We plough vast sums into low carbon electricity sources while leaving mere crumbs for energy saving. We set up a capacity market in which energy demand response barely features (save for a paltry pilot), even though it has an almost exactly the same impact on the system. Energy demand isn’t an alien force that is beyond comprehension or immune to influence. Demand is the sum total of the decisions made by 60 million people in the homes, offices and

factories across the country, both in the moment (to switch on, all at the same time, the lights, kettle and cooker and electric fan heater) and over time as purchases and procurement specifications (to buy inefficient appliances and lighting, install inadequate heating controls, or fail to insulate). These decisions are subject to influence, both in the short term (witness the 15% drop in electricity demand in Japan after public campaigns in response to the post-Fukushima shut down) and in the medium term (by banning all but the most efficient appliances and gadgets and light bulbs and driving forward building retrofit). Do you think the balance is achievable? What are the major constraints? There are two major constraints to solving the ‘trilemma’. As mentioned above, the first is the lack of attention to or priority for tackling the demand side in policy making. We recently undertook an analysis for DECC of how the demand side is reflected in DECC’s whole energy system models which underpin its policy-making. The short answer is ‘not very well at all’. (For the longer answer see www.cse.org.uk/news/ view/1858). In that context, it perhaps isn’t surprising that the demand side doesn’t feature much in policy priorities and resource allocations. The second, as mentioned as a ‘challenge’, is the persistent failure of both the industry and policymakers to engage meaningfully and deliberatively with the public to build an understanding of what needs to happen with our energy system and why. Getting our energy future right needs the public on board – because they will have to host it in their localities and landscapes, pay for it through their bills and taxes and respond to it in their energy using habits and home improvement choices. Without decent public dialogue, people will simply say ‘no’ to change they don’t understand to meet needs they don’t recognise for benefits they don’t value. What can – and should – governments, regulators and the energy industry itself do to meet the challenges? Put demand side centre stage and put as much effort and resource into influencing it as currently goes into developing the supply side. And more specifically, ensure policies and regulatory interventions are well designed so that they actually secure the

sorts of behaviours and business practices which are required. That means policy-makers and regulators need a much better understanding of the commercial business drivers of the energy industry. Not so they can become craven to it or so the policy process becomes stuffed with vested interests, but so policy can be designed with an understanding of how it will be responded to by people facing commercial pressures rather than policy hopes. Someone needs to be asking the question during the policy design process: ‘how would someone make money out of this policy?’, followed up quickly by ‘is that the behaviour we’re looking for?’. We need energy suppliers to become companies that are commercially viable in a world with lower sales volumes and which are working with their consumers to manage demand and secure demand response. Policies and regulators shouldn’t assume that will happen without policy effort because the changes needed go against the grain of typical business thinking. How could professional bodies contribute? Professional bodies tend to be organised around supply side technologies, systems and institutions, which is one of the reasons why supply side thinking still dominates. A good start to changing this would be to make sure that every event, training course, CPD resource and lobbying activity by the professional bodies requires some reflection on what causes the demand which the supply is meeting. And developing more ‘whole system’ thinking – where the system thinking embraces beyond the meter to consider the influence of our buildings, energy using equipment and, particularly, the habits and choices of the people who occupy and operate them. Are you optimistic, overall, about prospects for the future? I have a mug on my desk with a reproduction of some Bristol street art featuring the words ‘Relentless Optimism’. It sums up my general attitude, though, when I look at the challenges we need to meet over the next few decades, I’m not sure that optimism is well founded. l

The EI is a forum and facilitator for debate. Views expressed in this interview are solely those of the author and are not necessarily endorsed or given on behalf of the EI.

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