If people are confused about what to do about climate change in their everyday lives, they have every right to be.
Fossil fuel companies have for decades funded disinformation through a network of ‘think tanks’, and commentators, planting stories in the media. This was all helped by PR and Advertising agencies who know how to play with people’s emotions; to create fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Many have explored this issue more deeply than I ever can or will. Notably, Oreskes and Conway showed, in their book Merchants Of Doubt [1], how the same tactics used to promote smoking and deny its harms, were used by tobacco companies.
We might imagine we can now see through their tactics. I’m not so sure. I feel there is a tendency amongst some progressives to almost fall into the trap of amplifying the messages.
I am thinking of how some who claim that heat pumps are for the comfortably well off and it’s not fair to push them for those in energy poverty. The alternative – to stick with the comfort zone of insulating homes – came to be the default. This is not fair to anyone.
Before we get on to that, let’s start with the birth of ‘climate shaming’.
Climate Shaming 1.0: It’s your demand that’s the problem!
It is well established that fossil fuel companies like Exxon and their network decided to make you, the consumer, the problem [2].
The message:
It’s you driving your car and running your gas boiler. We are just meeting your demand, so don’t blame us.
Intended result:
Guilt, denial and inaction.
It is even alleged that BP and their communication agency Ogilvy cooked up the idea of ‘carbon footprint’ [3]. We could all then measure our level of guilt. No wonder people often resorted to tiny actions to salve that guilt, when they felt powerless to do more.
Yet, there is a counter argument that while this was and remains a key plank in the strategy to delay action, measuring things can be useful. What is needed is to shake off the guilt and find ways to act.
Climate Shaming 2.0: It’s all your fault!
Shaming has metastasised into everything we do that we can feel guilty about, where fossil fuels are often out of sight.
There are many voices at work here, but in the background, fossil fuel interests are keen to keep the heat on you, dear citizen, rather than them.
They will claim to be doing their bit, with greenwashing PR and advertising … now over to you people!
While they don’t control every part of this conversation we have amongst themselves, they have the wherewithal to influence it in a myriad of ways. The message we receive is, “don’t do this bad thing” (but we, fossil fuel interests, won’t help you):
Don’t fly to Europe (but we won’t divert fossil fuel investments into trains)
Don’t eat meat (but we’re happy to reinforce your guilt, when the Amazon burns; for cattle feed)
Don’t eat Ultra Processed Foods (but like this behemoth, we work hard to ensure law makers give our fossil fuel interests a free pass)
Feeling guilty? Feeling helpless?
(laughing emoji from fossil fuel boardrooms)
Recognising our agency
We are told by some progressive politicians and commentators that it’s all about system change, and that we should reject the idea that it is our fault. We can’t take an EV Bus if there is a bad bus service (and they are still run on diesel), we need to invest in rural public transport not just in the cities.
There is a lot of truth in this, but it isn’t quite that simple.
We are not separate from the system, and it is hardly ‘systems thinking’ to imagine such a separation. The system includes Government, business, civic society and the natural environment, interacting in numerous ways.
Citizen-consumers have a lot of identities (community members, consumers, voters, parents, volunteers, etc). These identities each have their own form of agency, which we can choose to use. We need the spirit of positive change in the choices we make:
To choose who to vote for.
To chose where we spend our money.
To choose where to go on holiday and how to get there (and if/how often to fly).
To modify our diet (reducing meat if not eliminating it).
To decide to buy quality clothing that is repairable (looking and feeling better).
To decide where we bank and where we invest through our pensions.
Even when an action one would like to take (like getting an EV) is not yet in reach, one can keep exploring options and set a goal for when it does come within reach.
Setting goals too is an achievement.
The shaming tactic of the fossil fuel interests is aimed at breaking our sense of agency. We have to organise and support each other and reclaim our agency, as individuals and as communities.
The Take The Jump initiative [4] espouses practical steps we can take, while recognising we also need system change.
Electrification of energy end-use is a key threat to fossil fuel interests
There are a range of solutions available now to make a serious dent in our carbon emissions. The most significant and relatively easy thing to achieve is to electrify our primary energy and energy consumption. These solutions are so brilliant they have become a threat to fossil fuel interests, notably:
Electric Vehicles (EVs) of all kinds will not only clean up our towns and cities but are so much more efficient than their fossil fuel alternatives. They require only a third of the energy of a petrol/ diesel car to run them.
Heat Pumps are so much more efficient than their fossil fuel alternatives. They require between a third and a fifth of the energy needed to run a gas boiler.
Both EVs and Heat Pumps are powered by electricity. When generated by solar and wind, it is both free and unlimited, because it is derived from the Sun (which deposits 10,000 times as much energy on Earth as humanity is ever likely to need).
There has been an incessant effort by the network of fossil fuel interests to plant stories and create memes aimed at trying to undermine this transition to clean, electrified energy use.
They know they will eventually lose, because the science of thermodynamics and economic reality mean it’s inevitable. Yet they will try to delay the transition for as long as possible. They can then extract as much fossil fuels as they can, and avoid ‘stranded assets’. Whereas, if they truly cared about climate change they would be working to leave it in the ground.
This essay is not the place to enumerate every myth and piece of disinformation that relentlessly circulates on social media about EVs and Heat Pumps. Carbon Brief have done the myth busting for you [5].
Climate Shaming 3.0: It’s ok for you woke well-to-do!
In order to counter this threat a new form of shaming emerged, particularly in relation to personal choice. I’m calling it Climate Shaming 3.0.
If one believed the framing so often evident in right-wing papers like the Mail and Telegraph titles, EVs and Heat Pumps are (paraphrasing)
… for the woke well-to-do – something they can afford but is not any good for most people …
If it was only these usual suspects one might try to shrug off this chatter.
Unfortunately, there has emerged an unholy alliance amongst those who would regard themselves as green progressives (in a non political sense), who are in a way doing exactly what the fossil fuel messaging is intended to promote.
We have politicians of all kinds who have been cowed by toxic reporting on heat pumps who – wanting to show they are addressing fuel poverty – will talk endlessly about the need to insulate homes. Yet they dare not use the words ‘heat pump’ for fear of being accused of elitism (even though a heat pump is a far more cost-effective route to decarbonising heating than deep retrofit [6]).
They must be laughing their heads off in the boardrooms of fossil fuel companies.
Is it really ‘climate justice’ to promote the poorly designed ECO (Energy Company Obligation) scheme that the NAO (National Audit Office) declared [7] has been a total failure? NAO found that external wall insulation, for example, has led to bad and often exceptionally bad outcomes 98% of the time. This has required very expensive re-work in many cases, compounding the injustice.
This is to be contrasted with the BUS (Boiler Upgrade Scheme) that – despite all the claims about a lack of skills in the sector – has helped to really pump prime the heat pump sector and can be regarded as a success.
Communities like Heat Geek are really shaking things up too, to lower installation costs and improve the quality of installations (to the level already practiced by many small businesses with great track records).
The unholy alliance extends to plumbers, retrofit organisations, council officers, architects and politicians who claim you cannot heat an old building without deep retrofit. A disproven and false claim, but repeated as many times as the story about British pilots seeing better in WWII thanks to eating carrots.
Some untruths live on through repetition.
The idea that we can insulate our way out of energy poverty, without also pushing at least as hard on rolling out heat pumps (individually or using shared heat networks) is an illusion, that would mean we’d be stuck with burning gas for much longer than necessary.
More laughter from those boardrooms.
Insulation, replacing windows and other fabric measures are important but you can easily blow so much money on these that you leave nothing in the pot for a heat pump [6].
Here is a diagram from Nesta that was based on one I originally produced and here I have added some further annotations (see [6] for Nesta version):
That is not climate justice, or fair on anyone.
It is not climate justice for those in energy poverty to have to pay for gas that will inevitably go through repeated market crises and cost spikes in its dying decades.
Climate justice is future proofing our electricity supply, the grid, our homes and our streets.
These will then be not only cleaner and more efficient but future proofed. As the late Professor Mackay observed, once you have electrified end use of energy, the electricity can come from anywhere: from your roof, from a community energy project, or from a wind farm in the north sea.
It’s time that those that claim to be progressives stopped falling for the tactics of fossil fuel interests, that time and again are slowing our transition to a clean energy future, and action on climate change.
It started with shaming people for their consumption. Let’s not fall for the new tactic of shaming those who actually care enough to adopt effective solutions.
References
[1] Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, 2010, Bloomberg Press.
[2] Exxon Mobil’s Messaging Shifted Blame for Warming to Consumers, Maxine Joselow & E&E News, Scientific American, 15th May 2021.
All the talk of the ‘spark gap’ – the particularly high ratio of electricity unit prices to gas unit prices – might deter people from getting a heat pump, because they think it will mean they will pay more for their heating than they do currently, but this is false in the majority of situations where householders are end-of-lifeing their old gas boiler.
Let’s run the numbers.
Take a building that currently that consumes 30,000 kWh of gas for heating per year.
At a gas unit price of 6p/kWh that totals £1,800 per year (for the moment, ignoring standing charges for simplicity)
Let’s assume the old gas boiler is 75% efficient (in many cases with will be quite optimistic).
So, building actually needs 22,500 kWh of heat reaching radiators (0.75 x 30,000 = 22,500).
So the question is, can a heat pump be cheaper to run with its high relative performance that counteracts the ‘spark gap’? Let’s see …
Let’s assume a reasonable minimum achievable heat pump system SCOP of 3.5
So heat pump needs 6,429 kWh of electricity to produce 22,500 kWh of heat ((22,500 / 3.5) = 6,429)
At a electricity unit price of 22p/kWh that totals £1,414 per year
That is a saving of £386 on running costs
Health Warning: The difference is very sensitive to the ‘spark gap’ (ratio of electricity to gas unit prices), and crucially the SCOP.
Now, I am not saying there is not an issue with the ‘spark gap’. Adoption rates in Europe show that the smaller the spark gap, the high the adoption of heat pumps (see ‘Figure 2.4 Comparison between the heat pump market share, the number of heat pumps installed, and electricity and gas price ratio for countries in Europe in 2023’, Progress in reducing emissions – 2025 report to Parliament, 25 June 2025).
However, when people talk about the spark gap they seem to assume the context is ‘buy a new gas boiler or buy a heat pump’. Needless to say that is a higher bar but not an insurmountable one. Many people who are concerned about climate change and have an ageing gas boiler simply want to know that their heat bills will not rise.
Now back to standing charges. I rerun the numbers for different SCOPs and included standing charges (see NOTES for assumptions). The ‘breakeven’ SCOP is then close to 2.9, which frankly only an incompetent heat pump installer would fail to exceed.
And what is more, for any of these SCOPs the carbon saving is at least 4 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. So both the planet and the bank balance can be happy with the choice.
So, let’s fix the spark gap, but stop banging on about it as though it is a reason not to press on with rolling out heat pumps.
(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2025
NOTES
Assumptions used in table: With heat demand of 22,500 kWh and old gas boiler with efficiency of 0.75 (75%), so gas bill showing 30,000 kWh primary energy used by gas boiler. Used standing charges of 28p and 59p per day for gas and electricity, and unit rates of 6p/kWh and 22p/kWh, respectively. The breakeven running costs SCOP in this case is 2.935. Also, a carbon intensity of gas of 184 gCO2/kWh and for UK electricity grid (for 2024) of 124 gCO2/kWh; so even at a SCOP of 2.5 you save 4.37 tonnes of CO2 a year.
Most people have heard about chaos theory, especially as it applies to weather, but may be a little fuzzy about what it all means. They may even hear people claim “if they can’t even predict the weather in a month’s time, how on earth can they tell us what the climate will be in 25 years time?!”.
It’s a fair challenge, but one that has been answered many times by climate scientists [1], but often in ways that perhaps are not as accessible as I feel they could be. When I was recently asked this question I was frustrated I could not share a plain English article with them.
So here is my attempt in plain, non-scientific language to explain how we can project future climate, despite ‘chaos’. I will use the analogy of rolling dice to help explain things – so no equations or mathematical jargon, I promise.
Chaotic Weather
Let’s start with the discovery of ‘chaos’ by Lorenz in 1963 [2]. Weather projections have to start from the current state of the weather and then project forward. The models incrementally step forward to see how the weather patterns evolve over minutes, hours and days. Lorenz discovered that even with the simplest models, if one did two ‘runs’ of the model which had an infinitesimal difference in initial conditions (eg. the temperature in Swindon at 15.0oC and 15.00001oC) the predicted weather can look very different in just a few weeks..
If this was just a trivial observation that errors can magnify themselves in a complex system, one might be tempted to shrug one’s shoulder – and it was not even a new insight [3]. But Lorenz discovered something far more profound: beautiful patterns amongst the chaotic behaviour of complex systems (think of the eddy currents that appear in the turbulent flow of a river). For those interested in learning more about Lorenz’s mathematical legacy, Professor Tim Palmer gave an interesting talk on this [4].
I say ‘errors can magnify’ because sometimes you end up with a chaotic outcome and sometimes you don’t [5]. This is important if you are about to head off to Cornwall for your summer holiday. Weather forecasters now do multiple runs of the models varying the initial parameters [6]. If all the outcomes look similar then the weather system is not behaving chaotically – at least over Cornwall for the period of interest – and the weatherman can say confidently “it will be dry next week over Cornwall”. If, however, out of 100 runs, 20 indicate wet and windy weather, and the rest were dry, they’d say “There is a good chance of dry weather over Cornwall next week, but there is a 20% chance of wet and windy weather”, so take your waterproofs!
Predictable Climate
It really is all about the question being asked, as with most issues in the world. If you ask the wrong question, don’t be surprised if you get a misleading answer.
If I ask the question “will it be sunny in Cornwall on the 3rd of July of 2050?” (wrong question) then it is impossible to say, because of ‘chaos’. If, on the other hand, I ask the question “do we expect the average temperature over Cornwall to be higher in the summer of 2050 as a result of our carbon emissions compared to what it would have been without those emissions?” (longer but valid question) I can answer that question with confidence; it is “Yes”.
This illustrates that when we talk about weather we are interested, as in our holiday plans or a farmer harvesting their crops, in the specific conditions at a specific place and specific time.
Climate is very different, because it is about the averaged conditions over a longer period and typically wider area.
Throwing the dice
I want to illustrate the difference between these two types of question (specific versus averaged) by use of a dice [7] analogy.
If I throw a dice I expect that the chance of getting a 6 to be 1 in 6. If I ask the (specific) question ‘what will the hundredth throw of the dice show?’ (think weather), I am no more certain of the outcome than after 10 throws [8].
Now ask a different question: ‘what will be the average number of 6s after 600 throw?’ (think climate). I would expect it to be around about 100. As the number of throws increases I’d expect the average (number of 6s divided by the number of throws) to get closer and closer to 1 in 6.
This is just how statistics comes to the rescue in the face of the much used, and abused, “chaos” in the climate debate.
You can do this yourself. Make multiple throws of a dice, and after each throw, take the count of the number of 6s thrown and divide by the number of throws – that is the observed odds. You might be surprised to find how long it takes before the odds settles down to close to 1 in 6.
Being lazy, I wrote a little program to plot the result (using a random number generator to do the ‘throwing’ for me).
The averaged number of 6s converges on the expected odds of 1/6 (shorthand for ‘1 in 6’).
I then imagined two dice, one that was ‘fair’ (where the odds of throwing a 6 were 1 in 6) and a ‘loaded’ dice (where the odds have changed to 1 in 5). This is a analogy for a changed climate where carbon emissions have been happening for some time but have now stopped, and there is a raised but stable concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This gives rise to a higher averaged temperature, represented by the higher odds of throwing a 6 in this analogy (see next illustration).
Despite the uncertainty in any specific throw (think weather) in both cases, the average chance of getting a 6 can be predicted (think climate) in both cases. We can see the loaded dice clearly in the graph, compared to the fair dice. In both cases it takes a little time for the influence of randomness (chaos if you like) to fade away as the number of throws increases.
However, the emissions have not stopped, and in fact have been growing since the start of the industrial revolution. There has been a significant acceleration in emissions in the last 75 years. So the amount of accumulated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been growing, and with it, the averaged surface temperature on Earth.
So, taking the analogy one step further, I created a dice that gets progressively more ‘loaded’ over time (think each year of emissions).
Now, the averaged chance of throwing a 6 will progressively increase, compared to the fair dice. This is illustrated in the next graphic.
Again, we see the averaged odds after a number of throws jump around for quite a while (think chaos), but things settle down after a several hundred throws.
We now see a clear and ever widening gap between the two dice.
This is analogous to what is happening with our climate: our continuing carbon emissions are progressively loading the ‘climate dice’.
No amount of weather chaos can cancel the climate statistics that become more evident with every year that passes.
Extreme WeatherEvents
Now while weather and climate are different, because climate is an average of what the weather is over time, there is an interesting flip-side to this. Since the climate changes due to our carbon emissions, that means the spread of possible weather must have also shifted, to generate a new average.
This means that extreme weather events become much more likely.
Once again, this is just basic statistics. So events that may have been “one in a hundred years” become much more frequent, and very extreme events, like the 40oC we saw in England in 2022, that were “basically impossible” without our carbon emissions [9], now start to happen.
I don’t want to make this essay longer explaining how this works, and the Royal Statistical Society have done a great job on this, so please visit their explainer [10].
Extreme weather events are now popping up all over the world, almost on a weekly basis, and thanks to the statistics and associated modelling, scientists can now put a number on how much more likely each event has become due to our carbon emissions [11].
We have already loaded the climate dice, the question now is, how much more do we want to load it, and make the odds even worse?
Over the specific place and time period of interest, of course.
This is called ‘ensemble modelling’.
For the grammar police: common usage now prefers ‘dice’ for singular and plural cases.
In this sense, the dice analogy is somewhat different to climate, because climate change is conditional on what came before, but this does not change the point of the analogy – to distinguish between specific and averaged questions.
I respect those wishing to protect nature who are worried about unrestrained infrastructure projects, but the ‘unrestrained’ bit was never part of the plan, and strawman arguments now abound, such as the claim we will be building solar farms on prime arable farmland.
An astonishing 30% of UK land is devoted to grazing, and raised solar arrays can co-exist with grazing, even providing shade during heatwaves. It may even pay back some of the carbon impact of those methane burping ruminants. Solar grazing (or agrivoltaics) is now a thing in some countries so why is it not supported by organisations like the CPRE in the UK?
I have concerns about the impact of progressive weakening of the Government’s new infrastructure policies that may continue the blocking or delaying of essential on-shore renewable energy projects.
In his seminal book over 15 years ago, Professor David Mackay wrote1:
If the British are good at one thing, it’s saying “no.”
No to this solar farm; no to that wind turbine on that hill; no to that wind farm off my coastline; etc.
This, despite the fact that the Government’s most recent public opinion survey2 shows 80% are in favour of renewables; although when it comes to on-shore wind and solar farms in one’s locality, this drops to 37% and 47%, respectively.
Is this because the public are not aware of the benefits of local energy production? Or because not enough of it is community owned? Is it that people do not understand the nature of the emergency we face and the imperative to act?
We’ve seen over the sequence of three heatwaves3 recently (heatwaves that have been made much more likely due to man-made global warming4) that our beloved commons around Stroud now look more like the Serengeti than our green and pleasant land. This will be the new norm by 2050 if we don’t urgently address our emissions.
At this stage in the climate emergency, climate inaction is tantamount to climate denial.
The Climate Change Committee has made it abundantly clear that we need to electrify most of our economy to get to net zero expeditiously and affordably5: This applies to both generation and consumption:
“In many key areas, the best way forward is now clear. Electrification and low-carbon electricity supply make up the largest share of emissions reductions in our pathway, 60% by 2040. Once the market has locked into a decarbonisation solution, it needs to be delivered. The roll-out rates required for the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs), heat pumps, and renewables are similar to those previously achieved for mass-market roll-outs of mobile phones, refrigerators, and internet connections.”
and really at a much lower costs than many have claimed:
“We estimate that the net costs of Net Zero will be around 0.2% of UK GDP per year on average in our pathway, with investment upfront leading to net savings during the Seventh Carbon Budget period. Much of this investment is expected to come from the private sector.”
Much has changed since David Mackay wrote his book. The costs of renewables has dropped, so they are now the cheapest form of energy (and onshore cheaper still).. Yet I believe another kind of “No” has developed in the dialogue around renewables infrastructure.
There has emerged a false dichotomy between green energy infrastructure and nature. The case often presented is that to protect nature we have to limit infrastructure to only those places which no one cares about, like brownfield sites, which of course would completely undermine any attempt to reach the levels of onshore wind and solar that are needed to supplement off shore development. Whereas there are many things harming nature which are much worse including farming systems, tidy gardens, and climate change itself.
Take the rewiring of our electricity grid that is needed for an electrified economy. The case is made for burying cables as opposed to pylons because it is assumed they are environmentally less harmful, and despite the enormous increase in capital costs (and hence delays) that would result. In fact, burying the quite different ultra expensive cables needed in wide trenches can have impacts on flora and fauna, such as harm to tree roots and subsoil ecology, that can exceed those arising from pylons.
Isn’t the honest truth that people simply don’t like their view being changed by the addition of renewables to the landscape and some use the nature card to avoid being labelled NIMBYs? I fear so.
Rodborough Common 19th Juky 2025 by Richard Erskine
Conversely, we can fail to act and our grandchildren will see a landscape changed forever by our inaction. The MetOffice’s most recent State of The Climate report6 states that under the intermediate pathway scenario (RCP4.5) “years 2022, 2023, and 2024 would likely be considered average by the 2050s and cool by around 2100”. Is that preferable to some wind turbines today offering local energy security and resilience, helping the local community do its part in decarbonising our economy?
The good news is that because of the enormous efficiencies of electrification and the end of burning fossil fuels, the primary energy required from renewables – about 800 TWh per year – would be about one third of the primary energy hitherto required from fossil fuels. Even if we almost double this – to allow for new demands like synthetic meats, AI, minerals recycling, etc – to about 1500 TWh, an Oxford University study7 shows wind and solar can power the UK. As Hannah Ritchie summarises the findings8:
“They think there is a large potential for offshore wind. This would be spread over 10% of the UK’s exclusive economic zone. Onshore wind could be used on 5% of British lands, and combined with farmland. 2% of British land would be used for solar PV, and could also be combined with farmland using a technique called ‘agrivoltaics’. Rooftop solar doesn’t add much – the output is quite small, even if 8% of British rooftops are covered. Definitely still a good option for individuals, but maybe not for the nation as a whole.”
For those that say let others do it, because we are special, don’t be surprised if everyone claims the same. It is analogous to a parent who says let other children take the vaccine (while their child benefits from community immunity so they can avoid the very small risk of side effects of inoculation). If everyone made that choice, everyone is at risk.
Have we, in short, become too selfish to take the steps to act with the urgency needed to actually take declarations of a climate emergency seriously; to go beyond laudable actions like recycling to really substantive endeavours?
We need to make the difficult decisions needed but work hard to take people with us, rather than stoke fears as some political parties choose to. The political debate has created some surprising bedfellows amongst those opposing onshore renewables projects.
UK news coverage just triggered me so please excuse me but really …
Good news: the coverage of heatwaves is drawing the link with climate change on BBC and C4.
Bad news: there seems to be a lot of surprise at this! The dry conditions and repeated heatwaves, causing head scratching on questions like ‘who knew?’, ‘does this herald worsening heat extremes?’, etc.
Well hello people, this has all been completely obvious to scientists studying climate since at least the 1970s, but society has gone along with denial (yep, we’re all in denial, to some degree).
People talk about the elephant in the room – the thing no one has mentioned but really should not have been ignored. Well, here we have the scientists in the room, including the news room, and now regularly demonstrating the long prediced link between man-made global warming and extreme weather events and episodes..
The Metoffice produces frequent decadel forecasts that few read, and then people get surprised when we have another 100 year heat wave or 100 year flood (following the last one 5 years ago; remember 40C in UK in 2022).
When the odds keep changing the use of the phrase “100 year event” we heard from ‘the orange one’ in relation to the deadly Texas floods, is meaningless, and misleading, but unsurprising from someone who is well into his mission to dismantle the USA’s climate science capacity, weather forecasting, and ability to adapt and respond to extreme weather events (driven by man-made climate change that is the underlying driver).
Switch off if you want to, but the simple truth is that every tonne of carbon dioxide we emit cumulatively turns up the climate one-way ratchet and increases the risk of extreme weather events (at both ends of the hydrological cycle, because warmer air holds more water).
More emissions. The dice gets loaded a bit more. The odds get changed a bit more. Repeat.
At this rate, by 2100, my great grandchildren will yearn for the (relatively) cool summers of the 2020s.
And because CO₂ is a long lived greenhouse gas, don’t expect the atmospheric concentration of it to fall anytime soon. Ratchets turn in one direction. Give it hundreds to many thousands of years before long-term carbon cycles begin to reduce atmospheric concentrations to comfortable levels for humanity, but by then on a changed planet.
Prevention is better than cure with a vengeance in this case.
Worried about heatwaves? You should be but please, don’t be surprised.
“We estimate that the net costs of Net Zero will be around 0.2% of UK GDP per year on average in our pathway, with investment upfront leading to net savings during the Seventh Carbon Budget period. Much of this investment is expected to come from the private sector.”
And 0.2% of roughly £3 billion of GDP is just £6 billion a year (and most coming from industry), less than what the UK spends on fizzy drinks. Even the Government’s spending watchdog agrees. And what a fabulous investment with huge ROI (Return On Inhabitability). The costs of inaction make the costs of action look small by comparison.
Reject the populist, science rejectionists, who think denial wins votes.
I’ll always vote on behalf of those who come after us who I hope will be wiser, less selfish and less ignorant than our generation have been, yet will feel the full force of our failure to take urgent action when we should have.
Yet, it is not too late for us to reduce harms. The harm-free-option ship has sailed, but every tonne avoided makes a difference, and reduces the level and frequency of extremes to come.
I was excited to get my hands on Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s latest book More and More and More – An All-Consuming History of Energy [1]. He offers up a very lively critique of the notion of historic energy transitions – from wood, to coal, to oil and gas.
His methodology aims to show how material flows are intimately linked to energy production in often surprising ways over time. For example we needed wood as pit props to mine coal, and in surprising quantities. Most of the book is devoted to examples of the symbiosis that has existed between the successive materials required to meet our energy needs. He mocks the idea of energy transitions with numerous well researched anecdotes, awash with surprising numbers. It is an entertaining read I would recommend to anyone.
However, I was expecting the book would close with some prescriptions that would show how the “amputation” the blurb called for could be achieved, but in the end he tells us he offers no solutions, or “green utopias”, as he discussed in an interview [2].
In the finale, he presents the newest energy transition – towards a world powered by renewables – as just the latest incarnation of a delusional concept, but largely abandons his methodology of using numbers to prove his case. I wonder why?
He does not deny the reality of a need to reduce carbon emissions, or the science of climate change, but it is clear he sees humanity’s insatiable appetite for energy as the central issue that must be addressed. He could have written a different book if that was his objective.
There are fundamental flaws in Fressoz’s scepticism of the renewables transition.
Solar abundance
The first of these is that the new source of energy that supplies our energy in a renewables future is our sun. Energy from the sun is a quite different category to that we extract from the ground.
The most pessimistic projection is that humanity, or what we may become, will have hundreds of millions of years left of usable energy from the sun [3]. No digging or extraction required. I’d call it functionally infinite on any meaningful timescale.
Not only that, but the sheer power of the sun’s energy is awesome, which we capture as wind, through photovoltaics, and the ambient energy harvested by heat pumps. As Frank Niele observed 20 years ago [4]:
“The planet’s global intercept of solar radiation amounts to roughly 170,000 TeraWatt [TW] ( 1 TW = 1000 GW). … [man’s] energy flow is about 14 TW, of which fossil fuels constitute approximately 80 percent. Future projects indicate a possible tripling of the total energy demand by 2050, would correspond to an anthropogenic energy flow of around 40 TW. Of course, based on Earth’s solar energy budget such a figure hardly catches the eye …”
It is clearly a category error to compare renewables with fossil fuels.
False equivalence
Ah, but what about the lithium and all those (scare story alert) “rare earths” needed to build the renewables infrastructure. This is the second flaw in the Fressoz thesis. The example of wood consumption for mining staying high even after the ‘transition’ to coal, is an example of an essential material relationship between the kilowatt-hours of energy produced and the kilograms of material consumed. This link does not exist with renewables to any meaningful degree.
It has nevertheless become a popular belief amongst those questioning the feasibility of renewables. For example, Justin Webb on BBC Radio 4 [5] posed this question:
“Is it also the case of us of us thinking whether we can find some other way of powering ourselves in the future … [we are] just going from taking one out of the ground – oil – into taking another thing or another set of things just isn’t the answer, isn’t the long-term answer for the planet.”
This is another category error that unfortunately Fressoz seems happy to go along with. The quantities of minerals required is minuscule compared with the huge tonnage of fossil fuels that has powered our carbon economy, as CarbonBrief illustrated as follows, as part of a debunking of 21 myths about Electric Vehicles [6]:
Credit: CarbonBrief
This false equivalence between minerals extraction and fossil fuels extraction is now widely shared by those who prefer memes to numbers.
A detailed published analysis of the demands for minerals required to build out renewables infrastructure by mid century shows we have enough to do this, without assuming high levels of recycling [7]:
“Our estimates of future power sector generation material requirements across a wide range of climate-energy scenarios highlight the need for greatly expanded production of certain commodities. However, we find that geological reserves should suffice to meet anticipated needs, and we also project climate impacts associated with the extraction and processing of these commodities to be marginal.”
Yet many commentators claim we are in danger of running out of ‘rare earths’ (which they conflate with minerals in general).
Beyond that, it is true that for many minerals it is cheaper to mine them rather than recycle them but Fressoz claims (p.218) “recycling will be difficult if not impossible”. There is no scientific basis for that claim. By 2050, one can expect that better design, improved technologies, economic incentives, and global coordination will become widely effective in tilting the balance to recycling rather than fresh extraction (and energy inputs to do this will not be an issue, as noted earlier).
And once you have built a wind farm it will continue to provide energy powered by the wind for a few decades (which is powered by the sun), without the need for material extraction or material inputs, and the faster this is done, the cheaper it gets, saving trillions of dollars [8].
A renewables circular economy is perfectly feasible, following the initial build out of the new infrastructure by mid century, with abundant energy from the sun powering the recycling needed to maintain and refresh that infrastructure.
Intermittency and grid stability
It is sad that Fressoz decides to play the it-doesn’t-always-shine card when he writes (p. 212):
“At the 2023 COP, the Chinese envoy explained that it was ‘unrealistic’ to completely eliminate fossil fuels which are used to maintain grid stability”.
… as though that settled the argument. They may have said this for UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) negotiating reasons, but it is frankly pretty depressing that Fressoz shared this quote as though it reflected current informed opinion on power systems.
Firstly, even fossil fuelled generation in the early 20th Century needed flywheels to level out energy supply, and in so doing, maintain grid frequency. Such devices can live on in a renewables dominated grid. More likely is the emergence of ‘grid forming inverter’ technology that can replace inertial forms of frequency response such as flywheels and turbines.
Secondly, there are several other ways in which a grid that is 100% based on renewables can remain stable, including what is called ‘flexibility’ (including demand shifting), and distributed energy storage.
The UK is rolling out a lot of battery storage, and these have the benefit of being able to be both large and small to support the network at local, regional and national levels. Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) technology is already making an impact in the UK, Australia and elsewhere [9] demonstrating the resilience that can be achieved in a well designed and well managed grid:
“Recently, a major interconnector trip sent the UK’s grid frequency plummeting. At around 8:47am on a morning in early October [2024], the NSL [North Sea Link] interconnector linking the UK and Norway, suddenly and with no warning, halted … with immediate and potentially disastrous impact on the UK’s electricity grid … battery energy storage systems (BESS) answered the call. Across NESO’s network [National Systems Energy Operator], 1.5GW of BESS assets came online to inject power into the system, bringing frequency to strong levels within two minutes.”
Far from renewables infrastructure causing a blackout, it prevented it. Other countries can learn from this (side eye to Spain!).
A near 100% renewables grid is well within the reach of countries like Australia, and others are not far behind [10]
As the infrastructure scales up, additional storage will be added, to deal with rare extended periods of poor sunlight and low wind. The Royal Society has provided recommendations [11] on how to handle such extreme episodes.
The Primary Energy Fallacy & Electrification
While Fressoz does talk about the efficiency arising from new forms of production and consumption, he does not really chose to provide any numbers (which is in stark contrast to the slew of numbers he uses when talking about wood, coal, oil, etc.).
He then makes the point (p. 214):
“In any case, electricity production accounts for only 40 per cent of emissions, and 40 per cent of this electricity is already decarbonised thanks to renewables and nuclear power.”
He channels arguments that readers of Vaclav Smil will be familiar with. Telling us how hard it will be to decarbonise steel, fertiliser production, flying, etc.; no solutions, sorry.
Even S-curves (that show how old technology is replaced by new) are disallowed in Fressoz’s narrative, because they are too optimistic, apparently, even though there is empirical evidence for their existence [12].
Just a ‘too hard’ message.
What he fails to mention is that the energy losses from using fossil fuels are so large that in electrifying the economy, we will need only about one third of primary energy hitherto needed (using renewables and nuclear). So, in the UK, if we needed 2,400 TWh (Terawatthours) of primary energy from fossil fuels, in an electrified economy powered by renewables, we’d only need 800 TWh to do the same tasks.
The efficiencies come both from power production, but also from end use efficiencies, notably transportation and heating. By moving to electric vehicles (trains, buses, cars) and heat pumps, we require only one third of the energy that has hitherto been used (from extracted coal, oil and gas). This is massive and transformational, not some minor efficiency improvement that can be shrugged off, as Fressoz does,
Green production of steel, cement and fertiliser is possible and in some cases already underway, although currently more expensive. Progress is being made, while flying is more difficult to crack. Together these sectors account for about a quarter of global emissions. Yet, road transport and heating together also represent about quarter of global emissions [13], and are easy to decarbonise, so I guess don’t fit into the book’s narrative.
The surprise for many, who are effectively in thrall to the primary energy fallacy, is that we can raise up the development of those in need while not necessarily increasing the total energy footprint of humanity. We can do more and more, with less!
Who is deluded?
In his essay The Delusion of “No Energy Transition”: And How Renewables Can End Endless Energy Extraction, Nafeez M Ahmed offers an eloquent critique of Fressoz’s book [14].
A key observation Ahmed makes is that Fressoz’s use of aggregate numbers masks regional variations in a misleading way:
“Because he fails to acknowledge the implications of the fact that this growth is not uniform across the globe at all, but is concentrated in specific regions. The aggregate figures thus mask the real absolute declines in wood fuel use in some regions as compared to the rise in others. Which means that oil and wood fuel growth are not symbiotically entwined at all.”
Ahmed goes on to present the arguments about the different nature of the move to renewables, electrification of end-use and so on, in an eloquent and persuasive way. I strongly recommend it.
Fressoz is right to claim that many have been seduced by a simplistic story about past transitions. His book is very entertaining in puncturing these delusions, but he overplays his hand. Ahmed argues convincingly that Fressoz has failed to demonstrate that his methods and arguments apply to the current transition.
Fressoz’s attempt to conjure up a new wave of symbiosis fails because he misunderstands and misrepresents the fundamentally different nature of renewables.
Is there a case for degrowth?
Of course, we do live in a world of over consumption and massive disparities in wealth (and over consumption does not seem to be a guarantee of happiness).
The famous Oxfam paper on Extreme Carbon Inequality from 2015 [15] showed how the top 10% of the world (in terms of income) were responsible for 50% of emissions, and the bottom 50% were responsible for 10% of emissions. An obscene asymmetry. As Kate Raworth argues in Doughnut Economics, we need to lift up those in need, while reducing the overconsumption of some that threaten planetary boundaries.
Yet we do not help those in poor countries by getting them hooked on fossil fuels. Indeed, renewables offer the opportunity to avoid the path taken by the so called ‘developed world’, and go straight to community-based renewable energy. This can be done – at least initially – without necessarily needing to build out a sophisticated grid: solar, wind, storage and electrified transport, heating and cooking is a transformative combination in any situation. We can increase the energy footprint of the poorest (providing them with the development they need), while reducing their carbon footprint.
Yet many want to play the zero sum game. True, there is a carbon budget (to remain below some notional global target rise in mean surface temperature, we cannot burn more than a quantity of carbon; the budget). We should share it out this dwindling budget fairly, but honestly, will we?
The game is nullified if people simply stop burning the stuff! The sun’s energy is functionally infinite (in any meaningful timeframe), so why not reframe the challenge? How about the poorest not waiting for, or relying on, the ‘haves’ suddenly getting a conscience and meeting their latest COP (Conference Of the Parties) promises? Countries like Kenya are already taking the lead [16].
Energy Independence and Resilience within our grasp
There are of course multiple interlocking crises (climate, nature, migration, water, and more). They are hard enough to deal with without claiming that energy should join them.
The land use needed for our energy needs is small compared to what is needed for agriculture and nature, so again, renewable energy is not part of another fictitious zero sum game involving land use.
A paper from the Smith School in Oxford [17] has found that wind and solar power could significantly exceed Britain’s energy needs. They found that even if one almost doubled the standard estimates of the energy needs (to cater for new demands such as circular economy, AI and synthetic meat in 2050), there were no issues with the area of land (or sea) required:
Solar PV 4% of British Rooftop
Solar PV 1% of British Land*
Wind Onshore 2.5% of British Land
Wind Floating Offshore 4% of UK’s exclusive economic zone.
… and bearing in mind that 30% of land is currently used for grazing.
The scare stories about prime arable land being covered in a sea of solar panels is politically motivated nonsense.
I gave a talk Greening Our Energy: How Soon, on how to understand how the UK has made the remarkable transition from a fossil fuel dominated energy sector to our current increasingly decarbonised grid, and how the journey will look going forward (and in a way that is accessible to lay people) [18].
In a world of petrostates and wars involving petrostates, there has indeed been repeated energy crises, and they will get worse while we remain addicted to fossil fuels.
Transitioning to a green energy future is the way out. It is already under way, we have the solutions. We just need to scale them up, and ignore the shills and naysayers.
Let’s not say or imply that solving the many injustices in the world is a pre-condition to addressing the energy transition. This is the false dilemma that is often presented in one form or another, often from surprising quarters, including ostensibly green ones. It is a prescription for delay or inaction.
Achieving green energy independence and resilience might actually undermine the roots of many of those power structures that drive injustices, because energy underpins so much of what communities need: education, health, food, and more.
John Lennon seems to says it right in his song “Power to the people”.
My short review of ‘The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science Secrets and Gaia Theory’, Jonathan Watts
If you have been variously inspired, confused and infuriated over the years about James Lovelock, then this wonderful biography is a revelation. It’s a book that is impossible to put down. It explores the deep roots of Lovelock’s brilliant but often idiosyncratic character.
It doesn’t try to offer trite answers to this complex character, but does reveal surprising insights you won’t find anywhere else. It is so revealing that Lovelock’s undoubted brilliance in matters of science, was not matched by an equally advanced emotional intelligence.
Instead, we see an emotional vulnerability that was exploited by dark forces to co-opt him to an industry narrative on several occasions. Ultimately, he acknowledged this. I wonder if it was in part due to his fiercely declared independence, and not to be seen as a leader of a green movement he saw as too susceptible to wooly thinking?
In my mind, his reaction to the green movement was rather in keeping with Le Chetalier’s Principle: a system will react to any constraint so as to oppose the constraint. He might have appreciated that chemistry metaphor! He seemed happier to express contrarian opinions, almost because it ruffled feathers. Unfortunately this then served the needs of those arch Machiavellian manipulators – notably Rothschild and Lawson – who played him, time and again. His need to please in such cases seemed to override his critical faculties in political matters, which he was so ill equipped to deal with.
The lasting feeling I had on finishing the book was one of poignancy. Lovelock achieved so much, and recognition aplenty, but he was never quite rewarded with the recognition of mainstream science he seemed to both recoil from but also craved.
At first I wondered how a biography whose chapters were titled by the key people in his life could work, but it worked brilliantly. The themes – a love of nature, invention, multidisciplinary problem solving, bombs and more – run through the book like a piece of Brighton rock, as does the evolution of the Gaia vision, from a formative idea to a fully fledged form that finally achieved scientific respectability; and continues to resist being pinned down.
I thoroughly recommend this biographical masterpiece.
A group of 6 ‘heat pump curious’ visitors, organised through our local climate group, cycled from Woodchester to Nailsworth to visit our heat pump and get their questions answered. My wife took some videos of me extemporising. It was a cold day (about 6C outside).
The house is over 200 years old, Grade 2 Listed, and with a floor area of about 250 square metres. Instead of having one large heat pump, Cotswold Energy Group, who installed the system 3 years ago, provided two smaller units. This had the benefit that for much of the year only one is running, as was the case on this visit (if, as one of the visitors pointed out, it had been -6C, then both would have been in operation).
Explaining the heat pump in plain English
So here is the first of the short videos – a plain English short talk (11 mins) explaining how a heat pump works and answering their questions.
You will notice that at one point I had to crouch down to see if one or both units was running – rather demonstrating the low level of noise they produce. At another point in the video, some of the visitors had to shuffle sideways as they were experiencing the cold air from the heat pump (which extracts heat from the air, as explained in the video). I also mention a figure of 20 litres of water a minute as the rate of flow through the radiators. This was illustrative only and not a fixed number, as it depends on a number of factors, and may have been more than that on this occasion.
Explaining why underfloor heating is not required, using a simple model
In this video (2 mins) I explained how radiators can deliver the same heat as underfloor heating, by using a simple paper model for explanation.
Everyone commented on how cosy the room was. We looked at a thermometer that showed it was at 21C. I then got someone to put their hand on the radiator and I asked if they thought it was on, and they weren’t sure. I used a thermometer gun to see how hot it was – its was only 30C. Then I got them to turn their hand palm upwards and found the temperature was 28C, and so of course the radiator didn’t feel “hot”. But, it doesn’t need to be 60C, or 70C, to heat the room, just greater than the target temperature (21C) and sufficiently higher than that to deliver the heat at the rate that balances the rate at which heat is lost from the wals etc.
The flow temperature was a bit higher than this (as this was the surface temperature of just one radiator), but it illustrates the point. ‘Low and slow’ heating works, and delivers greater comfort.
Explaining why the bills don’t need to rise going from an old boiler to a heat pump
In this video, I used simple maths to show why a heat pump shouldn’t raise electricity bills even in an old house (if properly installed), and even with our high UK electricity prices.
I slightly rushed the last part on the relative costs explanation. In the 3 bed semi example, I needed 4,000kWh of electricity say at 28p/kWh totalling £1,120/yr to run the heat pump. Assuming a 70% eff. oil gas boiler we’d would need to consume 17,143 TWh of gas to deliver 12,000 kWh of heat (as 70% of 17,143 equals 12,000). So I’d pay 17,143 kWh x 7p/kWh = £1,200 with the old gas boiler, and that is a little but more than with the heat pump.
As the ratio of the electricity unit price to the gas unit price comes down, as it assuredly will, the economic advantage of moving to a heat pump will only grow (let alone all the other ones: massive carbon emission reductions; more comfortable home; independent of petro-states for energy needs, as grid itself is increasingly dearbonised).
Postscript
The organiser of the visit, Sylvia, sent me a lovely message afterwards:
“Hi Richard, just wanted to thank you for a really interesting tour yesterday… It’s so generous of you to share your home and your experience like that, we were all impressed at how well it was working in a house like yours. Shows how much bad info there is around! You did a good job of explaining some difficult concepts too! I think we all came away inspired… Even though we may not be able to make the change at once… So many thanks from us all!”
I really enjoyed the experience too, with so many great questions.
A question came up about microbore and I gave a reasonable answer I felt, but Heat Geek provides an expert explanation of the issues and potential solutions here > https://www.heatgeek.com/what-to-do-with-microbore-pipework-on-heat-pumps/ and whether you are heat pump curious home owner, but especially a heating engineer, Heat Geek will have answers to most of your questions, and also provides training and support for those in the industry wishing to move from gas boilers into heat pumps.
It’s worth noting that NESTA provide a ‘Visit A Heat Pump’ scheme that connects those like me willing to host house visits, and those who would like to hear from someone who has a heat pump. I have hosted visits using this scheme and will do more, but its also nice to use local networks to organise visits e.g. through climate groups, churches, Rotary, or whoever.
Technical Note
For a deep dive on how radiators deliver their heat, an scientific explanation is provided in Using Radiators with Heat Pumps by Michael de Podesta.
I’ve been listening to coverage of Holocaust Day on BBC Radio and elsewhere. A lot of the coverage rightly centres around the stories of brave survivors who somehow lived to tell their stories of life and death at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
I heard no mention of the camps whose only function was murder soon after arrival of the trains, the Extermination or Death Camps built for the Nazi’s Aktion Reinhard plan: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
Why is this? I want to try to address this question.
In Concentration Camps like Buchenwald and numerous others, dehumanisation and ‘death by work’ was the goal. The Nazis wanted a financial outcome to run alongside their goal of genocide. This required inhumane care and lodging, but as a result there were buildings and other physical records of life and death at the camp.
For those of us trying to make sense of this still recent horror, it also meant that the few that did survive could offer some kind of hope. An emotional release from the darkness. In the words of Primo Levi “To survive is to defy those who would wish to see you erased from existence.”
The greatest focus is naturally on Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was numerically the most deadly of the camps, but it is also unique in having been both a Concentration Camp and an Extermination Camp. This creates an ambiguity about how to talk about this particular camp. It can be difficult to navigate (and explains why some commentators refer to it as a Concentration Camp and fail to mention the Extermination part). It can also enable Holocaust deniers to create their own wicked narratives.
As Channel 4 News tonight said, the story of the holocaust was not a story of those that lived, because the norm was that most died: the mass shootings all over Europe that preceded the camps (often eagerly supported by local antisemitic neighbours), and the build-up to the industrialisation of genocide. In all, the Holocaust created six million stories of lives brutally taken.
Laurence Rees remarked on the lack of attention to the purely Extermination Camps in his seminal book on the Holocaust (Auschwitz: The Nazis & The ‘Final Solution’, BBC Books, 2005):
“Visitors to the sites of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (of who there are far, far fewer than travel to Auschwitz) are shocked by how tiny these killing camps were. A total of around 1.7 million people were murdered in these three camps – 600,000 more than the murder toll of Auschwitz – and yet all three could fit into the area of Auschwitz-Birkenau with room to spare. In a murder process that is an affront to human dignity at almost every level, one of the greatest affronts – and this may seem illiogical unless you have actually been there – is that so many people were killed in such a small area.”
I simply think that news outlets, and most of us actually, find it simply unbearable, and beyond our comprehension to even think about the monstrosity of the industrial murder of so many. Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka seem to leave a blank space in our historical remembrances, because there are apparently no stories to tell of survival amongst the horror, only a blank sheet. Yet even that is not quite true.
One of the most remarkable stories of survival was the ‘Treblinka Revolt’ by Samuel Willenberg and many others, on the 2nd August 1943. These were victims who actively rebelled, with great purpose and planning, against their enforced passivity.
Why is this story not told each year?
Even while their numbers were small when tallied against the huge numbers that were murdered, we see in this story a willingness to stand up and be counted. A lesson to all of us who have infinitely more agency to confront hate and division.
Ultimately, the Nazi’s were confronted and defeated in their war against humanity, and there lies hope too. The good guys won.
Those who seek to divide in the name of an ideology, to achieve absolute autocratic power, will always dream of some distorted vision of a homeland: one that is ‘cleansed’ and made uniform in many ways, even in terms of artistic expression. These people hate diversity.
Yet we know that nature is most successful at its most diverse. Monocultures wither and die. Human society is no different. David McWilliams’s recent brilliant book ‘Money – A Story of Humanity’ gives numerous examples of how cultural plurality provides the spur for wealth and happiness. The cultural monoculture that Hitler dreamed of led to destruction not hope and happiness.
Is hope possible in the shadow of the Holocaust?
Assuredly it is, because humanity has shown that open societies with cultural diversity are the most successful, providing the basis for wealth and happiness. We must continually work to make this a reality, in our own time, faced with the latest incarnations of monoculturalists and autocrats. History teaches us that open, multicultural societies will always prevail in the end, and are worth defending.
‘Climate Models Can’t Explain What’s Happening to Earth: Global warming is moving faster than the best models can keep a handle on’ is the headline of an article in The Atlantic by Zoë Schlanger [1]
The content of the article does not justify the clickbait headline, which should instead read
‘Climate Models Haven’t Yet Explained an anomalous Global Mean Surface Temperature in 2023’.
Gavin Schmidt authored an earlier comment piece in Nature [2] with a similarly hyped up title (“can’t” is not the same as “haven’t yet”). He states very clearly in a discussion with Andy Revkin [3], that he fully expects the anomaly to be explained in due course through retrospective modelling using additional data. It’s worth noting that Zeke Hausfather (who also appears on Revkin’s discussion) said in an Carbon Brief article [4] that 2023 “is broadly in line with projections from the latest generation of climate models” and that there is “a risk of conflating shorter-term climate variability with longer-term changes – a pitfall that the climate science community has encountered before”.
It is not surprising there are anomalous changes in a single year. After all, climate change was historically considered by climate science as a discernible change in averaged weather over a 30 year period, precisely to eliminate inter-annual variability! Now, we have been pumping man-made carbon emissions into the atmosphere at such an unprecedented rate we don’t have to wait 30 years to see the signal.
If you look at the historical record of global mean surface temperature, it goes up and down for a lot of reasons. A lot of it has to do with the heat churning through the oceans, sometimes burping some heat out, sometimes swallowing some, but not creating additional heat. So the trend line is clearly rising and the models are excellent in modelling the trend line. The variations are superimposed on a rising trend. Nothing to see here, at this level of discussion.
The climate scientists are also, usually, pretty good at anticipating the ups and down that come from El Nino, La Nina, Volcanic eruptions, etc. (Gavin Schmidt and others do annual ‘forecasts’ of the expected variability based on this knowledge). Which triggered the concern at not seeing 2023 coming, but why expect to get it right 100% of the time?
Don’t confuse this area of investigation with extreme weather attribution, which addresses regional (ie. sub-global) and time limited (less than a year) extreme events. Weather is not climate, but climate influences weather. So it is possible using a combination of historic weather data and climate models to put a number on the probability of an extreme event and compare it with how probable it has been in the past. So, 100 year events can become 10 year events, for example. This is what the World Weather Attribution service provides. The rarer the event, the greater the uncertainties (because of less historic data to work with), but it is clear that in many cases extreme weather events are becoming more frequent in our warming world, which is no surprise at all, based purely on statistical reasoning (The Royal Statistical Society explain here.)
So back to The Atlantic piece.
The issue I feel is that journalists and lay people can’t abide uncertainty. What are the scientists not telling us! In general people want certainty and often they will choose based mostly on their own values and biases rather than expert judgment. In the case of the 2023 anomaly, the choice seems to be between “it’s certainly much worse than the modellers can model”, “it’s certainly catastrophic”, “it’s certainly ok, nothing to see here”, or something else. All without defining “it’s” or providing any margin of error on “certainty”. Whereas scientists have to navigate uncertainty every day.
The fact is that we know a lot but not everything. There is a spectrum between complete certainty and complete ignorance. On this spectrum, we know:
a lot ‘that is established beyond any doubt’ (e.g. increasing carbon dioxide emissions will increase global mean surface temperatures);
other things that ‘are established outcomes, but currently with uncertainties as to how much and how fast’ (e.g. sea-level rise as a result of global warming and melting of ice sheets, that will continue long after we get to net zero; before it reaches some yet to be determined new equilibrium/ level);
and others that ‘currently, have huge uncertainties attached to them’ (e.g. the net amount of carbon in the biosphere that will be released into the atmosphere through a combination of a warming planet, agriculture and other changes – we don’t even know for sure if it’s net positive or negative by 2050 at this stage given the uncertainties in negative and positive contributions).
So we can explain a lot about what’s happening to Earth, we just have to accept that there are areas which have significant uncertainties attached to them currently, and in some cases maybe forever. Not knowing some things is not the same as knowing nothing, and not the same as not being able to refine our approaches either to reduce the levels of uncertainty, or to find ways to address those uncertainties (e.g. through adaptation) to mitigate their impacts. Don’t put it all on climate models to do all the lifting here.
The current climate projections are much more precise than say the projections on stock market prices in 5 or 10 years, but we don’t use the latter as angst ridden debate about the unpredictability of the markets. We consider the risks and take action. On climate, we have enough data to make decisions in many areas (e.g. when it would be prudent to build a new, larger Thames Barrage), by using a hybrid form of decision making within which the climate models are just one input. Even at the prosaic level of our dwellings, we manage risk. I didn’t wait for certainty as to when the old gas boiler would pack up before we installed a super efficient heat pump – no, we did it prudently well beforehand – to avoid the risk of being forced into a bad decision (getting a new gas boiler). We managed the risks.
Climate models have been evolving to include more aspects of the Earth System and how these are coupled together and to enhance the granularity of the modelling (see Resources), but there is no suggestion that there is some missing process that is required to explain the 2023 uptick but probably missing data; not the same thing. Although there is a side commentary in [4] involving input from Professor Tim Palmer calling for ‘exa-scale’ computing, but Gavin Schmidt pushes back on the cost-effectiveness of such a path; there are many questions we must address and can with current models.
There are always uncertainties based on a whole range of factors (both model generated ones, and socio-economic inputs e.g. how fast will we stop burning fossil fuels in our homes and cars; that’s a model input not a model design issue). There is possibly nothing to see here (in 2023 anomaly), but it could be something significant. It certainly doesn’t quite justify the hyperbole of the The Atlantic’s headline.
If we globally are waiting for ‘certainty’ before we are prepared to act with urgency, we are completely misunderstanding how we should be managing the risks of man-made global warming.
We certainly should not, at this stage at least, be regarding what happened in 2023 as an extra spur to action. Don’t blame climate models for not having raised a red flag before or urgently enough – which is the subtext of the angst over 2023.
The climate scientists will investigate and no doubt tell us why 2023 was anomalous – merely statistical variability or something else – in due course. It is not really a topic where the public has even the slightest ability to contribute meaningfully to resolving the question. It might be better if instead The Atlantic was publishing pieces addressing the issue of what questions climate models should be addressing (e.g. constrasting the building of sea walls, managed retreat and other responses to sea level rise), where everyone can and should have a voice (as Erica Thompson discusses in her book [5]).
Climate scientists have been issuing the warning memo for decades, at least since the 1979 Charney Report, with broadly the same message. We read the memo, but then failed to act with anything like the urgency and agency required. Don’t blame them or their models for the lack of action. Ok, so the advance of models has allowed more diverse questions to be addressed (e.g. trends in flooding risks), but the core message remains essentially the same.
And please, don’t use 2023 as another pearl clutching moment for another ‘debate’ about how terrible things are, and how we need more research to enable us to take action; but then turn our heads away again. Until the next headline, of course.
(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2025
REFERENCES
‘Climate Models Can’t Explain What’s Happening to Earth: Global warming is moving faster than the best models can keep a handle on’, Zoë Schlanger, 6th January 2025, The Atlantic.
ANDY REVKIN speaks with longtime NASA climate scientist GAVIN SCHMIDT about his Nature commentary on what missing factors may be behind 2023’s shocking ocean and atmosphere temperature spikes, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/live/AYknM2qtRp4?si=fsq0y-XkYG58ITw5
‘Escape from Model Land: How mathematical models can lead us astray and what we can do about it’, Erica Thompson, 2022, Basic Books.
I have written a while ago about the project to replace a 25 year old creaking gas boiler with an Air Source Heat Pump. Today we had our annual service provided by Cotswold Energy Group, the original installer. All clear for another year.
The main advice we follow is not to fiddle with the as-installed setup at all – we let it do its thing! We don’t even adjust the controls (TRVs) on radiators because the system was well ‘balanced’ as part of the commissioning of the system. The only thing I look at periodically is the performance data via my phone or PC. If there was some malfunction it would no doubt show up in a drop in weekly performance data. Mostly we forget the system is there.
So I thought I’d just provide a summary of the 2024 performance and running costs.
Summary
A recap. Our house is a large semi-detached dwelling with a total floor area of 251 m² over three floors. It has solid walls [1], and mostly sash single glazed windows. Only the loft insulation and brushes on sash windows are additional retrofit ‘fabric’ measures [2].
The total heat delivered to the house over the last 12 months (directly metered from pipes flow and return gauges) was 29,236 kWh (kilowatthours), and that was achieved with the input of 7,942 kWh of electricity (again, using dedicated metering). So the annual performance (the so called Seasonal Coefficient Of Performance, Seasonal COP or SCOP) is found by dividing the first number by the second, giving a SCOP of 3.68 for 2024. That can be thought of as an efficiency (output divided by input) of 368%. This apparently magical feat (obtaining an efficiency of greater than 100%) is achieved because the heat pump harvests energy from the ambient environment (in our case, the air), and concentrates it to raise its temperature.
Looking at data on a monthly basis, I found that the worst month was January with a COP of 3.06. There will be days when it was worse than this but even on a daily basis it rarely drops below 2.5; for just a handful of days in the year.
If we’d stuck with our old boiler which optimistically ran at 72% efficiency [3], then the primary energy required (in form of gas) would be equivalent to 40,606 kWh (that is 29,236 divided by 0.72).
The result of this is that we are saving about £480 a year as a result of ditching the old boiler, and also achieved a more comfortable evenly heated home (rather than the roller-coaster heating we had with the gas boiler).
With the old system, hot water to our shower came via a gravity fed system and needed a little pump to improve the pressure (noisy, and pressure not that great). With the heat pump and new water tank we now get our hot water under mains pressure. This was one of the most surprising benefits of our move to a heat pump system.
Running cost comparisons
Taking the unit prices for gas and electricity that applied for us for the most of 2024 (5.9p/kWh and 22.7p/kWh, respectively), and the standing charges (28.21p/day and 58.63p/day, respectively), the cost of heating (mainly space heat, but some water heat too) was £2,017 in 2024.
Had we stayed with our old gas boiler, it would have been about £2,500 to do the same job. Probably more because the system was creaking and unlikely to have performed according to the published performance figures [3].
Conclusion
Yes, you can heat any old building with a heat pump without having to make any significant or disruptive changes to the insulation.
Of course, where you can add insulation to a house heated by a gas boiler you can reduce the rate of heat loss and therefore the heating bills. The same is true of heating with a heat pump. But you will find that as you try to reduce the heat loss further and further, the costs will escalate, as I discussed in Insulate Britain: Yes, But by How Much?.
No, it wasn’t difficult to install (whatever ‘noises off’ you may hear from the perenially sceptical ‘You & Yours’ [4], and other naysayers), if you engage professionals with the experience, as you would do for any important job.
We remain very happy with our Air Source Heat Pump and our suppliers. We have a more comfortable house, that is cheaper to run than the boiler it replaced (even given the unjustifiable ratio of electricity/gas unit costs), is very reliable, and we have better showers.
No fiddling, or ‘intelligent home’ tech, required. Keeping it simple.
What’s not to like. You won’t regret it.
(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2025
NOTES
[1] The 200 year old walls are termed ‘solid’, but are actually two course of Cotswold stone with in-filled rubble, providing an element of air gap. The overall wall thickness at ground level is about 600mm. This kind of wall tends to perform better than is often assumed.
[2] I get a little frustrated with the question “is your home insulated?” If one lives in an imaginary house with no roof or walls then the answer would be no! The fact is that any structure that is enclosed provides insulation. The question is really shorthand for “has any insulation been added to the fabric of the building above and beyond the original construction?”. Most people now have some form of loft insulation which wasn’t original, but it is worth ensuring you have it up to the recommended depth (but going much beyond that is not really needed as there is a law of diminishing returns). Draught-proofing is a really good idea, as it reduces the air turnover in the house, improves comfort levels near windows and doors, and is relatively inexpensive. Extraction fans in kitchens and bathrooms are also important, both in reducing the risk of mould, but also because moist are needs more energy to warm it!
[3] You can find out the estimated efficiency of your old boiler using the Product Characteristics Database search function. Our old boiler was a Glow-worm Hideaway 120B. I’ve taken the slightly higher figure presented for winter of 72% (rounded), even though this is likely to be optimistic for a 25 year old boiler.
[4] ‘You & Yours’ is BBC Radio 4’s consumer affairs programme https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qps9 – Today (6th Jan 2025), during a segment about heat pumps we heard about the forthcoming new homes standard, and research being done with Barretts and Salford University. I was astonished to hear that with their new build standards they were seeing a performance, for the air-source heat pumps used to heat the new home (they were referring to the SCOP), of 3. That’s right, worse than our 200 year old house! For new homes, I would suggest a SCOP of 4 is an absolute minimum target, and I’m sure that those clever chaps at Heat Geek would be aiming for 5.
The researchers also “discovered” that the efficiency of heat pumps improves if they are kept on rather than used like gas boilers (being put on on the morning for a few hours and then again in the afternoon). Who knew? Anyone who has any knowledge or expertise in heat pumps, that’s who. With our house, the thermostat in the living room is set to 21C from 0630-2230 and setback to 18C from 2230-0630. The heat pump works only as hard as it needs to (based on the external temperature) to achieve this goal, and does this by changing the ‘flow temperature’ as needed. In our system the maximum design flow temperature of 50C is only for the very coldest days (perhaps a few days a year). In my house over the last month it has averaged about 35C and only once gone above 40C (a few days ago it was 42C).
It then discussed the use of radiant heating for those small dwelling “unsuitable” for a heat pump! I know that Nathan Gambling of BetaTalk would probably be jumping up and down at this point! The Air to Air kind of Air-Source Heat Pumps can be quite compact systems, and can be fitted to any dwelling. For a small flat, at a lower cost than a gas boiler. Direct electric heating may have a niche role is super-efficient PassivHaus’s, we’ll see, but it is not true to claim that heat pumps cannot be used in small dwelling.
So I haven’t a clue about the quality of the research referred to, but based on this admittedly brief segment, it did raise some concerns as to the research brief. And it is clear that the producers and lead presenter on You & Yours are still unable to accept that heat pumps are the primary game in town, so they will continue to find ways to sow doubts.
I was flabbergasted this morning (3rd January 2025) to hear a segment on BBC Radio 4 Today, where there was a discussion prompted by widespread calls by X users, and Elon Musk himself, calling for National Inquiry into rape gangs in Oldham. We are used to the Daily Mail often seeming to set the agenda for news commentary, but X, the platform that all right-minded people are fleeing from?
This prompted me to write this piece about a concern I have had about BBC news coverage for some time.
If you watch or listen to BBC news coverage and political commentary, on TV or Radio, and compare it with, say, Channel 4 News, you will for the most part detect a distinct difference in tone and content.
On Channel 4 News, if there is a news flare up about some talking point that is being pushed by the right wing media, Elon Musk’s X, or wherever, there will be a strong push back, but not so much on the BBC.
We have seen this with the riots in the summer and now with calls for a Public Inquiry into sex gangs in Oldham. In this case it is not about the merits or de-merits of a national inquiry but the way this story has been handled, even though it is clear that malign actors are using the terrible experiences of young girls in Oldham to pursue a far-right agenda. Instead of the picking up the framing “Why is there not a National Inquiry?” (with the dog-whistle of implied cover-up), the BBC journalists could reframe it as “We’ve had multiple reports on grooming gangs, let’s explore what success there has been, if any, in implementing the many recommendations?”. But no, the BBC News coverage seems to cut-and-paste the headlines screaming from the right wing papers whose primary interest seems to be undermining the Government.
How is that “balance”?
Impartiality is not simply taking opinion at face value, but should involve challenging the underlying assumptions and framing that is being promoted. Sharp interrogation of the assumptions and framing are the norm on Channel 4. On the BBC too often it comes across as an acceptance of the framing, followed by a bland commentary and exchange of opinions. This can have the appearance of a robust discussion but is anything but if it fails to challenge underlying assumptions and motivations. It comes across as ‘he said, she said’.
The BBC will counter by saying they are different because they have a mandate to ensure impartiality of its coverage, but how do they interpret this duty?
We saw how on climate change reporting over a decade ago, that ‘false balance’ was practised, as Professor Steve Jones pointed out in his July 2011 report on science reporting at the BBC. He noted:
“in their desire to give an objective account of what appears to be an emerging controversy…face the danger of being trapped into false balance; into giving equal coverage to the views of a determined but deluded minority.’ This problem of false balance was particularly pronounced when it came to climate change because ‘denialists’ use rhetoric ‘to give the appearance of debate”
and as a result pursued an “over-rigid” insistence on due impartiality and risked giving ”undue attention to marginal opinion” on scientific questions. A commitment to accuracy cannot be overridden by the claim of impartiality.
Three years later, the Science and Technology Select Committee conducted a year long inquiry on the BBC’s coverage of climate science and found that:
“BBC News teams continue to make mistakes in their coverage of climate science by giving opinions and scientific fact the same weight”.
We saw how the coverage of Brexit was too often a parade of opinions, avoiding any real substantive argument or evidence base. Claims that there would be no harm to our economy were handled very much in this fashion. Only well after the referendum, when the Conservative Government was embroiled in increasingly convoluted attempts to avoid the inevitable, did a real interrogation occur of the flawed claims (such as the oft-repeated claim that WTO rules could be used to side step EU rules).
There were no shortage of experts challenging the Pro-Brexit claims about trade, such as Bristol University Law School, but these never got a proper airing on the BBC, which was once again desperate (do you spot the pattern) to appear balanced but achieving exactly the opposite. It became a competition of different slogans, and the devil, as we all know, always has better tunes; and better slogans (‘Take Back Control’ won the day).
After their success in getting the UK to leave the EU – our nearest and largest trading block – and all the harm that has ensued (as warned of by experts), the same right-wing actors have now gained confidence. They’ve completely stopped the pretence: they are now nakedly espousing a far right agenda. They want to use populist attacks on the Government to undermine our democracy. Now, Trump and Musk – who no one in the UK have voted for – are putting their considerable weight behind Farage’s Reform Party.
Of course, any comparison with 1920s Germany is regarded as alarmist and scaremongering.
“But that could never happen in the UK?”. Do we really believe that we are more cultured and sophisticated, and less susceptible to demagogues, than the Germany that sleepwalked into authoritarian rule?
In their rise to power, the Naziz made the same use of disinformation, attacks on institutions and ‘othering’ of minorities (the Jews). Remember that the Nazis used the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) in their campaign of antisemitism, even while they knew it was not true. The meme has never really left us, even after the horrors of the Holocaust.
This toxic conspiracy theory has transformed into a modern form: a conspiracy of a world order that controls everything and is led by Jews. It is a core belief amongst the far right conspiracy theorists who Trump has empowered, and who lurk in the wings, aiming to undermine every Western democracy, including ours.
It is no surprise then that Nigel Farage was called out in the Guardian (2019) for criticising George Soros, an emblematic placeholder in this imagined world Government:
Farage said Soros sought “to undermine democracy and to fundamentally change the makeup, demographically, of the whole European continent”. The latter claim directly echoes conspiracy theories against Soros made by far-right groups such as Generation Identity.
His tactic of using conspiracy claims was evident again in comments he made following the murder of 3 girls in Stockport in the summer of 2024 (as reported in The Independent, 19th August 2024), and half of voters held him directly responsible for the riots, when
.. he accused the police of withholding the truth from the public and repeated misinformation which claimed the suspect was under surveillance by security services.
“amplifying false information” by spreading a theory first suggested by influencers like Andrew Tate, and then failed wholly to condemn the riots. “I want to be clear: this is not leadership. It is deeply irresponsible and dangerous,” he said.
It is no wonder there was much despair at Mishal Husain leaving the BBC, because she seemed to be an outlier – a journalist on BBC Radio 4 Today who departed from the formulaic banality of faux balance, and instead engaged in substantive argument. See how she conducted interviews with Nigel Farage on his claim that no one speaks English in Oldham or on the Reform Party’s policy to freeze non-essential migration. If she can do it, why can’t the others? Victoria Derbyshire on BBC Newsnight is another in an all too small group.
Yet overall the BBC is failing in its duty as our national broadcaster, by enabling marginal opinion and not holding malign actors to account. It’s approach to news reporting requires a fundamental review. They could start by endeavouring to emulate Mishal Husain’s methods, by simply not putting up with those that engage in dogwhistle politics. Call it out!
In the light of the UK Government’s new report Clean Power 2030 Action Plan: A new era of clean electricity (13th Dec 2024), and the UK’s commitment achieve netzero by 2050, this talk looks at the UK energy system and how it has evolved from 2010 to today, and how it will evolve through 2030 towards 2050.
It is aimed at a non specialist lay audience, and avoids graphs and technical jargon.
It provides a new approach to communicating the complexities of the transition from a fossil fuel dominated energy system to one dominated by renewables.
For those who are well versed in energy matters, it is hoped it will support their efforts in engaging with a wider audience on the path to net zero.
[This NEW VERSION is one that was presented in person to the Cam & Dursley branch of the University of the 3rd Age (U3A) on 28th November 2024. It is a complete reworking of a talk I gave in February 2024 https://essaysconcerning.com/2024/02/22/greening-our-energy-how-soon/ . The recorded version included here is a slightly amended version of the U3A talk, including a little more on the Government’s Clean Power in 2030 plans, for example].
History taught in my young days often gave us a cartoon version of the past. A great example is that of King Canute who showed to his flattering courtiers that he could not turn back the tide; that his secular powers were no match for the almighty. It was a teaching moment by a wise King.
But of course this was mutated into a comical converse version of history: it became a poor old King Canute tried to turn back the tide, ha ha version of history.
King Donald, as he no doubt sees himself, also surrounded by flattering courtiers, believes he can turn back the tide of the green transition, but he can’t and he must not.
“Clean energy is like a giant boulder that’s already reached its tipping point and is now rolling downhill toward a greener future. It’s got millions of hands on it, from individuals to some of the biggest countries, cities, and companies in the world. It could still be slowed by actions of governments and corporations—delays that will have serious consequences for people and planet alike—but it can’t be stopped. Gravity, history, and progress are on our side.“
The cost of renewables has fallen exponentially, and while there is a long way to go the boulder has passed a tipping point – we are on a rising trend on a typical S curve of transition:
“The S-curve is a well-established phenomenon where a successful new technology reaches a certain catalytic tipping point (typically 5-10% market share), and then rapidly reaches a high market share (i.e. 50%+) within just a couple more years once past this tipping point.”
So, like the tide the green transition cannot be turned back.
I wonder what future historians will make of King Donald?
Schoolchildren will no doubt laugh at his scientific illiteracy and attempts to hold back the tide, but in this case they will reflect an accurate interpretation of history.
Unlike the wise King Canute, the foolish King Donald truly believes he can hold back the green tide, but while he can throw spanners in the works – and S curves always have ups and downs along the way – he cannot hold back the tide.
Yet that is no reason now for all of us not to give that boulder a helping hand, to speed it on its way.
This post is a section / extract from my book Trusted Knowledge in a digital and fragmented world of work which is available as a hardback, paperback or e-book on Amazon.Several of the previous sections in the book provide the underlying know-how on how to deal with difficult areas such as access to sensitive information. I believe that the book has relevance to all sectors but given the UK Government’s call for a national conversation in its aims towards Creating a new 10-Year Health Plan.Here follows the section Healthcare’s Knowledge Architecture, including (with her permission) the treatment pathway of my wife’s successful treatment for breast cancer from 25 years ago at Cheltenham General Hospital, starting with a description of key principles ...
I want to focus on the question of knowledge as it is shared within a healthcare system, as an exemplar of the opportunities to improve information and knowledge management. If we look at the regular clinical experience of patients within the healthcare system of the UK, with a National Health Service (NHS), one might expect that someone on holiday taken ill could walk into any hospital at the other end of the country, and the clinicians would be able to immediately access information needed to assess a patient. This is not the case, despite many years of trying to fulfil this outcome, and billions spent on IT, including the disastrous National Program for IT (NPfIT) failure.
Fragmentation of data and systems exists in many countries for a variety of reasons. In the USA, it is down to the privatised, metric driven, insurance funded fiefdoms which dominate the sector. Some countries, such as Finland, have managed to crack the problem, but this is an exception, not the rule.
Healthcare is a sector that is a great exemplar for both the challenges and opportunities of improved information and knowledge management, and I wanted to use it as a vehicle for illustrating several of the key principles that have been central to this book.
IT delivery across healthcare has been marked by a highly fragmented approach. Many healthcare organisations find that they have accumulated several hundred systems, creating a large number of data and document silos. Often, because there are not the funds to do a proper fix, another ‘bolt on’ remedy will be implemented.
While this has caused operational issues, it has fundamentally hampered the ability of clinicians to have a unified view of a patient or patient pathway, and this can have a significant impact on the quality of patient care.
Even when a basic unified medical record has been achieved, much of the associated data has remained inaccessible, and there is still an over reliance on paper or on relatively primitive digital approaches to ‘unstructured’ data, which has remained stubbornly siloed. In many practices it is not a lack of IT solutions that is the issue, but a fragmented approach that has led to a lack of joined up data and information, let alone knowledge.
In the section The Data Landscape, I discussed how transactional systems have tended to get the most attention and funding in organisations, whereas the more ‘knowledge oriented’ processes and systems are often neglected. This is also true in healthcare, but fragmentation has been common for all types of systems, particularly in cash-strapped hospitals; they have fallen back on a cottage industry approach to IT systems that has further fragmented the delivery of solutions.
This is not to advocate a top-down approach to systems. In the NHS this was tried and singularly failed because it imposed a rigid approach in areas where there should arguably be more freedom (such as in the procurement of software).
It could instead have had a more fundamental and achievable goal, to create standards (such as an information architecture) that facilitated data and information sharing, without being prescriptive on solutions delivery. What would a process look like that delivered such standardization to the NHS?
I want here to sketch out some aspects of the methodology that is outlined in this book, and I am interested in focusing the exposition on the ‘patient pathway’. The analysis starts with the identification of Essential Business Entities (EBEs); those entities that would exist however the management decided to reorganise or despite several generations of systems. For healthcare, the following are an incomplete list of EBEs:
Admission
Appointment
Clinic
Clinical/Medical Image
Clinical Pathway
Consultant
Consultation
Discharge
Doctor
General Practitioner
Examination
Healthcare Provider
Hospital / Clinic
Investigative Procedure
Laboratory Test
Medical Record
Medical Specialist
Medication
Nurse
Observation
Patient
Payer
Pharmacy
Prescription
Regulator
Referral
Report
Treatment
For some EBEs, such as ‘Regulator’, there is no work related to it from the organisation’s perspective (because it is a pre-existing entity and not something that requires anything from the healthcare provider to create or manage it). For this reason, we are only interested in EBEs that generate work within the scope of the organisation (e.g. within a healthcare provider).
In addition, because we want to analyse patient pathways, the focus is on those EBEs that are most relevant in the current context, such as: Referral, Observation; Patient; etc. The Process Architecture below reflects this focus.
Figure – Patient Pathway Process Architecture
The aim of a process architecture is to indicate how each process ‘invokes’ possible subsequent processes; this is not a dataflow, or workflow, but a graph showing the possible sequence of invocations.
On a patient pathway such as cancer treatment and after-care, a particular process such as Make Examination can be invoked many times over several years, as the patient passes through the different interlocking cycles of referral, examination and treatment.
My wife (who I thank for giving permission to share her story) was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, soon after we had moved house. It was a terrible shock to the whole family. We visited the senior breast cancer consultant at Cheltenham Hospital and recall being the last to see him, late on a Friday afternoon. He sat with my wife and I for over an hour, and never once looked at his watch. He explained the options clearly. He calmed us down. The path ahead would be difficult but we could make it. He gave us the confidence we needed. I had read that the key to successful cancer care was not necessarily the things we imagine – the specific drugs used and other technicalities – but the communications and particularly the team-work amongst the healthcare professionals.
Luckily for us, Mr. Bristol and the team at Cheltenham were exceptional. I know that there were occasions when how I acted, as part of the extended team, would be critical. For example, when my wife became drowsy and I knew from my briefings from the Breast Cancer Nurse that I needed to be alert to the possibility of low white cell count; and that a possible dash to the hospital and isolation ward might be called for. This happened twice during the chemotherapy, and we are forever grateful for the knowledge that the nurse instilled in us.
The usual process with chemotherapy for breast cancer was to use the milder drug first and only use the harsher drug for subsequent treatment. My wife agreed to take part in a clinical trial for a new protocol where these treatments were reversed; there would be a hard hit first, followed by a longer sequence with the milder drug.
The involvement in the trial meant that my wife was monitored and assessed long after most patients would have been fully discharged by the hospital – even those who had moved onto a post-chemo hormone suppressant treatment, such as Tamoxifen. In my wife’s case, she was only fully discharged after 10 years, and while the trial was completed some time ago, the data from her case continues to inform scientific research on Breast Cancer, more than 20 years after she was diagnosed.
In the summer of 2019, she received a request to access samples of tissue, held in storage, as part of continuing research; the documentary records themselves will be equally valuable for current and future research.
Figure – The Long Pathway of a Breast Cancer Patient
Protecting personal confidentiality is important, which is why some records need to be transferred in a way that does not identify the patient; this is preferrable to simply deleting records after arbitrary retention periods. This would limit the ability to carry out longitudinal studies, and assess the efficacy of treatments over long periods.
The duration of this pathway is very long compared to the waves of change that occur in IT. This emphasises the need for an approach to information management and the handling of records that is resilient to these changes, to minimise or even eliminate the need to transcribe and convert data and documents between systems on ever shorter cycles.
At the heart of the approach to handling this change, is the ‘Electronic Health Record’ (EHR) – which is usually conceived of as the complete history of an individual’s clinical encounters: examinations, diagnoses, treatments – so perhaps better thought of as a dossier of health records. It is essentially the digital equivalent of the manilla file that a General Practitioner would previously retain in your local surgery (at least in the UK), including correspondence with specialists and hospitals, referred to during treatments that could not be dealt with locally. Now, however, the EHR is seen as including literally everything including, for example, the digital X-ray files created during an examination.
The idea of a single system being responsible for all aspects of a person’s clinical pathway is not realistic: there are specialist, dedicated systems for MRI (Magnetic-Resonance Imaging), and each discipline. What is possible is that each system such as this can share the records it generates on a secure network, and some central repository can add each record into a patient ‘dossier’ without interfering with the source system.
Figure – Conceptual Information Model
The dossier itself could be stored, and if necessary moved, in a non-proprietary form, such as XML using a standard structure applicable to health records. This can be modelled conceptually as in a Conceptual Information Model, as depicted above.
An individual’s health record will grow and grow, and in addition to the pathway discussed above will include interventions small and large – the cut on the knee, the treatment for a skin condition, and so on and so forth – from birth to death. So how would a health professional interact with this information?
It must be possible to filter and segment access according to the role of the health professional. A technician who is undertaking an X-ray does not need full access to the whole health record, whereas a general practitioner does. If it is a team meeting to discuss next steps for a cancer patient, then they all need to see the diagnosis, treatments and observations made by all professionals who have been part of the treatment pathway. They might interact with the information through a timeline view of the information, that could reveal something like the long pathway shown earlier, but allow them to zoom in and out of the timeline, and move back and forth in time.
To make this as much a knowledge platform as a data and information one, they need the ability to add notes and annotations to this timeline, to make sense of decisions made, and perhaps course changes made on the pathway. The pathway would reference the current protocols and standards being used, but also, in the case of an innovative trial, the basis for the decisions being made.
Quite separate from the particularities of one patient, work is done to manage and maintain those protocols and standards. There will be the development of new protocols based on evidence from published research as well as on local knowledge of the team, or health trust, or at a national level. It is a continual process or review and challenge. In the UK, we have the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), whose job is to evaluate the efficacy of drugs and treatments, based on the shared national experience. NICE also will assess the relative benefits of one treatment compared to another in terms of health outcomes as a function of costs. This sounds as if it could be a difficult role, and it is, but the NHS does not have an infinite budget, and so if a treatment will extend life by 3 years and costs £50 a week, and another that will extend it for 5 years but costs £1000 a week, there is a utilitarian argument that says that for 10,000 people needing treatment, the first treatment is actually more cost effective, and if budgets are capped, will deliver more years of life extension.
A body like NICE is powerful, because it is often difficult for one professional or even a healthcare unit, to have the breadth of experiences required to evaluate options, even with access to the published literature. Local knowledge sharing is crucial, but it should not be an excuse for an insular approach. The knowledge must flow laterally, between professionals, and vertically, to inform regional and national good practices.
Specific disciplines will have their own knowledge repositories that provide the commentary, stories and narrative that are essential in making sense of the hard numbers, or received wisdom. The radiologists who discuss their methods and approaches, and how they collaborate with other specialists, will contribute to the performance of the diverse teams, such as in cancer care.
Genomics data linked to health records for ‘big data analytics’ – and machine learning to find patterns in that data – will make increasingly large impacts on the choice of treatment protocols. However, as I have argued earlier, this must be seen as a tool that supports the collective knowledge of teams and disciplines. Humans can contextualise knowledge arrived at from personal experience, drug trials or big data. Only humans can summarise that knowledge in a way that combines science, ethics and the wishes of individual patients and families.
Ultimately, health professionals must make choices on treatment pathways, and it is they who must collectively curate a body of knowledge that makes sense of data and information and how to apply that knowledge in a specific context.
A fully developed architecture of knowledge – that respects the principles and practices outlined in this book – is therefore an essential feature of any healthcare system, where knowledge sharing and learning are valued.
Trusted knowledge is crucial to any organisation – working in healthcare or any other sector we might wish to explore – and I hope that this book will make a significant contribution to its advancement.
(in your own/country market on Amazon, search on ‘Trusted Knowledge in a digital and fragmented world of work’ by Dr Richard William Erskine)
I spent 30 years providing strategic advice and practical implementation in the field of enterprise information and knowledge management, working for leading global consultancies, alongside many colleagues and clients to whom I am indebted.
The work took me to many countries and to almost as many sectors, enabling me to see many of the common issues that arise in organisations of all shapes and sizes. Since my retirement in 2016 I have spent time reflecting on my experiences. I have now written a book Trusted Knowledge in a digital and fragmented world of work that provides a synthesis of the ideas and methods developed and deployed over the years.
The term ‘trusted knowledge’ is not intended to imply some immutable truth on a topic, even within an organisational context, but knowledge whose provenance is clear and can be challenged and refined over time, to enrich and improve an evolving body of knowledge.
The book is concerned with ‘communities of practice’, typically within some organisational or collaborative setting. It addresses the fundamental question: How is knowledge captured, shared and acted upon by practitioners in a field of work?
The reality is that few organisations have achieved mastery in answering this question. Too often silos are the reality, and lessons are neither captured nor learned. Information does not flow seamlessly through the value chain. Wheels are reinvented. Access to information that a practitioner needs is often too hard to find, whereas confidential information is carelessly released.
The book sets out the principles, practices and capabilities needed for enterprises to enhance the value of an evolving body of knowledge in what is an increasingly digital and fragmented world of work. This is in part about putting in place a consistent information management platform, but that is only the start. It is also about creating a culture where there is respect for the curation of knowledge, and its take up, which becomes embedded into a ‘learning organisation’.
To enable past colleagues and clients internationally who I have worked with to have easy access to the book, it is published as an eBook and as Print on Demand book on Amazon KDP. Others are encouraged to take a look and if they like what they see, to pass the word on.
The book starts by covering the current state of affairs as it exists in many organisations, then sets out the foundations required of a sound approach to information management. For example: finding the right balance between accessibility and confidentiality; ensuring there is a shared language in use across the value chain; enabling effective reuse of intellectual capital – to name just a few. The book then brings the elements together by setting out an approach to creating an architecture of knowledge, and illustrates this with reference to the healthcare sector.
The book includes many anecdotes from client experiences (suitably anonymised), and nearly 100 figures I have used during my consulting career to help in articulating ideas and recommendations to assist clients.
In the Afterword, I conclude the book with the following reflections:
There is a lot of debate about the failure to improve productivity, in the UK at least. As we now live in a knowledge economy, I am convinced that adopting the approaches set out in this book would have a huge impact on personal and organisational productivity. Done well, it could also have a transformative effect on trust in the organisation. Trust in the knowledge curation, and as used by the enterprise and its partners.We have to stop imagining that the management and take-up of knowledge can be fixed by yet another silver bullet (the latest being AI). It will require sustained effort from management and a diversity of disciplines, with technology playing its part, but not dominating the conversation. There will be lots of achievements to celebrate and gain benefit from along the way; this is not about a big bang transformation. It will be a journey of continuing improvement, with numerous opportunities for innovation along the way.I feel privileged if you have accepted me, through this book, as a guide and mentor on that journey.
(c) Richard W Erskine, 2024
The two pages from the book listing the chapters/ sections are reproduced below to give you more of a teaser for what is covered.
Today, World Environment Day, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres made a special address on climate action “A Moment of Truth” in New York. In a speech that covered the impacts already being felt from the delays in taking action, and the injustices this gives rise to, he turned his ire on fossil fuel companies and their enablers (my emphasis):
“Fourth and finally, we must directly confront those in the fossil fuel industry who have shown relentless zeal for obstructing progress – over decades. Billions of dollars have been thrown at distorting the truth, deceiving the public, and sowing doubt. I thank the academics and the activists, the journalists and the whistleblowers, who have exposed those tactics – often at great personal and professional risk. I call on leaders in the fossil fuel industry to understand that if you are not in the fast lane to clean energy transformation, you are driving your business into a dead end – and taking us all with you. Last year, the oil and gas industry invested a measly 2.5 percent of its total capital spending on clean energy.”
He then went on to say:
“Many in the fossil fuel industry have shamelessly greenwashed, even as they have sought to delay climate action – with lobbying, legal threats, and massive ad campaigns. They have been aided and abetted by advertising and PR companies – Mad Men – remember the TV series – fuelling the madness. I call on these companies to stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction. Stop taking on new fossil fuel clients, from today, and set out plans to drop your existing ones. Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet – they’re toxic for your brand. Your sector is full of creative minds who are already mobilising around this cause. They are gravitating towards companies that are fighting for our planet – not trashing it. I also call on countries to act. Many governments restrict or prohibit advertising for products that harm human health – like tobacco. Some are now doing the same with fossil fuels. I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies. And I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil fuel advertising.”
The on-going activities of organisations, individuals and PR companies funded by fossil fuel interests did not end in the mid 1990s (even <shocked emoji> in the UK), and has continued in many ways unabated, as Desmog has documented on an almost daily basis https://www.desmog.com. However, now the emphasis is on trying to undermine climate solutions, so as to justify carrying on using fossil fuels, either in electricity generation, or in end-use such as transport and heating. But as the alternatives are now so good, the PR and greenwashing has to be world-class to try to undermine them.
So it was astounding to hear Nick Butler – a Visiting Professor at King’s College – being interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s PM today (5th June 2024) by Evan Davis, being highly critical of the Secretary General’s speech. When asked about fossil fuel companies obstructing public discourse with their lobbying, public affairs, and so on, he said:
“… I think that was the case in the past but from the middle of the 1990s that has changed, certainly for the European companies, certainly BP and Shell, are going in a different direction …” <my jaw drops emoji>
Well being an ex-BP employee he would say that wouldn’t he. He is just one example of what might be called an apologist for climate greenwashing.
And it is incredibly disingenuous to say that adverts for oil and gas don’t appear on TV anymore in the UK. No, but adverts and PR for petrol powered SUVs, or Hydrogen Boilers, or … the list goes on. And to say that its all our fault for making the wrong choices, as Nick Butler suggested, is really the equivalent of victim blaming. I can’t take an EV Bus if there are no EV Buses (or indeed no bus service worth talking about), because car manufacturers and fossil fuel interests have been in cohoots to promote gas guzzlers (and are now whining because the China actually invested in an EV supply chain and market).
The truth is that between 2010 and 2018, Shell dedicated just 1% of its long terms investments to renewable energy, and paying creative agencies to target influencers to improve the brand’s image, etc, as Client Earth’s expose ‘The Greenwashing Files’ reveals. BP and the rest are no different.
You see they have moved on from the mid-1990s. Then the focus was on full front climate science denial, through a myriad of think tanks, influencers writing for the Daily Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, and wherever. Now they are more subtle, more devious. “Oh yes we love renewables”, they will say, but “when the wind doesn’t blow or it doesn’t shine our gas will be needed to generate your electricity”. Gas, I should stress, which they want to grow as a proportion of their business, not phase it out at all. It’s almost as if they are trying to gaslight renewables.
We have an example in the UK of fossil fuel interests – the gas network – producing hit pieces on heat pumps, and claiming that green hydrogen is better, even though all the science shows this is not the case (and in any case, its a ruse by them to carry on extracting natural gas to turn into hydrogen, which will never be green, because they will never be able to afford to bury the carbon dioxide produced in the process). Yet even the Bosch executive vice-president Stefan Thiel now accepts that hydrogen is a lost cause for heating homes. The delays caused by the industry’s disinformation campaign on just this one attack line has come at a cost – being delays in decarbonising UK home heating.
And the greenwashing has been getting worse as the fossil fuel companies try desperately not to be in possession of stranded fossil fuel assets. But they, and their PR / Advertising agencies, are now feeling the heat as one Desmog story Litigation Over Misleading Climate Claims Has ‘Exploded’ Over the Past Few Years reveals:
“Companies are increasingly facing legal action over their false or misleading climate communications, according to a new report examining trends in global climate litigation. That report, released late last week, highlighted a surge in litigation around climate-related greenwashing — what researchers have termed “climate-washing” — over the past few years.”
And to take Shell as an exemplar again, far from “going in a different direction”, as Nick Butler claimed, they are actually reducing investments in renewables because it does not “align” with their strategy to maximise extraction of methane (aka “natural” gas, see what they did there, long ago). They have been pulled up several times for misleading greenwashing advertisements.
As recently as 2022 Shell has had some of its adverts banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for misleading claims about how clean its overall energy production is, as the BBC reported here.
One can forgive Evan Davis for not being as well briefed as he could be on the history and on-going tactics of the fossil fuel companies to delay the green transition through well funded PR, advertising and influencer campaigns, but it would not be a bad idea for BBC PM to do a follow-up with someone who is well informed.
For example, how about inviting Joana Setzer (Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment), and co-author of the report Global trends in climate change litigation: 2023 snapshot, as we know how much the BBC loves a bit of balance.
I was prompted to write this essay after listening to Justin Webb interviewing Ernest Scheyder (author of The War Below: lithium, Copper, and The Global Battle To Power Our Lives) on BBC Radio 4 Today on 3rd April 2024. I was impressed by the author’s arguments, stressing the need to make informed choices in the way we mine for minerals. I was however rather depressed by Justin Webb repeating talking points that are used by those trying to halt or delay the transition to clean energy. One thing Webb said rather illustrates my point:
“Is it also the case of us of us thinking whether we can find some other way of powering ourselves in the future that doesn’t involve doing this, because I wonder if that’s what some people at least listening to this are thinking, just going from taking one out of the ground – oil – into taking another thing or another set of things just isn’t the answer, isn’t the long-term answer for the planet.”
The false equivalence between the extraction of fossil fuels and the extraction of minerals used in renewable technologies is so great (by a factor of between 100 and 1000), philosophers might call it a ‘category error’. I’ll get into the details below, but first I want to address the general issue of harms.
A reduction of harms
Imagine it is the 19th Century and it is proposed that workmen use poles with brushes to sweep chimneys in order to replace children going up chimneys. This is motivated by a need for a reduction in harms to children.
What would you think if someone said that chimney sweeps will harm birds nesting in chimneys and so we shouldn’t rush to replace children? A ridiculous argument, you may think, because it highlights the lesser harm without mentioning the greater harm that is being eliminated.
But that is effectively how many argue against renewable technologies aimed at displacing fossil fuels.
I call it the ‘Fallacy of Perfection’: the idea that any new solution should be developed to a point where it has no discernible short-comings before it can be scaled up to replace the old ways of doing things.
Perhaps the most popular and persistent of the myths relate to the mining of minerals needed for EVs and other renewable technologies. Like a meme that now floods social media, we hear that EVs are not green because of this or that, and the implication being we must find an alternative, or do nothing (which would please the fossil fuel companies – the planet, not so much). The naysayers are delaying getting to net zero which is time critical; it’s almost as if they do not take seriously the increasing impacts of man-made global warming!
The Carbon Brief Factsheet included the following graph:
The harms done by fossil fuel extraction and use is the main cause of the climate and ecological crisis we face.
EVs by contrast are like the birds nests being disrupted by a chimney sweep. There are issues to be resolved – and can be relatively easily – but using these issues as a reason to slow the displacement of fossil fuel use is a dangerous argument, that gives succour to those in climate denial.
The impacts from global warming gets worse in proportion to the cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases, most crucially carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels. Delaying getting to the point where we stop burning fossil fuels will only increase the harms that global warming is already causing. These will get worse with each year we keep emitting on the scale we are at present.
In this world, nothing comes with zero impact, and yes, mining for minerals needed for renewables comes with impacts, but we can choose to mitigate those impacts. But let’s get one thing clear, there is no shortage of the minerals we need to get to net zero. We do need to make choices on where we mine, and also the controls we put in place to minimise impacts, both ecological and social, as Ernest Scheyder makes clear. But we do not have the option not to mine at all, if we are serious about mitigating global warming!
But claiming EVs are uniquely problematic ignores the reality of the immediate impacts – such as from the huge spills of oil (Deepwater Horizon disaster for example) or the water pollution from tar sands, and much more – let alone the longer term ones.
People will need to travel in 2050, and whether it be on bikes, trains, trams, buses or cars, they are going to be mostly EVs (not Hydrogen Cell vehicles). So we need to use our ingenuity to electrify transport, and do it in the fairest way possible.
So let’s not use the fallacy of perfection as a reason for not rapidly decarbonising transport, that the World Bank has called the ‘low hanging fruit’ of decarbonisation.
Immediate impacts of fossil fuel mining
Fossil fuel extraction has immediate impacts that far outweigh the impacts from mineral extraction, in part because of their scale, as with the devastation caused by the Deepwater Horizon, or the pollution of the Niger delta, or the water issues cause by the Canadian Tar Sands mining, impacting people’s habitats and livelihoods, and the ecology.
Long-term impacts of mining fossil fuels
Fossil fuels are extracted and burned once, but the carbon dioxide they release continues to cause warming of the planet for centuries. To power a fossil fuel economy you MUST keep extracting, and do so until you have exhausted all of that ancient carbon. You cannot reuse the coal, oil or gas once it is burned.
Long-term benefits of minerals for renewables
By contrast, minerals for renewable technologies are just the opposite. They are mined one, but are continuously used, enabling three things:
Firstly, they enable us to use the energy of the sun to generate electricity to travel, heat our homes and much more.
Secondly, these technologies ensure we avoid the emissions we would otherwise make, and do this not once, but for the lifetime EV, heat pump or other end-use.
Thirdly, we can then recycle the minerals. So, we have to keep extracting minerals till we have displaced all of the fossil fuel end-use, but once we have (and when recycling is more cost-effective or regulated to be so) we won’t need further mining. We get to a circular economy, because we’ll have enough in the system to reach a steady state of circularity.
We won’t run out of minerals
There is no shortage of the minerals we need to reach a global 2050 ‘net zero’ target. A detailed full life-cycle analysis of demand for minerals shows we can decarbonise our energy production and end-use without optimistic assumptions or modal changes in, for example, transport.
Yes, we have become too dependent on China, but the Earth’s crust provides more than enough.
We can clean up the supply chains
Yes there are some sources that have a poor environmental and ethical record. The solution is not to abandon a push to electrify transport. The solution is to clean up the supply chains. This can be done in a few ways. Governments can legislate to require better management and monitoring of supply chains; consumers can choose EVs where the manufacturer is showing commitment to cleaning up the supply chain; and manufacturers themselves may simply make the moves necessary themselves. Tesla has done this (see their Impact Report), where they show they are committed to ensuring child and forced labour are not involved in materials they import.
Final thoughts
One has to wonder what are the underlying motivations, beliefs or biases that allow people to so easily pick up and repeat the myths and poor arguments that surround minerals and renewable technologies such as EVs.
Obviously, for the professional climate change deniers, they do it (whether they believe it or not) because they get well paid to write their odious pieces for The Teleggraph, Daily Mail and Wall Street Journal.
What is more puzzling is how often these memes are popular with those who would describe themselves as ‘green’. This is a conundrum that really needs a separate essay, but I think that at its root is a belief that ‘natural solutions’ and changes in society can deliver a greener future free from fossil fuels, with only minimal need to rely on that horrible technological stuff.
This is a fantasy, even while natural solutions do have an important role to play, particularly in restoring nature.
Sometimes this belief is defended using some dodgy discredited ‘science’ about the potential impact of regenerative farming in terms of improved soil carbon sequestration (something I have touched on before in Fantasy Maths and the National Farmers Union).
However in most cases I think it is a lack of appreciation of the urgency to stop burning fossil fuels, and the need to electrify much if not most of our energy end use as soon as possible, powered by renewable electricity generation.
All of us who strive to be green really do have to learn to love the technology, even while we insist on it being deployed in ways that do not perpetuate current injustices, and metaphorically and literally redistribute power.
In a talk I addressed the topic ‘Greening Our Energy: How Soon?’, using recent research [1] to show that the UK could be self-sufficient in energy using wind and solar alone, along with significant levels of long-term energy storage to ensure energy security. The talk also discussed how electrification of much of our energy use reduces the overall energy demand, something that Mackay and others have talked about for years.
A question raised by an audience member was ‘How much energy could a community generate itself?’. This essay aims to answer this question, using my home town of Nailsworth as an example. As I said in the talk, the focus is on wind and solar.
When considering the total carbon emissions we are responsible for (so-called ‘consumption emissions’) studies [2] include literally everything. Including imported goods and produce. However, in terms of future UK generation, it is better to consider just the energy produced and consumed in the UK (the so-called ‘terrestrial emissions’).
We can narrow the scope further by considering those forms of energy consumption that are truly local and therefore best considered as being potentially met in whole or in part by community energy.
The two big ones are:
electrified private cars and public transport (we’ll call these simply ‘transport’).
heat pumps used to heat our homes and offices.
In terms of carbon emissions, these two represent 60% of Nailsworth’s terrestrial emissions, and 40% of our consumption emissions, so highly significant, however they are viewed [2].
Credit: IMPACT: Community Carbon Footprint tool, Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE)
According to Mackay [3], these would require energy consumption of 18 kWh and 12 kWh, respectively, per person per day in this electrified future world. The total including all energy needed would be 68 kWh/p.d and this is the figure used in the Oxford study referred to in my talk. So these two uses of energy would account for 44% of the total consumption of energy used.
The total of 30 kWh per person per day for transport and heating implies an average delivered power supply from community energy of 30/24 = 1.25 kW per person in Winter. In Summer we still need hot water but the great majority of heating is for space heating so we’d need about 12/24 = 0.5 kW per person in Summer for transport.
Nailsworth has a population of around 5,500, so let’s assume a future population of 6,000, which would imply a power supply required (for transport and heating) of 1.25 kW x 6,000 = 7,500 kW = 7.5MW in Winter, and 0.5 kW x 6,000 = 3,000 kW = 3MW in Summer.
Now the capacity factors for wind and solar in England [4] are on average, respectively, about 40% and 3% in winter and 20% and 20% in summer.
The winter solar generation depends a great deal on the orientation of the panels – much more so than in summer. I have taken a relatively pessimistic figure, assuming on average East/West orientation, which still provides some energy in Winter but I have based estimates assuming wind alone meets the required demand in winter.
So let’s start with winter where we will discount solar [5]. Applying the capacity factor of 40% (in this case, dividing by 0.4) the 7.5 MW delivered energy would require 7.5MW/0.4 = 18.75MW of wind energy capacity to meet it. Let’s round that up to 20MW.
For onshore wind turbines, we cannot use the largest ones available and are potentially restricted to say 5MW turbines. Only 4 of these would meet the power requirement of 20MW. Currently we have one 500kW wind turbine high above Nailsworth owned by Ecotricity. Having established this precedent, and given changing public attitudes, and both Stroud District Council and Nailsworth Town Council having declared a climate emergency, one would hope this could be implemented, especially if it is a community energy scheme.
Now, should we increase the capacity to deal with peaks in demand or lulls in wind? No, in my view. Community energy will be connected to the grid. When Nympsfield above Nailsworth is having a lull, other community sites around the country, and indeed large resources such as North Sea wind farms, will be able to take up the strain.
A national energy storage strategy would deal with more extreme lulls that cover most of the country, as discussed in the talk.
Moving now to Summer, the four wind turbines proposed would deliver (now multiplying the wind capacity by the summer capacity factor), 20MWx0.2 = 4MW, so we’d need solar to deliver the remaining requirement of 7.5-4 = 3.5MW. Using the capacity factor for solar in Summer (at 20%, twice as good as the average for the year, 10%), that gives us a required solar PV capacity of 3.5MW/0.2 = 17.5MW.
The average domestic solar PV installation in the UK has been 3.5kW, but with improved panels let’s round this to 4 kW. Assuming that the average home has 3 occupant, we anticipate 2,000 dwellings. They could provide a capacity of 2,000 x 4kW = 8MW, or about 45% of the solar capacity required. Yes, I know many live in flats, but the goal here is to look at broad brush feasibility.
Ground mounted solar would then need to deliver 9.5MW. It’s been estimated that “Approximately 25 acres of land is required for every 5 megawatts (MW) of installation while 6 to 8 acres will be needed for a 1MW farm” [6]. So lets assume 1MW parcels at average of 7 acres each. We’d need 9.5 x 7 acres or about 70 acres.
To give a sense of scale, Minchinhamption Common is 182 hectares or 450 acres, so we’d require the equivalent of 15% of it’s land area. This is not a proposal to use this common I should stress, just to give a sense of scale and feasibility. Nevertheless, shade (for our grazers and humans alike) will come at a premium by 2050 [7] so who knows?
This feels like a doable number.
To the extent to which domestic solar cannot be fully deployed, then ground mounted solar could be increased, or solar on commercial or civic buildings could take up the strain. I haven’t included these but they could make a substantial contribution (actually, are already making a contribution), albeit not necessarily being able to be classed as ‘community energy’.
The question naturally arises as to whether Nailsworth could use small hydro power using its streams, or as a mini Dinorwig, for energy storage, harking back to the Mill Ponds used during the 19th and 20th Century, when they provided some energy resilience to the wool mills of the town. It could of course play and role, and even if at a scale which is less significant numerically [8], could help in enabling local energy resilience [9]. There is strength in diversity, as nature teaches us.
Research on renewables offers up some pleasant surprises in how different forms of it can complement and support each other [10]. All of this is detail to explore of course.
My main goal in this essay was to establish if Community-based renewables – and specifically wind and solar – could compete in relevance with the large national assets such as North Sea wind, and thus provide a strong case for Community Energy schemes.
The answer is a definite yes.
Community Energy could provide a significant percentage (over 40%) of the terrestrial energy demand of a town like Nailsworth, throught the year. This would shift the control of energy, to a significant extent, away from large commercial assets, and could have untold benefits for local communities [11]. Nationally, such diversified and highly dispersed resources would enhance energy security for the whole country.
3.1) Note that 68 kWh/p.d for a 70m population, say, in 2050 would amount to a UK energy demand per year of 68 kWh/p.d x 60m p x 365 d/y = 1,489 TWh/y – the total energy requirement that the Oxford Study shows can be achieved with wind and solar (actually, they show we could do double that quite feasibly with out excessive use of land or sea area).
3.2) Note that the (18+12)/68 = 0.44 or 44%
But be careful not to assume that means 44% of our consumption emissions being eliminated by transport and heating as it depends on the carbon intensity of different processes. It could be more or less. Actually, due to relatively efficiencies, moving to electrification of heating in particular and also transport, make very good contributions to displacing carbon-creating energy usage. As a percentage of our terrestrial emissions, transport and heating amount to about 60%.
So who know what solutions will be needed to provide shelter from the heat?
[8] I’m emotionally attracted to the gravitational storage / micro hydro idea. After all, the Mill Ponds around Nailsworth kept the mills running when the streams ran slack. It’s part of our history. But then again, Dunkirk Mill needed only about 16kW to run, a thousandth of what we are now considering, and even 20 of these would match the vastly greater energy footprint of modern society. The Centre for Alternative Energy’s Zero Carbon Britain report includes an estimate of 8 TWh of generation from hydro (including large and micro) for UK, so about 1% of the total.
[9] Assuming 20 reservoirs at 100m above their twins on valley floor, each holding 10,000 cubic metres of water, and a round trip efficiency of 75%, one could store about 40 MWh of energy, a not inconsiderable amount. If each reservoir used a 100 kW turbine (not the largest micro turbine but illustrative) then they would generate in total 2 MW, or nearly 30% of the Nailsworth average power demand, although at full power, the reservoirs would be exhausted in 20 hours. If larger turbines were used, the duration at full power would decline in proportion (eg. if 500 kW, then in 4 hours)
For storage, Micro hydro would have to compete with (or maybe, collaborate with!) domestic or small scale batteries. For example, if each household had a battery with 100kWh storage, then 2000 of these would equal 200 MWh, and would be equivalent to 200MWh/7.5MW = 26.7h, so about 1 day’s worth of storage. That again is pretty significant local resilience to augment a national massive (30 day) storage capacity discussed in the essay.
[10] While either micro hydro or batteries may have limited capacity, they could make an extremely significant contribution to balancing the local grid over a day or so, and that could in its turn relieve pinch points in the distribution grid when there are short term mis-matches between supply and demand. Indeed, I wrote a piece – Small Is Beautiful – local renewables and storage can catalyse the greening of grid – based on some modelling in the USA that showed that even small amounts of local solar could have a disproportionately large impact in enabling increasing grid-scale wind resources. Similar modelling of a diverse array of renewable assets could reveal other pleasant surprises.
[11] A Community Energy scheme could, if setup right, ensure that it incorporates energy security for all as a founding principle, using profits to help fund the restrofitting (insulation, solar, heat pumps, etc.) of poorly built or maintained accommodation and social housing, for example.
This article includes a video and almost verbatim text of a 40+ minute public talk at Sawyer Hall, Nailsworth, on Thursday 22nd February given by Dr Richard Erskine, Education Lead for Nailsworth Climate Action Network. The numbered paragraphs refer to the slides, but only some of the illustrations from the slides are included in the text below. It’s better to play the video to see the slides alongside hearing the words.At the end of this piece are Acknowledgement, References, and some Questions and Answers from the event.
Update 13 March 2024: Report from the House of Lords on Long-duration Energy Storage: Get On With It underlines importance of storage to get us to fully clean energy system, dominated by renewables, as the talk sets out.
Update 16 April 2023: A great new blog Is a 100% Renewable Energy Grid Possible? by scientist Michael de Podesta also comes to the conclusion that 100% renewables can be achieved.
A recorded online version of the talk can be found here:
The almost verbatim script follows:
1 Greening Our Energy: How Soon
Thank you for coming in this presentation. I really want to help you to understand the potential for solar and wind to get us off oil and gas and fossil fuels in general. You’ll no doubt know – if you’ve looked in the paper or on social media – that there’s lots of opinions flying around about what’s possible and you often see numbers being thrown around. I think it’s very easy to feel bamboozled by some of the big numbers that are thrown around and statements made.
Can you put your hands up if you feel a little bit bamboozled sometimes by what you read? I’ll put my hand up as well.
2 Net Zero by 2050?
Well that’s understandablebut the interesting thing is that when we look at a recent survey [1], eight out of 10 Britains were concerned about climate change, and over half of them (52%) thought that the net zero target for 2050 should be brought forward.
3 Questions we aim to address
I want to try to address three questions in this talk:
Firstly, could all of future energy demand be met by wind and solar? now that’s not to discount other forms of low carbon energy, but if we can show that it can be done with wind and solar, then of course, any other forms of low carbon or zero carbon energy that are available will simply make that goal easier to meet it won’t make it harder to meet.
Specifically, nuclear has met about 20% of our generation needs over recent decades, and it is likely with new projects to continue to do so, and given the climate crisis it would be foolish to stop this, but I want to focus here on wind and solar.
Secondly, what are the opportunities and hurdles on this journey, and
Thirdly, how soon can we do it?
4 My Journey
We are all on a journey.
My journey on these questions started with David Mackay’s famous book ‘Sustainability Energy without the hot air’ [2] which was very influential. It was forensic in working out the carbon intensity of everything we own or do, and in looking at the possible ways to get off fossil fuels.
I later attended the course Zero Carbon Britain (ZCB) at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) [3]in Machynlleth, and this inspired me to believe that we could actually do it.
5 New look at Mackay’s UK numbers
The David Mackay analysis was brilliant but it suggested that we would struggle to get to 100% renewables because the one thing Brits are all good at is saying: “NO!”. No to this solar farm; no to those new pylons; and so on. He was accused of being pro nuclear because he felt we unavoidably would need plenty of it. He replied that he was only in favour of maths.
However, solar and wind costs have fallen dramatically. British opinion is now firmly in favour of renewables. This recent paper [4] – I’ll refer to it as the ‘Oxford paper’ – has revisited Mackay’s numbers and I will share their findings.
6 … and not forgetting a global view
And let’snot forget the paper [5] that made a big splash because it showed that increasing innovation could result in trillions of cost savings if the world pushed hard for renewables.
7 An over abundance
People talk about fusion power which is famously always 50 years away. But we have a fantastic fusion reactor up in the sky – it’s called the Sun! The Sun deposits 170,000 Terawatts of energy on the Earth, which is about 10,000 times more than humanity needs currently. And – wait for it – Shell pointed this out in 2005! [6]
Is anyone really saying that humanity doesn’t have the ingenuity to harvest just one 10,000th of the energy we get from the Sun? Are they really saying that we cannot use this massive over abundance of energy from the Sun?
8 How is UK doing so far?
Before looking into the near future, let’s do a check on where we are. We keep being told we have been leaders. So are we?
Yes and no.
We were certainly leaders when we passed the Climate Change Act in 2008, and when the 2050 Net Zero target was incorporated in 2019. Now look at the numbers.
9 Fossil fuel (FF) UK in 2017
The picture below from the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) Zero Carbon Britain (ZCB) report [3] shows that primary energy in 2017 was 80% fossil fuel [I chose CAT’s graphics in part beause they are better for clear and uncluttered communication of the information than many other source – in the talk I overlay some of their slides with key messages in text boxes].
Primary energy is the inherent energy in a lump of coal for example. But when you burn fossil fuels you lose energy in heat that doesn’t do useful work and so you lose 25% of that.
The other key point is that only 20% of delivered energy was electrified at in 2017.
10 Decline of coal in electricity
This Our World In Data graphic shows what has happened in the last 40 years. Coal in electricity generation has dropped from 60% to almost zero [7] in that period. This was a great achievement.
11 The dash for gas
But again, just looking at the electricity generation, gas generation has displaced coal [8]. A cleaner form of energy but still a fossil fuel putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. [8]
12 Renewables growing fast
But renewables in recent years, due to their plummeting costs, have been growing really fast over recent decades, and it’s nearing 40% of annual electricity generation. Half of this comes from wind. [9]
13 Good news, bad news 1/2
Good news, Bad news.
Whether it’s the climate change committee or the national audit office or lawyers: they’re telling the government to pull your finger out if we’re gonna to get to clean the clean grid by the middle of the next decade.
Climate Change Committee’s 2022 Progress Report showed that only 8 of 50 key indicators were on track. A pretty dismal performance by the Government.
As Victoria Seabrook of Sky News reported [10], The National Audit Office has also been damning:
“The longer it takes before government finalises its delivery plan, the greater the risk that it won’t achieve that ambition to decarbonize power by 2035, or that doing so will cost consumers more” Simon Bittlestone, National Audit Office, Director of value for money studies.
Energy bills may rise again without government plan to deliver 2035 clean power target, NAO warns – A missing plan to decarbonise Britain’s electricity network is costing households, the report warned. The NAO audit prompted calls for government to lift a de facto ban on onshore wind.
Government lawyers are warning of a risk of litigation against the Government for its laggardly performance.
14 Good news, bad news 2/2
The good news is we’ve been cleaning up the electricity that is currently in use, but we’ve been slow to electrify the large chunks of the economy that are currently not electrified. Transport and heating are the two big ones.
15 Demystifying energy
I want to spend some time demystifying energy a bit.
16 What is energy?
The great American physicist Richard Feynman said that “Energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right.” [11]
There’s energy in a food bar, in a battery, and in some petrol. They seem totally different – like chalk and cheese!
For our purposes, we can say energy is any source of usable power. It comes in different forms, chemical, solar, nuclear, electrical, etc.
It can be transformed from one form to another, usually with some loss of energy in the process.
This is quite important.
17 Power vs Energy
I want to use an analogy of pouring water. This 40 watt lightbulb uses a hundred times less power to drive it than the kettle. So think of the rate of water flow from here to here as equivalent to the power that’s being used. The energy consumed is then analogous to the total amount of water poured over a certain period of time. If you go for 24 hours we will get a kilowatt hour of an hour of energy used by a 40 W lightbulb. The 3 kW kettle draws much more power – which is analogous to pouring the water much faster like this – so will get to 1 kWh of energy used much sooner (in just 20 minutes).
18 Power & Energy on UK scale
If we scale power and energy up to our UK population of 60 million or so, everything is multiplied by tens of million.
So it’s typical for the UK currently to draw on 40 million kW of power, which we call 40 gigawatts (40 GW) for short. Over a year – which is 24 x 365 hours – this amounts to 350,000 gigawatt hours, which we can call 350 terawatt hours (350) TWh for short.
Country sized power tends to be in tens of GW, whereas country sized energy per year is in hundreds of TWh.
So does that mean we simply install 40 GW of wind, or a bit more to deal with less windy days or days with more demand? Not quite!
19 ‘Capacity factors’
The nameplate power rating of a wind turbine does not reflect the fact it is not always windy. The capacity factor is an adjustment that takes account of this.
For wind in the UK, the capacity factor is 40%.
For solar, given our highish latitude, the capacity factor is 10%.
So 1 GW of offshore wind delivers 3.5 TWh of energy per year.
Whereas 1 GW of solar delivers 0.9 TWh of energy per year
So why not ignore solar for the UK?
Because in winter, wind is high and solar is low, whereas in summer, wind is low and solar is high.
Most of the time, they compensate for each other in a very effective way.
20 Demystifying efficiency
Efficiency is a really key topic when we look at how we use energy. If there are two ways of getting the same result but one uses twice as much energy, it means you’ll need twice as many resources to achieve the result.
21 What is energy efficiency?
The result we want with a lightbulb is to light up a small room. Suppose we need 400 Lumens of light to do that. Then a 40W Incandescent light bulb would do that job. But it comes with large energy losses. Only 10% or less of the electricity put in is transformed into light. So we say it has an efficiency of 10% or less. [12]
22 Less energy loss improves efficiency
With a 6W LED lightbulb we can still get the result we want – 400 Lumens of light output – but with much less loss of energy through heat loss. So the efficiency increases to typically 60%.
23 Electrification revolution
The electrification revolution is key to achieving greater efficiency, because in those areas of energy use where we burn fossil fuels, there is often huge inefficiencies.
24 Faraday invented ability to turn motion into electricity
There is an apocryphal story that Michael Faraday was asked by a politician “what use is electricity?” and he replied “What use a baby?”. That baby has been through its childhood and is now ready to enter adulthood.
The electrification revolution is really not new. Michael Faraday showed how to turn motion into electricity, and the reverse of this, to turn electricity into motion. This is what an electric drill does.
Over the two centuries since Faraday and others made their discoveries various forms of energy use have been electrified. Candles were replaced by light bulbs; Mills moved from water power to electric power; Electric washing machines and other household devices replaced muscle power – arduous manual work.
But some aspects of our lives ended up being powered by burning fossil fuels, and we turn to these now.
25 Petrol/ Diesel Cars
An internal combustion engine burns petrol/ diesel to create power at the wheel, but it loses at least 70% of the primary energy in the fuel, so a petrol/diesel car only has an efficiency of 12-30% overall [13].
26 Electric Vehicle (EV) cars
An Electric Vehicle has much lower losses to create the same forward motion, losing about 20% of the energy stored in a battery. So overall, an EV has an efficiency of 77% [13]. For those EVs that include regenerative braking, they can achieve even higher efficiency.
Great Britain currently uses the equivalent of 445 TWh from petrol and diesel road vehicles. As we’ve just calculated, if this was electric we’d need just 118 TWh. Almost 4 times less [14].
27 Gas boiler for heating
A Gas Boiler is designed to create heat, but there are still heat losses that do not go towards heating rooms or water for taps. A modern condensing boiler can have an efficiency of almost 90% (although often they are setup poorly so do not achieve this level).
So for every 1 kWh of primary energy in the gas that is put in, 0.9 kWh of heat is delivered to the house.
28 Heat pump for heating
Before I talk to this slide, who has a heat pump?
OK, just a few.
Hmmm, Who has a fridge? Looks like most or all of you. But did you know that a fridge uses a heat pump.
A heat pump is a device, invented in the 19th Century for moving heat from one place to another. For a fridge, it moves it from inside the fridge to outside of it.
For heat pumps that are used for heating, an air-source the heat pump harvests the ambient energy in the air outside the house, concentrates it, then moves it inside the house, for space heating or water heating.
Then 1 kWh of electricity is augmented by 2 kWh of thermal energy from the environment, resulting in 3 kWh of delivered heat inside the house. This is an effective efficiency – or Coefficient Of Performance (COP) – of 300% [15].
29 Heat pumps usable in any home
And contrary to received opinion, heat pumps can heat any house that a gas boiler can heat [16]. The key ingredients are a proper house survey; appropriate sizing of the system elements; and properly training technicians installing the system.
(Note: I wrote a blog that attracted a lot of attention ‘Insulate Britain: Yes but by how much?’ that provides a repost to the idea that ‘deep retrofit’ is needed before one gets a het pump)
30 Electrification is future-proofing
As David Mackay observed, electrification is future-proofing. The end users of electricity, be they light bulbs, heat pumps, cars or industry, really don’t care where the electricity comes from.
And if new forms of energy prove to be advantageous in the future, we can simply plug them into the grid.
31 How much energy will UK use in the future?
So how much will the UK use in the future?
32 Electrification reduces demand
The CAT ZCB report estimated that in a UK that has stopped burning fossil fuels, where most energy use is electrified, the energy demand would be reduced by 60%to around 700 TWh.
They included quite ambitious goals for improved public transport, but others such as the Oxford study [4] referred to earlier have come to a similar estimate without assuming major behavioural change.
33 What about new demands in 2050?
The Oxford Study conservatively doubled this figure (to 1400 TWh) to allow for new or novel demands such as generative AI [17], synthetic meats, direct carbon capture, etc.
The Royal Society [18] estimates we’d need 100 TWh of hydrogen storage.
So in total, a generous 1500 TWh of energy demand is the estimate for 2050. to meet the mainly electrified demand.
34 Is it feasible with wind and solar alone?
But is this feasible with wind and solar alone?
35 UK has best wind resources in Europe
The UK has the best wind resources in Europe [3], so we are very lucky in that regard.
It’s interesting to note that at the start of the Industrial Revolution, Britain had as much energy reserves in the form of coal, as Saudi Arabia was discovered to have in the form of oil in the 20th century [2].
Now, the UK could use its wind resources to power a new Green Industrial Revolution. How lucky we are if we are wise enough to grasp the opportunity.
36 Hornsea wind farm phases
The Hornsea wind farms [19] phases 1, 2 and 3 in the North Sea will deliver 129 TWh per year, and wind farms such as these can be constructed pretty quickly. We just need to accelerate the planning processes for additional wind farms.
Floating wind resources in the deeper waters further north will benefit from even stronger wind.
37 Plenty of space to spare
Overall, having assessed the feasible use of land and sea area, the Oxford study concluded that they could even double the 1500 TWh energy supply.
With 1500 TWh, the land and sea areas required to meet the demand are modest. As a comparator, golf courses take up 0.5% of UK land.
And we won’t run out of minerals either, as a comprehensive study has demonstrated [20].
38 Infrastructure & End-use growing – in parallel
There is a perverse argument used to question the rise of EVs – not enough charging points. Or heat pumps – not enough installers. As with every transition, the growth in a new end-use is accompanied by its twin: the growth in a new infrastructure. They are like twins, running a marathon together.
39 What what about variability in wind and solar?
The question naturally arises as to the variability of wind and solar. The extreme scenario is an anti-cyclone stuck over Britain for 2 weeks with poor wind and solar power generation.
[Note added 14-5-24: An analysis of the general requirements for storage (both in terms of energy stored and power capacity) is avaialble at Storage Lab [27] ].
40 Mismatch!
Even in less extreme, or quite normal situations, the supply might be much more than needed sometimes and less than what is needed at other times.
How would we deal with this mismatch?
There are many ways to try to address this. Over a day’s cycle, we can shift demand using a smart grid and smart tariffs. We can get more or less electricity from our European neighbours. There is scope for large degrees of flexibility in the system, to flatten the peak demand.
41 Over-build option
But over slightly longer periods, like a week, we need to do more. One way is simply to build more than we need – this is termed ‘over build’, which obviously comes at a cost, but the cost of both solar and wind have plummeted so this is clearly an option.
42 Energy storage option
Another option is to store excess energy – when it is blowing hard – and to pay it back to the grid when there is a shortfall in supply. This also comes at a cost – to build the storage systems and means for regenerating the power. The choice between over build and storage options depends in part on their relative unit costs.
For the extreme case of a persistent anticyclone, over build alone cannot fix the problem. More turbines on a windless day won’t cut it. So storage has to be at least partof the solution.
43 High wind & solar challenge
But interestingly, studies have shown [21] that the need for massive storage only gets significantly pressing when the fraction of energy from wind and solar exceeds 80% of the total energy mix (which is what this graphic by Ken Caldeira is showing).
44 Batteries will play a role for shorter term
One of the beauties of renewables is that they can exist at multiple scales – for a homeowner, for a community, for a region and for a country. Storage too can exist at these different scales, as many homes who use batteries alongside their rooftop solar PV systems can attest to.
Large battery units are already playing a role in helping to ease pressure points on electricity grids.
45 Dinorwig hydro energy storage
At a larger capacity, the Dinorwig hydro energy plant provides good scale energy storage, able to respond very fast to peaks in demand, or losses in supply [22].
It’s a strategic asset for the UK, but again, it would not be enough to deal with a long-term energy or inter-seasonal storage needs.
46 Hydrogen long-term storage
A recent Royal Society report on long term storage has concluded that hydrogen will play a key role. The hydrogen can be created using electricity when there is an excess of wind or solar, and then stored, and can be used to generate electricity using a fuel-cell to put back on the grid when we need energy back.
In East Yorkshire alone, there are 3000 potential salt cavern locations totalling 366 TWh of stored energy [18].
(Editorial Note: I should stress that hydrogen in this context is for long term storage, NOT for heating. As the Climate Change Committee has projected, heating will be mostly met by domestic heat pumps and district heating – and the district heating itself will often be community-scale heat pumps. The reason for this is the vastly greater energy efficiency of using heat pumps as compared to burning hydrogen in our homes. But this is another talk!)
47 Modelling is key to ensure feasibility
Modelling of the whole system is key, including real-world weather and demand data to test the feasibility of potential solutions, over individual months …
48 Ensuring balance during extremes
… but we must also model system behaviour over decades.
They looked at weather data over a 40 year period to seek out worst case lulls.
It is always very odd that newspaper articles or social media posts raise the issue of lulls as though it is a gotcha discovery. Unsurprisingly, scientists and engineers are not stupid and have of course included the issue of lulls in their projections.
49 Revisiting the questions 1/3
So let’s revisit the questions I raised. Yes, we could meet future demand using just wind and solar. There is an over-abundance of renewable energy and it is an effectively limitless resource.
And the Climate Change Committee broadly agrees, based on their recent report ‘Delivering a reliable decarbonised power system’ – although some of the details differ. And at least in the medium term, anticipate reliance on gas turbines with CCS as backup.
There are many permutations, as to the detailed plans for the transition, but the end-goal feasibility question is settled.
50 Revisiting the questions 2/3
The opportunities are legion:
to stop damaging the planet;
to have clean air in our homes and towns;
to stop being reliant on petro-states and volatile international energy markets;
and to create a newvibrant economy based on green energy.
The hurdles are also there:
regulations and an ossified planning regime that has slowed deployment of onshore wind, solar and grid connections.
We also need electricity market reforms.
But the biggest hurdle of all has been the lack of long-term thinking and political leadership at all levels of government.
51 Revisiting the questions 3/3
I think that ‘How soon’ is a poorly defined question:
How soon to displace the current gas generating capacity?
Or how soon to electrify the 80% of demand that is not yet electrified?
Those are two different targets.
The key ‘How Soon’ is really How soon will we have a government committed to a fully fledged plan to mobilise the economy – including the talents, skills, regulations and incentives needed – to start us on an accelerated path to net zero.
The Oxford paper’s recommendations are:
Remove barriers to new solar and wind energy capacity.
Continue to incentivise accelerated solar and wind energy investment.
Invest in storage solutions, grid upgrades and, where necessary, grid services.
52 Fast transformations not new
These photos of New York street show the change from horse drawn carriages to petrol cars in just 13 years; from 1900 to 1913.
Transitions can be very fast, if the will is there.
We just need to stop the mixed singles to the public and to industry and push on hard.
53 Final reflections – Embrace optimism
One of the lessons that’s been important for me to learn is that its possible to believe both that things are deeply worrying, but that some positive changes are in train, thanks to the work of many people.
A sustainable future is possible if we make progressive choices, for people and planet. It’s ok to be optimistic about the future, while recognising the challenges we face. Resigning oneself to catastrophe is a recipe for inaction and despair, and I for one reject that choice.
I’d recommend Hannah Ritchie’s recent book ‘Not the end of the World’ for anyone wanting a boost of positive thinking on the choices and opportunities we have to build a sustainable future for people and planet [23].
54 Final reflections – System change more than mere substitution
System change more than mere substitution
30 million EVs is not the answer to 30 million petrol and diesel cars (but how many?)
System change not merely substitution.
We need less clogged up, people friendly, walkable towns & cities
Electrification of improved bus, tram & rail services also key, alongside EV cars.
55 Final reflections – We need head, hand and heart
I’d like to close by returning to Machynlleth, and the Centre of Alternative Technology, where my journey began.
While there studying energy futures we found time to spend time with nature.
Here are two fellow students Sarah and Rosie who placed their hands on a tree for me.
A green energy transition is essential to save the planet, and create a new thriving economy and society which enjoys abundant energy enabling education, health and agricultural benefits in impoverished communities [24].
But it’s not inevitable that head, hand and heart will work together to create a fairer world.
We must therefore strive to put communities at the heart of everything we do, to decentralise power as far as possible, and not to perpetuate current injustices.
56 Thank you
Now please, can we have questions.
Please keep questions short as I will repeat each question to ensure everyone can hear the question and my response.
After Q&A, we can break up and move around, get a cuppa, and mingle. NailsworthCAN would very much like to share what we have been doing and to hear from you. We are keen to continue to tap into the talents and ideas of the community.
Richard Erskine, 2024
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The talk includes insights from many people: Ken Caldeira [21], Richard Hellen [25], David Mackay [2], Hannah Ritchie [23] and Rupert Way [26] to name just a few.
And from many institutions: The Centre for Alternative Technology [3], Our World In Data [7-9], Oxford Univerisity (including the Smith School of Energy and the Environment), The Royal Society [18], The Schumacher Institute and the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, to name just a few.
How these insights and some materials and data have been used here – including any errors or omissions – are the sole responsibility of Dr Richard Erskine.
The figures used from reports are overlaid in the presentation with annotations using large text to highlight the key messages. Anyone wanting to see the original figures and data are directed via links to the sources.
Niele, Frank (2005), Energy: Engine of Evolution, Shell Global Solutions, 2005
In the text Frank Niele mentions a solar intercept of 170,000 TeraWatt (TW = 1000 GW). This is not the practical maximum for solar power we could harness (and Niele is not saying that, but some people might misread it that way). Due to a number of factors (we would only want to use a small area of land for solar, the efficiency of PVs, etc.) the practical limit is very much less. BUT, even allowing for this, the amount of energy is so massive that we are still left with an enormous potential, that far exceeds the 40 TW requirement. Humanity will need (in his 2050 projection) ’only’ about 1 million square km (or 0.67% of the Earth’s land area). So, in practical terms, there is no ‘functional limit’ in respect of the energy that humanity needs. The calculation backing this up is in Note 16 of my essay Demystifying Global Warming and Its Implications.
Feynman (1969), From an address “What is Science?”, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313-320
“From 2023 to 2030, we are looking at about an 80% increase in US data center power demand, going from about 19 GW to about 35 GW,” Stephen Oliver, vice president of corporate marketing and investor relations at Navitas Semiconductor, said in an interview. Since total US demand is expected to rise to about 482 GW in 2027 (let’s assume 500 GW by 2030), the 35 GW for data centres is about 7% of the total – significant but hardly existentially large.
Rupert Way was co-author on both the key paper [4] above, and the 2022 paper [5] – which had considerable worldwide coverage – that showed the world could save trillions of dollars if it moved rapidy to scale up renewable technologies such as wind, solar and electrolysers
The answers given are broadly as given but with a little embellishment in a few cases. Some references added to help in solidifying the points made.
Will there be room for nature in this move to renewables, and recognising that the ecological crisis and climate crisis?
Yes. As I said, the ground mounted solar included in the Oxford paper would require 1% of UK land, but pasture takes up 30% and ground mounted solar can co-exist with grazing sheep for example.
There is a The Fallacy of Perfection, that requires that new solutions are perfect while ignoring the harms of the status quo. Extraction for coal alone in 2021 amounted to 7,500 tonnes, whereas“Estimates for the maximum amount of materials we’ll need annually to build low-emissions energy infrastructure top out at about 200 million metric tons, including all the cement, aluminum, steel, and even glass that needs to be produced.” – and once built, this level falls away, whereas with fossil fuels we keep on having to extract it. On land use too, renewables are better than fossil fuels if we look at the full life-cycle (extraction through to operation).
But it is also true that in UK we are not always very good at consulting on projects. We do a cursory consultation, then spend a lot of the budget, then start to raise questions on the requirements while construction is in full flight (HS2 was a case in point). Good project practice is to do a thorough consultation that truly listens to and engages with the public and articulates the impacts, costs and benefits of a new project and the status quo, then pilot and prototype to test out proposals, before then proceeding. Politicians are too often led by industrial partners wanting to push ahead without delay. We can build fast, but we do need to build the right assets in the right places for the right reasons.
Too often, there seems to be a belief that nature-based solutions are in conflict with technological ones, but the truth is we need both. For example, nature based approaches to flood alleviation (like SUDS) are needed, but in many cases, engineered ones (like the Thames Barrage) are needed as well. But on decarbonising our energy, technologies like wind, solar and electrolysers are essential, and as we have seen, they leave the great majority of available land area for nature to thrive, if we choose to use it to address the ecological crisis; it’s not renewables stopping us doing it!
With the greater degree of flexible working, particularly following COVID, and also streaming of top shows … will that help to flatten the peaks in demand?
Great thought! That sounds very plausible and I’m tempted to look into the data to see if this is indeed true. The general message is that there are lots of additional ways in which demand can be nudged to help lower peak demand.
Isn’t it a worry that so much comes from China – batteries and the minerals used in them and elsewhere? … use lots of dirty energy …
Yes and no. It’s those twins again. A lot of claims are made about a minerals crisis by the Seaver Wang paper from last year did a thorough study of this question, and concluded that we have more than enough minerals to decarbonise the world’s economies. However, we do need to diversify our supply of minerals, and not be over reliant on China, that is true. We have to manage political risk. As an example of diversifying sources, Lithium is now being mined in Cornwall. Canada can open up its reserves of minerals.
How large a role could community energy play in the energy transition?
That’s an important question. I made the point that renewables have the benefit of being possible at all scales. The more we can have renewables at local scales, the more resilient we are, and the less the risk of power being solely in the hands of centralised conglomerates. Some of the largest wind farms are owned by private companies that aren’t British. So I’d like to see a lot of community energy. How much of a town’s energy could be produced locally will vary a lot according to the location, and may also vary through the seasons. It’s not clear whether we’re in a position to put a number on it or decide what is optimal. However, a town will still need to be connected to the national grid because it isn’t always windy or sunny in a specific locality. Some assets like Dinorweg or future hydrogen storage facilities, are national assets, for everyone’s benefit. So we need to think of community energy as part of a whole system – giving and taking energy at different times.
You mentioned that there is a majority of people wanting the UK to be more ambitious, so why are some politicians thinking there are votes in delaying action?
What a great question. Hitherto there has been cross party support. In Parliament, there was almost unanimity in votes for the 2008, and the 2019 ‘net zero by 2050’ change. Unfortunately it seems it has become something that has become rather polarised – some trying to claim that there is a conflict between solving current financial issues and investing in the future. But as the 2022 Oxford paper by Rupert Way and others showed, we can actually save lots of money by accelerating the pace of transition to a green future.
Despite claims by the Government that the UK is a leader, we saw in the talk heavy criticisms from the Climate Change Committee and the National Audit Office on the lack of progress in many areas; the UK cannot rest on the laurels of displacing coal. So currently the UK has definitely lost its position of leadership. The country can earn back a position of leadership if politicians grasp the opportunity and stop using the climate as a political football. We need to get back to there being a cross party consensus at least amongst the major parties that will last till 2050, which is 5 Parliaments away.
Could we learn from what Nigeria is doing? They have micro grids and will later bring these together.
Different countries have started from different places. The UK have had large centralised generating capacity and will now need to loosen thing up a bit to accommodate a network of resources at different scales. Nigeria is in a sense doing the opposite from what you say – having lots of local capacity before bringing it all together. I’m sure we could learn from each other.
In the last 6 months you noticed a change in attitudes toward siting of renewables? I’m finding many acquaintances have.
Yes, and we are seeing communities embracing solar and wind for their mutual benefits, as the Channel 4 series The Great Climate Fight showed, it is often regressive Government rules and directives blocking communities from building what they want (such as a wind turbine on the edge of a village), with just a small minority vetoing progress.
Are there issues with using hydrogen, I’ve heard about?
We have to distinguish various uses of hydrogen. Michael Liebreich has a ‘hydrogen ladder’ showing where hydrogen sensibly can or should be used and where it shouldn’t. It cannot compete with electrification for cars and heating homes, and is now being relegated into relatively few areas. Energy storage is one of those. Another is fertiliser production. And there are also applications in industry. You mentioned Bath University research, so I’ll need to talk with you after to determine what issues you are referring to.
What about heat storage playing a role?
Heat storage is a great idea and there are most certainly cases for using it. I am not clear it can displace the need for long term storage with hydrogen, but I understand it could pay an important role. Its worth stressing that there is a lot of waste heat also around that could be exploited (such as from industry). Waste in our sewers could, when combined with a heat pump, supply heat, and of course there are many existing installations of water source heat pumps that can heat large building; Stroud District Council’s offices in Ebley is a case in point.
[since the talk, the following example from Princeton University has come to my attention. They will be using large heat pumps to extract heat from buildings in summer to keep them cool and store this underground, then use the heat pumps again in winter to use the buried heat to heat buildings in winter. They will create a huge thermal reservoir to achieve this outcome. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2021/11/09/going-deep-princeton-lays-foundation-net-zero-campus]
How are we going to convince people that we need a revolution in energy, especially when there are been conflict over the siting of some renewables such as the Arlingham solar array? There is a suggestion the UK should build 6-8GW of solar by 2030, but we need to take people with us.
We have to consult and engage hearts and minds? I don’t think is simply a case of not bribing people with lower bills. The use of Citizens Assemblies and other forms of engagement with the community will be key. People need to understand the benefits. A local village hall with rooftop solar, a heat pump, EV charging and a battery can become a place that brings local benefits and also helps to engage hearts and minds.
I love the BBC series ‘In Our Time’ (IOT), conceived by Melvyn Bragg (MB) and hosted by him for over 25 years. The more than 1000 episodes have covered innumerable topics in the arts, history, science, philosophy, politics and much more. Typically three Professors, leading experts in a field, are invited to explore the knowledge and scholarship on the topic of the week. Delightful surprises has been its hallmark covering topics as diverse as ‘Tea’, ‘The Neutron’, ‘The Illiad’ and so much more.
The life and work of scientists have been covered many times: Robert Hooke, Dorothy Hodgkin and Paul Dirac being a few examples. You might think that the most pressing topic of our age – man-made climate change – might get quite a bit of attention, but it doesn’t. It’s not as if its too contemporary for IOT’s tastes; unsuitable for the historical lens that IOT likes to employ. The science of climate change dates back at least 200 years.
The lives of five scientists come to mind which could help explore the huge subject of climate change: John Tyndall, Svant Arrhenius, Guy Callendar, Wally Broecker and Michael Mann are just a small sample of ones that come to mind. None of these has been covered by IOT. Here’s why each of these would be great candidates for an episode:
John Tyndall is regarded as one of the greatest experimentalists of the 19th century, and a great populariser of science. His apparatus – that in the years 1859-1861 demonstrated that carbon dioxide and other gases were heat trapping, but that oxygen and nitrogen were not – can still be seen at The Royal Institution, where he did his experiments. An episode could cover Tyndall or simply be on ‘Greenhouse Gases’ and include a survey of work up to Manabe & Wetheralds seminal 1967 paper.
Svante Arrhenius, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, published the first calculation on how much the world would warm if the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere doubled – in 1896. Again an episode could cover Arrhenius exclusively or deal with the question of ‘Earth Climate Sensitivity’.
Guy Callendar published a paper in 1938 that was the first to demonstrate empirically the correlation between rising levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere (attributable to human activities) and rising global mean surface temperature. Some have even suggested that instead of referring to ‘The Greenhouse Effect’ we should use the term ‘The Callendar Effect’.
Wally Broecker was a famous oceanographer who coined the term ‘The Great Ocean Conveyor’, which moves heat around the oceans of the world, and whose understanding is crucial to climate science. He also coined the term ‘Global Warming’. Broecker said that following the publication of Manabe and Wetheralds seminal 1967 paper, man-made climate change stopped being a cocktail conversation amongst scientists, and something that was increasingly concerning.
Michael Mann et al published the famous ‘Hockey Stick’ paper in 1999 which gathered all the disparate data to demonstrate unequivocally that the world was warming. So powerful in fact that the fossil-fuel funded forces of denial started a vicious campaign to try to discredit Mann. They failed, as the findings have been supported by independent research since.
Needless to say, there are a wealth of women scientists whose work might be considered too recent for IOT, but is often of crucial importance. For example, Friederike Otto’s work on extreme weather attribution has been revolutionary, because now we have the ability to put a number on how much more likely a specific extreme weather event has become as a result of man-made global warming. This can be done in a matter of days rather than the year or more that used to be required for this kind of attribution study (see the World Weather Attribution site for more details). The topic of ‘Extreme weather events’ is assuredly in our time, and increasingly so!
Well, no, because this episode was exceptional in more ways than its rarity.
In every other episode of In Our Time, MB approaches the conversation much like you’d expect of a curious student, trying to learn from the expert professors who he robustly challenges, but respects. The debated points would be ones where experts have engaged in debating a point in the published literature, so disagreements are possible; say, to what extent Rosalind Franklin’s work was key to discovering the structure of DNA. What is not generally entertained on IOT are outlier comments from those who are not experts in the field.
So, the IOT Climate Change episode in 2000 was quite different. Outrageously different. MB approached the conversation not as a curious student, but sounding more like an opinionated journalist with an angle doing an interview, and boy, did he have an angle!
He had a completely different tone to normal, not of respectful enquiry. He reprised talking points that are rife within climate science denial circles, and even cited Matt Ridley (“no slouch”) a well known propagandist – a free-market fundamentalist like his father – who engages in constant attacks on climate science, and the climate solutions he wishes to undermine.
Leo Hickman noted on Twitter (3-1-2015) “Little known fact: Bragg witnessed GWPF’s Companies House docs for Lord Lawson”, so one is bound to speculate whether it was no accident that MB was channeling the GWPF (Global Warming Policy Foundation) non-science.
It’s easier to see what I mean about the episode by listening to the episode but I will use some snippets from the transcript here to illustrate what I mean (MB quotes in italics):
“With me to discuss what could be called “The new climate of fear” at the beginning of a new century is …”, from the off, it was clear that MB was not interested in obvious questions like “how have we come to an understanding of man-made global warming?”. He clearly wanted to frame it in a way that minimised any discussion of the underlying science. He wanted it to be a ‘both sides’ apparent exchange of newspaper comment pages opinion.
After George Monbiot’s first contributions, MB chips in “Now this is very much a received view, and you’ve been one of the people that have made it received by banging on, very effectively in the Guardian and in other places, I’m going to challenge this in a minute or two, but I just want to emphasise to the listeners, how apocalyptic your views are, …” – trying to undermine his guest with a charge of alarmism shocked me 24 years ago and shocks me still. The reason it is ‘received’ Melvyn is because of decades of research, thousands of scientific papers, and resulting IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports, not Monbiot’s writings, however lucid they may be.
MB later pushes harder “Right now, you two have spent….devoted your lives to this subject and I haven’t, but nevertheless, I’ve looked at…tried to find some evidence which contradicts this block view, which seems you’ve got your evidence, but there’s other points of view , and ….’cause I’m worried about the evidence that you can know so much about what’s going to happen in 100 years time, and I’m worried about the lack of robustness …”, but never asks the question ‘please help me understand the evidence’, no he shares what he has read who knows where – in The Spectator perhaps. This might seem normal on a social media comments thread but is pretty unedifying on the normally rather good In Our Time.
MB says something that is straight from the climate science denial factory at GWPF: “Mmmm, but you…well er…I’m still worried about the evidence for this, the evidence that you….what evidence can you tell us Professor Houghton, that in the next century….’cause all this is to do with man-made pollution isn’t it? That the worry is that this is the Greenhouse Effect, it’s all to do with us emitting too much CO₂, and that sort of thing, can you give us your evidence, for the…why the accumulation of this is going to have such a devastating effect? Because people use extra CO₂ as fertiliser don’t they? To bring crops on?”
The framing, the tone, the references to denialist talking points (such as: ‘carbon dioxide being good for plants therefore must be good to have more of it’, would fail Philosophy 101, let alone the scientific demolition of it).
All of the talking points he raised have been answered innumerable times, if he bothered to do genuine background reading from experts on the subject.
There have been other episodes of IOT that have touched on climate since then, such as the ones on ‘Corals’, ‘Ice Ages’ and others, but clearly both Melvyn Bragg and the production team are staying well clear of man-made climate change after their last diabolical attempt.
What motivates MB’s climate denialism is unclear. It is certainly not independent scholarship. The history of our understanding of climate change has been set out clearly many times, such as in Weart’s book (see Notes). Yet, being a Labour Peer, the free market fundamentalism that drove Lord Lawson and continues to drive much of the funding for climate denial, is unlikely to be the reason. Maybe in some perverse way, it’s his faith that took him there – who knows? The fact is he was very poorly read and badly briefed. It has left a large black hole in an otherwise great series, In Our Time, that is surely crying out to be filled.
No doubt an episode entitled ‘Man-Made Climate Change’, or one based on the life and work of the many scientists that have done so much to reveal our understanding of it, will come back as a topic in due course. There are no shortage of topics linked to it that could also be covered (Fossil fuels, Energy transitions, Extreme weather events, Rossby waves, and many others).
Though I suspect it will not be in Melvyn Bragg’s time.
We’ll have to wait for the sad day when the great man moves on.
(c) Richard Erskine, 2024.
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Notes
I have not made the essay longer still by including the rebuttals to all the talking points raised by MB, but I don’t need to as others have done a great job addressing commonly shared myths. A good place to go for short non-technical responses is Katharine Hayhoe’s ‘Global Weirding’ series of short videos.
The book by Spencer Weart I mentioned is a great historical survey – starting with scientists like Fourier in the early 19th Century – and is available online: The Discovery of Global Warming.
Of course, the most up to date and rigorous evidence on the causes and impacts of climate change, and on the possible scenarios we may face in the future, is contained in the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports. The latest full assessment being the 6th Assessment Report.
Getting a reliable sense of what the science is telling us can be hard for non-experts, particularly on shouty social media. I always feel we should go back to the established experts. Some summaries can be useful if they do not try to selectively spin the science in a direction to support a particular framing.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an international body whose work is the product of an international team of scientists from over 60 countries who give their time voluntarily to produce in depth reports. The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) is the latest full assessment, and covers different aspects: causes, impacts, adaptation and mitigation, both globally but also from a regional perspective. One of the reasons people go to secondary sources is because of the huge size of the IPCC reports. But the IPCC provides summaries. The AR6 report comes in three parts, with summaries as follows:
Part II: Impacts, Adaptation & Vulnerability Report assesses ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities at global and regional levels. It also reviews vulnerabilities and the capacities and limits of the natural world and human societies to adapt to climate change.An accessible summary is available as a short video: https://youtu.be/SDRxfuEvqGg A written Summary for Policymakers is available here https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf
If IOT do decide to do a new episode on Climate Change – or more accurately, man-made climate change – they might do well to first re-read Professor Steve Jones’s 2011 report on coverage of climate change at the BBC, and its tendency of using false balance. The report recommended that the BBC coverage “takes into account the non‐contentious nature of some material and the need to avoid giving undue attention to marginal opinion” (download the document then skip to page 14 to get to the report, avoiding the self-justification by BBC senior management prefixing the report itself.)
Yes, but it only dealt with man-made climate change in the dying few minutes. Richard Corfield, when not talking over the two women scientists with him, was dismissive of the risks. He used an argument that fails Critical Thinking 101, along with Ethics 101, and more.
His gobsmacking words:
“a ‘Greenhouse Climate’ is the natural condition for the Earth. 85% of Earth history has been ‘Greenhouse’ Ummm, 70 million years ago carbon dioxide levels were 8 times what they are at the moment, which made them 2,400 parts per million. Before that they were 12 times higher. The only certainty is that climate change is a natural part of the Earth and as a species we may have been the result of climate change. We may now be altering it but anyhow we’d have to deal with it, so I think we are going to have to geo-engineer our own climate to deal with it. Nothing wrong with that.”
A logically incoherent argument. And it’s not ‘we may now be altering’, we are altering, please read the IPCC reports Richard.
To conflate tens of millions of years with Homo Sapien’s quarter of a million years of existence; or the 12,000 years where civilisation has emerged, in the stable climate we have enjoyed alongside nature since the end of the last ice age; or indeed the 200 years where man-made carbon emissions have increased CO2 levels at an unprecedently fast rate in geological terms, is crass.
The way to stop additional warming is simply to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible.
To simply shrug and say that the climate always changes so we’d have to have done something anyway at some point is asinine, and fails to mention that we’d have had 10s of thousands of years to deal with it, not the few decades we now have left to do something, precisely because of naysayers like Melvyn Bragg and Richard Corfield.
No wonder this disaster climate advocate Richard Corfield has been on IOT 8 times.
As I discussed in a previous essay Is 2°C a big deal?, we know that as the world warms the chance of extreme weather events will increase markedly. This essay does not revisit that established insight, but is more of a diversion, exploring simple probabilities.
Attribution studies can now routinely provide estimates of how much more probable a particular event has been made as a result of man-made global warming. The World Weather Attribution organisation provides many example.
There will be impacts on the environment, society and agriculture. Focusing on the latter, sceptics might say, “ok, the chances are increasing, but if we have a crop failure in one region, one year, we have many regions able to compensate.”
The follow up question that comes to my mind is “if I accept that point the question is then how often will we have multiple failures in a given year?”.
There can be some big surprises when one explores probabilities. Bear with me as a tease out a few insights.
A famous example of surprising odds
Imagine there is a public meeting and people arrive one to one. Assume they have random birthdays and we exclude siblings. The question is: how many people need to arrive before the chance of two of the people present having a greater than evens chance of having the same birthday?
What number do you expect? Think about it.
To answer this it’s easier to start by determining the chance for each arrival to NOT have the same birthday. The 1st arrival has 365 choices out of 365. The 2nd arrival has 364 choices out of 365 to avoid having the same birthday. The 3rd arrival has 363 choices out of 365 to avoid a clash. And so on.
So the probability for 3 arrivals not having the same birthday is (365/365) x (364/365) x (363/365) which equals 0.9918 (rounded). So the chance that at least two of these three having the same birthday must be 1 minus this, which equals 0.0092 – see Note [1]. This is pretty small; about a 1% chance.
If you keep repeating this process, surprisingly one finds we only need 23 people to arrive for the chance of two matching birthdays to be greater than even (ie. greater than 0.5). See table in Note [2].
As you can see from the table, for 10 arrivals the chance of a match is just under 1 in 10 (0.1), but then rapidly escalates.
Calculating the chance of extreme weather events without global warming
By extreme weather events I’m not talking even about the current serious flooding in the UK. I’m talking about an event that would take out the arable sector in a large area.
To make this simple and purely as an illustration, I will take the 1,400 million hectares of arable land globally and break this down into 100 blocks, each of 14 million hectares.
Since the UK has 13 million hectares of arable land, the world figure can be thought of as about 100 UKs (of arable land only).
If the chance of an extreme weather event anywhere across the world between 1900 and 1950 was on average 1 in 1000 per year, that in effect defines what level of event we mean by ‘extreme’ for this illustration.
Then, we need to ask the question: what would have been the chance of 2 extreme events occurring in any one year? What about 3?
Let’s first follow a similar but adapted method as with the birthdays.
The chance of NOT having an extreme weather event in the first block is 1 minus (1/1000), which equals 0.999.
Now, the probabilities for each block are assumed to be independent, so the chance of NOT having an extreme weather event in any one year in all blocks is 0.999 x 0.999 x … x 0.999 (with 100 factors), and this equals 0.90479. So a 90% chance of not having an extreme weather event in any of the 100 blocks.
So the chance of having at least one extreme event in any one year across the 100 blocks would be one minus this figure, so that = 1 – 0.90479 = 0.09521 = 0.1 approx, or 1 in 10, or 10%. This is not insignificant. It means that a 1 in 1000 year event will happen once every 10 years somewhere on the planet.
In the next section I’ll use the percentage form, rounded to 2 significant figures to express the odds.
We have gone from a 1 in 1000 chance of an extreme event in one block in one year, to a 1 in 10 chance of at least one extreme weather event across the 100. A simpler way to see this is the 100 x (1/1000) = 1/10.
Moving to multiple extreme event is not so simple.
The basic idea is to visualise the 100 blocks as containers, and the chance of an extreme event as a ball that can be put into a container to indicate an extreme weather event has happened there.
Then, calculating the odds becomes an exercise in counting all possible permutations.
If there were 2 events in one year, then they could be in the same block (and there are 100 ways for that to happen), or in different blocks (and the chances of that are a little more complex to calculate). In general, we need to work out the odds of how you sort X objects amongst 100 containers. We do that using something called a ‘binomial expansion’ – see Note [3] if you want to dive into the details.
We can then look at what happens when the chance of any single event changes due to global warming changes from odds on 1 in a 1000 to say 1 in a 100.
The chance of extreme weather events with global warming
To explore the impact of global warming on the change odds, I have used a progression as follows. The average chance of an extreme weather event in any one year, in any one block, was 1 in 1000 but as the world warms it might become a 1 in 100 year event, or worse a 1 in 50 year event, or worse still a 1 in 25 year event. In Note [4] there are details on calculating the odds for up to 10 events per year across the 100 blocks.
The odds for a single event are already changing. The 40C weather we had in the UK would have been virtually impossible without man-made global warming. But the purpose of this essay is not to make projections or estimates, but simply to illustrate the surprising change in odds that occurs when multiple events are involved.
Here is a summary of how the odds change in our illustrative example:
We see that in the warmest scenario (1 in 25), an extreme weather event is likely to happen every year somewhere in the world (98%), but there is a high probability (77%) of there being 3 events occurring in a single year across the world.
If we have 2 or 3 blocks in the world suffering from extreme weather events and consequent crop failures, then that starts to have a major impact on food supply, which is potentially catastrophic.
What is worrying is how the odds of multiple events can escalate quite fast.
So if you have the feeling that more than one extreme event seem to be occurring every year around the world – more frequently than they were a few decades ago – you are not wrong.
(c) Richard Erskine, 2024
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NOTES
These notes are only included for those that wish to check my workings. Thanks in advance for spotting any errors. If you are not interested in the details, you don’t need to read these notes.
[1] The one minus trick
If you pick a card from a normal deck of cars, the chance of pulling an ace of spades is 1 in 52. As a number that equals 0.01923, it’s probability. But there is 100% chance (a probability of 1) of pulling a card, so one can say the chance of NOT pulling the ace of spades is 1 – 0.01923 = 0.98077 (which is also what you get from the fraction 51/52).
If a probability of an outcome is difficult to calculate it can sometimes be easier to calculate the probability of not having the outcome, and then using the ‘one minus …’ trick.
So we want the chance of at least one extreme event across 100 blocks. We could try to calculate the chance for 1 event, the chance for 2, then 3, all the way up to 100. The trick is instead to calculate the probability of there being no event across all 100 blocks. Then by taking the resulting probability from one, we get the probability of at least one event occurring.
[2] A famous example of surprising odds
Table calculating the odds:
The Product is the calculated by multiplying the successive A/B values. So for 4 arrivals the Product = 1 x 0.9973 x 0.9945 x 0.9918 = 0.9836 is the probability that none have the same birthday. So the chance of at least two having the same birthday for 4 arrivals = 1 – 0.9836 = 0.0164
[3] Use of the binomial expansion
Let’s assume that the probability of a loss of crops due to an extreme weather event in any one year for any region (because of many possible direct or indirect effects: extended heat wave; flooding; inability to work outside; migration; war) is p, then:
The chance of there NOT being an extreme event in one specific region in any one year is (1-p)
The chance of there NOT being an extreme event ANYWHERE in the world (for all n blocks) in any one year is (1-p) raised to the power n, which is written (1-p)n
Therefore, the chance of there being at least one extreme event (ie. 1, or 2, or 3, etc.) anywhere in the world, in any one year is 1-(1-p)n
The probability of exactly k out of n regions being hit by an extreme weather event in any one year is trickier to calculate but can be done using the binomial expansion:
P(k,n) = ( n!/ (k!(n-k)! ) * pk * (1-p)n-k
To create a table it is convenient to use a generator (especially if n gets very large, as some spreadsheets will blow up or truncate numbers in an unhelpful way), so, we start with P(1,n):
P(1,n) = n * p * (1-p)n-1
P(2,n) = ((n * (n-1)) / 2) * p2 * (1-p)n-2
and in general there is the way to calculate the next number based on the previous one:
P(m+1,n) = P(m,n) * ((n-m)/(m+1)) * p / (1-p)
This is the formula used in the Table (see Note [4]) for P(2,100), P(3,100), etc.
eg.
P (2,n) = P(1,n) * ((n-1)/(2) * p / (1-p)
The sum of P(i,n) from i = 0 to n must be 1
For n=100, the chance of at least 1 event would be P(1,100) + P(2,100) + … + P(100,100).
The chance of at least 2 events would be P(2,100) + P(3,100) + … + P(100,100).
And so on.
[4] Table of probabilities based on binomial expansion
I’ve drafted a suggested Keir Starmer speech, next time Rishi Sunak or his client media attack Labour for their £28 billion per year green investment promise. Instead of being on the defensive, I suggest attack. Over to Keir …
Yet the Prime Minister is deaf to the experts and deaf to popular opinion. He is now fully captive to the climate action delayists – actually climate change deniers – of the increasingly hard right of his Party.
If you want more extreme floods and more extreme heat waves, getting worse every year and,
if you want crop failures around the world spiking food prices and,
if you want petrostates and wars causing energy insecurity and poverty,
then vote Tory.
If you want instead a Government that is not in denial and truly acknowledges the serious risks we face and,
if you want a Government that will accelerate action on climate change by greening our energy, and protecting the ecosystems on which we depend and,
if you want a path to a sustainable future that is fair to all,
There are no shortage of myths and memes that attack EVs and Heat Pumps, particularly in the pages of The Telegraph and other right wing outlets. It’s a curious phenomenon, railing against thermodyanmics.
There is of course an inevitable transition to a clean, electrified and decarbonised world. The goal of naysayers is not to stop it happening (they are not that silly), merely to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. That’s what the fossil fuel lobby wants to achieve – wringing out as many dollars as they can before the bubble bursts; before assets are stranded.
There are several myths about EVs and Heat Pumps that are widely shared. These have been refuted many times, such as in these plain English pieces on the Nailsworth Climate Action Network website: myths about EVs and myths about heat pumps.
One I hadn’t seen before popped up on my social media timeline. It suggested that if EVs got caught out in a snowdrift, the batteries would get cold, so couldn’t work, and occupants would freeze, whereas those in petrol/diesel cars would be OK with their idling fossil fuel powered engines.
I can imagine The Telegraph readers – fed on a daily diet of hit jobs on any clean tech – chuckling at the idea of EVs freezing up in the snow.
The truth is quite the opposite. This meme is just another lie powering another social media storm; another myth to add to a growing list. Reuters provides a great factcheck refuting the points being shared widely across social media. Reuters quoted Professor David Howey from the University of Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science:
“Electric vehicles use very little power when stationary … the motor doesn’t consume power at zero speed … only the car electronics and heating/cooling systems use power when the car is stationary, and the amounts are relatively small … [and could run climate settings for] at least a day, probably many days”
Dr Katherine Collett, was also quoted, saying of EVs that “Many of them are installed with very efficient heating systems nowadays”
But it gets better, because the “very efficient heating system” being referred to is – hold onto your hats – a heat pump. This means that both the car’s battery and car interior are kept snug by a heat pump; and just as for home heating, that means electrical supply stretches further. A heat pump can turn one unit of electrical energy (in an EVs case, from a battery) into a few units of heat energy, as explained here. If you had a resistive heater for the EV that would keep you warm for so many hours [1], with the heat pump it could be 3 times as long that you would stay warm.
The efficiency of EVs and Heat Pumps, and the future-proofing that electrification enables, means that The Future Is Electric.
This will all probably make The Telegraph readers heads explode.
Their bete noirs – EVs and heat pumps – are now conspiring to keep EV drivers snug in snow drifts long after the petrol heads have started to freeze because their fuel has run out.
Stuck in a storm of disinformation about EVs and heat pumps, this is the perfect cautionary tale on what not to believe, for those who have been misled by a right wing propaganda machine. A machine in part funded by fossil fuel interests and in part motivated by misplaced culture wars ideology.
My advice is, don’t get caught in yet another bullshitstorm of disinformation, get off social media and the papers, and hunt down genuine experts. They’re not exactly hard to find.
(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2023
Notes
[1] In one test an older Tesla that had resistive power heater (so not with a heat pump) and at about -10C, it was found that “No surprise, but the Tesla is vastly more efficient, burning 1.6 kWh per hour versus the Hyundai sucking gas at the rate of 10.3 kWh per hour”, and both the Tesla (2019) and Hyundai were able to maintain a comfortable internal tem[erature for nearly 2 days .
Summary: The neoclassical economics, assumptions, methods and data used by William Nordhaus and other economists in their models (known as IAMs, Integrated Assessment Models), on how the economy interacts with climate change, are flawed. They rely on narrowly defined data, projected into the future in simplistic ways, that grossly underestimates the likely impacts of global warming on the economy, and in broader terms. These misrepresentations have acted as a fig leaf that have enabled policy-makers and politicians to avoid taking urgent action to reduce carbon emissions, and has therefore already done incalculable harm. It is not too late to base policies on scientifically grounded estimates of future impacts, and to ensure these deliver a fair transition to a net zero future.
A fundamental question
A fundamental questions is how much warming can we realistically tolerate to avoid serious damage? As we will see, economists have hitherto come up with surprisingly high estimates in answer to this question.
I know I am not alone in being both puzzled and angry at the apparent lack of urgency shown by governments to the growing risks of man-made global warming. For the purposes of this essay, let us be generous and assume that these politicians aren’t from the breed of economic liberals who obdurately denigrate climate science for ideological reasons.
We are nonetheless left with something far more insidious and dangerous. Mainstream policy-makers and politicians who walk the corridors of Westminster and other centres of power who seem quite happy to see new fossil fuel exploration, and keep putting off urgent plans to transition to a net zero future. They fail to acknowledge that not all paths to net zero are the same [1].
So what is going on?
Nordhaus’s neoclassical economics
One explanation for this lack of urgency is because economists hold much more sway with policy-makers than scientists, and hitherto, economists have been telling a quite different story to the one we hear from scientists.
Scientists will say that an average rise in global mean surface temperatures of 4°C or more over a mere century or so would be catastrophic. Scientists will point out that the PETM (Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) 56 million years ago was estimated as being a rise of about 5°C (which occurred over a period of several thousand years) [2].
While we do see temperature ranges between the tropics and polar regions that greatly exceed 5°C, it is a misunderstanding (that infects the work of some economists) to imagine that this should be a source of comfort. Heating the whole world by 5°C is an enormous amount of energy that has in the past and would in the future knock the climate into a completely new state. It would be an end to the relatively stable climate in which humanity and nature has co-evolved and co-existed, and do this not in several thousand years but in a mere century. A blink of the eye.
Yet William Nordhaus, whose pioneering work on IAMs won him the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2018, estimates economic damages by the middle of the next century to be just 2.1% with a warming of 3°C and 8.5% with a warming of 6°C [3]. Bear in mind that 8.5% drop on GDP is less than two times the financial crash following the 2008 banking crisis (about 6% drop for the UK).
So, during a global temperature rise that will bring mass extinctions, hugely destructive sea level rise, etc. Nordhaus’s economics seems to just give a shrug! Nothing to see here. Any wonder then that Rishi Sunak is also giving a shrug, and why the UK Treasury and many other arms of Government seem not only relaxed about climate change but in many cases have, and continue, to actively frustrate the path to net zero.
I should add that Nordhaus himself adds words of warning [3]:
“Because the studies generally included only a subset of all potential impacts, weadded an adjustment of 25 percent of quantified damages for omitted sectors andnonmarket and catastrophic damages …”
So, there’s a whole lot we don’t know or are not measured well enough, so let’s add a measly 25% to the narrowly circumscribed and quantifiable impacts. Wow! Why not 250%, or 500%?
Other economists have been deeply critical of this approach and regarding specific aspects of the modelling. Issues include:
the scope of impacts included is quite narrow. A key reference used by Nordhaus acknowledges “As a final conclusion, we emphasize the limited nature of work on impacts.” but that does not seem to stop them publishing [4]
many often questionable parameters are included. For example, extrapolating from current meagre efforts to date “it is assumed that the rate of decarbonization going forward is −1.5 percent per year” [3], yet detailed analysis of existing technology indicates dramatic worldwide savings totalling trillions of dollars by 2030 are achievable with ambitious decarbonisation policies and plans [5].
using the productivity of different regions with current climatic variability, such as the continental USA, as a way to calibrate forward in time, over many decades, the impact of global warming, signals a complete misunderstanding of climate change and is grossly misleading.
discounting damages is based on current data for goods, so grossly underestimates impacts on future generations (the Stern Review had a lot to say about discount rates).
extrapolations from current data is done using simple smooth functions, whereas we can expect discontinuities and abrupt changes as the world warms, in thousands of systems in a myriad of ways (more to say on this below in thresholds and system impacts)
The UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) originally set the target for peak global warming to be 2°C, with a supplementary Paris Accord ambition to keep it to 1.5°C, under pressure from the most vulnerable nations. Yet the current policy commitments (the Nationally Determined Contributions) from the parties to the convention would take us currently to between 2.6°C and 4°C according to the UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2022 [6].
A critique of neoclassical economics
Steve Keen has provided a comprehensive and excoriating critique of the work of Nordhaus and others in his paper The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change [7]. I want to pull out a few key observations (quoted snippets) from Keen’s paper, but please study the paper in full:
Nordhaus excludes 87% of US industry from consideration, on the basis that it takes place ‘in carefully controlled environments that will not be directly affected by climate change’
Nordhaus’s list of industries that he simply assumed would be negligibly impacted by climate change is so broad, and so large, that it is obvious that what he meant by ‘not be directly affected by climate change’ is anything that takes place indoors – or, indeed, underground, since he includes mining as one of the unaffected sectors (more to say on this below in thresholds and system impacts).
If you then assume that this same relationship between GDP and temperature will apply as global temperatures rise with Global Warming, you will conclude that Global Warming will have a trivial impact on global GDP. Your assumption is your conclusion.
Given this extreme divergence of opinion between economists and scientists, one might imagine that Nordhaus’s next survey would examine the reasons for it. In fact, the opposite applied: his methodology excluded non-economists entirely.
There is thus no empirical or scientific justification for choosing a quadratic to represent damages from climate change – the opposite in fact applies. Regardless, this is the function that Nordhaus ultimately adopted.
As with the decision to exclude ∼90% of GDP from damages from climate change, Tol’s assumed equivalence of weather changes across space with climate change over time ignores the role of energy in causing climate change.
What Mohaddes called ‘rare disaster events’ – such as, for example, the complete disappearance of the Arctic Ice sheet during summer – would indeed be rare at our current global temperature. But they become certainties as the temperature rises another 3°C.
The numerical estimates to which they fitted their inappropriate models are, as shown here, utterly unrelated to the phenomenon of global warming. Even an appropriate model of the relationship between climate change and GDP would return garbage predictions if it were calibrated on ‘data’ like this.
Deeply problematic, as Keen points out:
The impact of these economists goes beyond merely advising governments, to actually writing the economic components of the formal reports by the IPCC (‘Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change’)
and he concludes:
That work this bad has been done, and been taken seriously, is therefore not merely an intellectual travesty like the Sokal hoax. If climate change does lead to the catastrophic outcomes that some scientists now openly contemplate … then these Neoclassical economists will be complicit in causing the greatest crisis, not merely in the history of capitalism, but potentially in the history of life on Earth.
Beyond Nordhaus
It seems that Nordhaus and others have been able to pursue their approach because they had free rein for too long in what seemed to be a relatively niche field (when compared with the majority of climate change related research). It would be easy to shrug concerns off as a squabble amongst academics in an immature field of research.
Wrong! The issues are not of mere academic interest but have real-world consequences for policies and climate actions being undertaken (or rather, not undertaken) by governments and industry. For example, a recent paper by Rennert et al [7] on the social cost (SC) of carbon dioxide (CO₂) notes:
For more than a decade, the US government has used the SC-CO2 to measure the benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions in its required regulatory analysis of more than 60 finalized, economically significant regulations, including standards for appliance energy efficiency and vehicle and power plant emissions.
and this paper arrives at a social cost for carbon dioxide that is 3.6 times greater (that is 360% higher) than the value currently used by the US Government, and leads to their conclusion that:
Our higher SC-CO2 values, compared with estimates currently used in policy evaluation, substantially increase the estimated benefits of greenhouse gas mitigation and thereby increase the expected net benefits of more stringent climate policies.
In plain English: we urgently need to stop burning fossil fuels.
Other papers are now amending IAMs to be more realistic. One paper titled Persistent inequality in economically optimal climate policies [8] notes:
The re-calibrated models have shown that the Paris agreement targets might be economically optimal under standard benefit-cost analysis.
These researches are however concerned at the narrow cost-benefit global approach. They take a more detailed look at the differences between and within countries when it comes to the fairness of future pathways. They find that the economic response to climate change will vary greatly depending on the level of cooperation between countries. The conclusions are curiously both optimistic and depressing:
Results indicate that without international cooperation, global temperature rises, though less than in commonly-used reference scenarios. Cooperation stabilizes temperature within the Paris goals (1.80°C [1.53°C–2.31°C] in 2100). Nevertheless, economic inequality persists: the ratio between top and bottom income deciles is 117% higher than without climate change impacts, even for economically optimal pathways.
So better modelling indicates we can dial back on the ludicrous Nordhaus ‘optimal’ warming estimates to something closer to the UNFCCC’s 2°C, as a target that policy-makers and politicians should take seriously. The bad news is that the well known deep inequalities that exist in how climate change plays out will not be remedied merely by staying within the 2°C limit.
Other things must happen – in the solutions that are adopted and how these are implemented within countries and across regions – to ensure that inequalities are not perpetuated or even widened.
Thresholds and system impacts – nature
I want to illustrate the idiocy of the approach taken by Nordhaus and others who use IAMs to project implausibly minimal impacts resulting from 3°C to 6°C of global warming.
It speaks not merely to the lack of an appreciation of how systems work in the real world, but also, a complete absence of imagination.
Systems thinking has recently become a buzz word in some UK Government departments, but it is not obviously reaching the parts of the Treasury or Number 10 Downing Street where decisions are made.
We don’t need one of the much talked about major tipping points (e.g. loss of Arctic Sea Ice) to suffer extremely severe consequences from global heating.
When talking to young people about climate change there is a story I like to tell that helps illustrate how a small change in global mean surface temperature can have a big impact, and it concerns the Pied Flycatcher. This is a picture I created when talking to Primary School children (picture me also holding a globe at the same time to show the migratory paths).
This what I say:
“The Pied Flycatcher flies from Africa to northern Europe just in time to nest so it can feed its hatchlings on the caterpillars of the Winter Moth, which in turn feed on the leaves of oak trees.
But the oak trees have been coming into leaf a few weeks earlier, due to global warming, and the moths have adapted.
But the Pied Flycatcher in Africa is unaware of this, so it arrives at its normal time of the year only to find that caterpillars to feed its hatchlings are scarce.
Fewer hatchlings survive to make the return journey to Africa later in the season, so their numbers decrease.
This has all happened owing to only a small change in the temprature, because life-cycles of the bird and moth that worked together have now being disrupted.“
It is not hard to see that the link (the red arrow) between these separate life-cycles has been broken and has thereby disrupted the system as a whole. There has been a severe decline in their numbers as a result of this ecological dislocation [9], and this (at the time) with less than 1°C of global warming.
In general, nature can adapt to changing climate, but within limits and only at certain ‘speeds’. A species of plant that likes cold conditions might migrate further up a mountain as the climate warms, but eventually it will run out of mountain!
With global warming now being so fast, nature cannot fully adapt or evolve to the changes being wrought.
Thousands of such ecological (and indeed physical and societal) thresholds have been crossed and will be crossed.
Thresholds and system impacts – human society
Let’s move to another example of how climate change is already having an impact – and in this case with industry.
Last summer there was a drought in Europe. Politico reported [10]
Water levels on the Rhine, Europe’s major inland river connecting mega-ports at Rotterdam and Antwerp to Germany’s industrial heartland and landlocked Switzerland, are precipitously low …
That’s a pressing problem for major industries, but it also puts a damper on EU plans to increase the movement of goods along waterways by 25 percent by 2030 and by 50 percent by 2050 …
So those factories that are ignored by Nordhaus because they are indoors find that their raw materials struggle to get in and their produce struggles to get out, when the Rhine is dried up. Not exactly rocket science insight! Note here the complex picture of potential harmful feedbacks:
global warming causes an extreme weather event (a widespread drought)
the drought causes low waters in the Rhine
the low water in the Rhine adversely impacts the passage of material and thereby the manufacturing sector
mitigation steps would require more land transport, leading to greater net emissions (but could not completely replace the tonnage provided by shipping)
greater net emissions increase the risk of extreme weather events.
It really isn’t hard for even young children to work this out (I’ve had conversations along these lines with 12 year olds) but apparently too hard for some economists.
One of economist (surveyed by Nordhaus), Larry Summers, replying to one question said ’For my answer, the existence value [of species] is irrelevant – I don’t care about ants except for drugs’. I guess no one has told him that insects pollinate plants and are therefore an essential part of life on Earth, including human life, and hence our economy. It starkly illustrates the recklessly narrow scope of climate impacts considered by some economists.
Conclusion
For too long, policy-makers and politicians, in the UK, USA and elsewhere have been able to justify their inaction on climate because of the economists like William Nordhaus telling them that a warming globe will have essentially only marginal impacts on the economy. A 2015 survey of the social cost of carbon used by countries [11] found a number of countries using an average 2014 price of $56/tCO2 similar to the USA (rising to $115 in 2050). The UK is actively reviewing how it puts a cost on carbon, as in a January 2023 paper by the BEIS Department [12].
Nordhaus would now say that he is calling for early mitigation, at least on a precautionary basis, but that is a bit like calling the fire brigade when the fire is already well established.
It is time for policy and action to be based on science, systems thinking, and a just transition, rather than some approaches and models that are well past their sell-by date.
George Box quipped that ‘All Models are wrong but some are useful’.
In the form that William Nordhaus and others have developed IAMs over the last few decades, a better aphorism to use might be:
‘All models are wrong, and some are dangerously misleading’.
Thankfully, if belatedly, other economists have been teaming with climate scientists, and challenging and improving the models. Models are needed, and can be useful, to guide our thinking. There is still much work to do. We need to be able to ask ‘what if …?’ type questions to see what the future might look like with different assumptions, and drive ambitious policies.
It’s now time for policy-makers and politicians to recognise the need to radically review their policies and actions, based on the best available approaches and models.
Nordhaus, William D., and Andrew Moffat, 2017 A Survey of Global Impacts of Climate Change: Replication, Survey Methods, and a Statistical Analysis, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper 23646, https://www.nber.org/papers/w23646
Both, C., Visser, M. 2001 Adjustment to climate change is constrained by arrival date in a long-distance migrant bird. Nature 411, 296–298 (2001). DOI 10.1038/35077063. https://www.nature.com/articles/35077063#citeas
Smith, S. and N. Braathen, 2015 Monetary Carbon Values in Policy Appraisal: An Overview of Current Practice and Key Issues”, OECD Environment Working Papers, No. 92, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/5jrs8st3ngvh-en.
Valuation of energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions: Supplementary guidance to the HM Treasury Green Book on Appraisal and Evaluation in Central Government, January 2023, Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
If the experience of a good friend of mine with British Gas is anything to go by, then the answer to this question is a definite no! Two and half months after a team of subcontractors arrived, and 15 return visits later, my friend still doesn’t have a properly operating system!
Nevertheless, I welcome the fact that British Gas want to offer householders the option to install a heat pump, which was launched in 2022. And the commitments provided are reassuring:
We know changing to a new kind of heating might seem like a big move, so our Warm Home Promise is there to give you total peace of mind.
Our engineers will only install a heat pump if we’re confident it’ll heat your home as well as a traditional boiler.
We’ll design your new heating system to reach the right temperature for your home. And if it doesn’t, we’ll come to put things right – or give you your money back.
Is my friend’s experience a one off, or evidence of a deeper issue with how the outsourcing is operating? I don’t know, but British Gas need to urgently determine the answer to this question (and also help my friend!).
As a strong advocate of heat pumps and as someone who is frustrated at the disinformation that surrounds them, pushed by fossil fuel interests, my concerns in this case have nothing to do with the technology or its capability to fulfil its promise. It is a question of how best to scale up capacity.
But let’s wind back a bit and consider the broader question of how large companies use sub-contractors, and outsourcing in general.
Why do they do it?
The risks and failures of subcontracting
Companies often resort to outsourcing because they lack either the skills or capacity to deliver a service, particularly when they are new entrants into a market they want to penetrate. The logic is often that they do not have the time to immediately meet the demand, so seek the support of other companies to fulfil this demand.
Large providers with an existing customer base have the power to make an attractive offer, but often jump the gun, and go to market before they truly have the capability to fulfil the latent demand. I’ve seen this many times over the years in different sectors.
In some the of largest IT projects I have witnessed, especially with Government procurement, big companies win the main contract on the basis that they have the financial muscle to lead, but know they do not have the specialist skills, so they sub-contract to medium sized companies with spare capacity.
Often, these medium sized companies also lack the specific skills or capacity for the projects in play, so they too subcontract to those with genuine expertise in the new technologies, even sole traders. Via this process of successive subcontracting, there is a dilution of accountability. The ones who end up on site discover that there has been a mismatch between client expectations and the resources assembled to deliver the project.
Why don’t the main contractors not do the obvious thing and train up their staff to deliver the new stuff? A very good question, and one that has always puzzled me.
Sometimes it is due to organisational inertia. Imagine a building company that has spent several decades delivering standard British build homes. There is a whole industry behind the standard model. It takes changes in many aspects of the business operations – supply chains, basic skills, and much more – for them to move to something different, such as European style modular, 2050 ready, house building.
The same is true of a large company that has spent years delivering gas boiler installations, now wanting to start delivering heat pump systems. The pressure to create a sales pipeline will often trump the concerns of the engineers wanting to create a solid new delivery model. Inevitably, companies end up trying to run before they can walk.
Impact of failed subcontracting
My friend is very ‘Green’ in everything she does. She wanted a heat pump to replace her boiler. If she’d asked me, I’d have recommended a few questions to ask any potential supplier (see below).
She opted for British Gas because they were her existing supplier and their website made reassuring claims.
The promise was to arrive late in July this year, and finish the installation within 3 or 4 days, It is now mid October (two and half months later) and after 15 visits by the sub-contractor and British Gas the system is still not working.
It is obviously not the fault of the technology (they deployed well established products), but the lack of competence and experience of the staff the subcontractor deployed. Because my friend’s contract is with British Gas, the issue is 100% with them, and they acknowledge that.
Questions for British Gas and other outsourcers
These are my questions for British Gas:
How do they recruit subcontractors?
How do they ensure their subcontractors are competent, in both heat pump installation in general, but also the specific product configurations preferred by British Gas?
What project management and oversight do they provide to ensure effective delivery?
If there are issues, how effective is their ability to escalate matters, to ensure timely resolution?
On the basis of my friends experience the answers to all these questions is really disappointing.
So will outsourcing turbo-charge the roll-out of heat pumps, by British Gas and other large companies wanting to get into the market?
My genuine belief is that it will not.
The small and medium sized companies/ enterprises (SMEs) that know how to do it are already maxed out, so the only option that outsourcing can provide is to go with companies that do not know how to do it, but claim they can.
A better model in my view for expanding the capacity of the heat pump delivery market is to replicate existing successful SMEs.
Companies like British Gas cannot build a business by outsourcing to subcontractors who lack competence and experience, they need instead to properly skill up their own workforce and have systems in place to ensure they achieve effective delivery.
Meanwhile, as we enter winter, my friend is still being let down, not by the technology or its ability to do the job, but by incompetence.
What a delivery process looks like
Delivering a heat pump to replace a boiler is really not that complex but as with any technology, it requires genuine experience and a proven delivery process, not just classroom training. A mitred butt joint is quite a basic carpentry skill, but you can’t just show some Powerpoint to an apprentice and expect them to pull it off very well, and start being a frame maker. Practice makes perfect.
A plumber experienced in fitting gas boilers and radiators will have many transferrable skills. However, a sole trader plumber will rarely be able to make the transition to a sole trader heat pump installer. If they’ve never worked with heat pumps, don’t expect that minimal training will ensure successful delivery, especially given that many of the most specialised tasks – the electrical and digital setup of the heat pump – are not plumbing tasks at all.
Installing heat pumps really needs a team with a variety of skills, and I believe this is the only way to properly scale up the installation of heat pumps as I wrote about here.
Only a company that is focused on installing heat pumps and has successful projects it can reference, would I ever consider to install a heat pump in my house. I followed my own advice and it proved to be a good decision.
I want the people who turn up on site to be co-workers, employed by the same company, not an assortment of contractors who are strangers to each other, with no shared company ethos and ways of working.
That is why out-sourcing so often delivers poor results for the customer, be it software, house building or the installation of a heat pump system. It leads to the dilution of accountability, and really no assurance in the quality of practice that actually turns up on the day.
Following this essay I’ve produced AGuideline for Householders Considering a Heat Pump.
I really want British Gas to make a successful switch from installing gas boilers to installing heat pumps, but they really do have to consider how they do this.
If they choose in the short term to outsource work, they will need to ensure that there is true competence and experience in the teams that are deployed in their name.
How they ensure the quality of those teams is up to them, but it is essential they do.
A Guideline for Householders Considering a Heat Pump
Here is my guideline for householders considering signing a contract with an air source heat pump installer.
1. Getting an understanding of what is possible
It’s really important to move beyond the misinformation and received wisdom attached to heat pumps.
The essential point to understand is that if a building can be heated by a gas boiler, it can be heated by a heat pump. But of course in both cases, the unit needs to be sufficiently powered and the rest of the plumbing setup and sized correctly too.
It will mean that some things change though. For efficiency reasons it is best to use a ‘flow temperature’ as low as possible (that is the temperature of the water flowing through your radiators). This is actually true whatever the heating source.
A room that needs to be heated to 21°C does not need a flow temperature of 70°C or more. The latest UK building regulations for new builds mean that whatever the heating system used, the flow temperature should not exceed 55°C. So plumbers will need to learn how to implement ‘low temperature’ systems, whether with gas boilers or heat pumps.
Often 35°C is enough, and even in mid winter, 50°C is the maximum required in even the most challenging of settings. The 3 key factors that determine the flow temperature are: the external temperature; how well insulated the house is; and the surface area of the ‘emitters’ (radiators or underfloor heating):
The colder it is outside, the harder a heating system has to work to achieve the same result, but a well designed heat pump system will normally ensure that the flow temperature never needs to be more than 50°C, even when it is -5°C outside.
The fabric of the building determines how fast the building loses heat, but it is a myth to say that old buildings cannot be heated by a heat pump or need ‘deep retrofit’ before they can. This case study and others cited in the essay prove otherwise.
The larger the surface area of your radiators, the lower the flow temperature required (whether it be a gas boiler or heat pump). By moving from a single panelled radiator to a double panelled one with fins, the effective surface area is increased greatly, without the wall space of the radiator increasing at all (the height and width of the radiator unchanged even if it gets a bit fatter). The same is true moving from a double panelled to a triple panelled radiator, when this might be needed (which is not as common as is believed).
The pipe work will need sufficiently sized pipework and flow rates to move the heat needed around the house, but that should be part of the assessment that a supplier makes. In many cases, no changes to pipework are required.
In terms of system operation, householders will not have the fast heating up of the house twice a day as they do with a gas boiler. Instead the heat pump stays on for longer, and the house does not go through big swings in temperature. In many cases, the system is setup to stay on 24/7 but with the system set back a few degrees overnight.
2. Get a proper assessment done
A reputable company providing installation services for a heat pump should do a full room by room assessment of your home and check various things we have already mentioned: the state of the plumbing; existing radiators; space requirements inside and outside for the kit required; etc. A householder will typically have to pay for this report but be offered a refund if they go with this supplier.
Other things the assessment will cover are the electricity and water supply. In some homes that have not been upgraded for many decades, remedial work might be required, for example, to carry our work on the mains supply, but this is often unnecessary. They might recommend that an electrician does a ‘load survey’ before the project proceeds (in my larger than average old house I was worried that our 80A mains fuse being too low, but it turned out to be fine).
I would recommend getting at least two assessments from different suppliers. If their assessments are not similar (e.g. in terms of the size of heat pump required and costs), then you need to understand why. Also, ask for references in the locality – and take up an offer to visit these. Consider choosing a supplier that is not too far away, as they need to be able to pop back to fix any issues post installation.
A potential installer should produce a professional report (delivered electronically as a PDF) that should be quite detailed, including the following:
the assumed nominal coldest day of the year used as a basis for the design including maximum heat loss calculations (e.g. external temp of -3°C);
confirmation or otherwise that the design uses MCS standards for target room temperatures (21°C, 18°C and 22°C for living spaces, bedrooms and bathrooms, respectively);
an estimate of the heating power requirements (in kW) for each room when heat loss is at a maximum;
the total heating power requirement (in kW) for the house as a whole when heat loss is at a maximum;
the maximum flow temperature for the radiators;
the total expected heat delivered by the system over a year (in kWh);
the estimated Seasonal Coefficient Of Performance (SCOP) for the system over a typical year.
confirmation that the system design and products used will be specified to include metering that will enable – over any period – electrical usage (kWh) and heat delivered (kWh) to be viewed (via an App) (without this, the householder is unable to ascertain how efficiently the system is actually operating);
the capacity of the water tank, based on the usage for the potential occupancy of the house.
You may say ‘Oh, but I’m happy with 19°C in my living room’ or ‘our children have left home, so can be we get away with a smaller hot water tank?’, but remember that the system needs to be fit for the house, and future occupants when and if you move on.
The steps required before the installer can come on site to install the heat pump system will vary a little, depending on the householder’s situation (e.g. if local authority permissions are required). This list is illustrative of the preparatory steps that need to be ticked off:
Local authority approvals ✔︎
Electrical ‘load survey’ ✔︎
Water pressure checks ✔︎
Checks on pipework sizing in the house ✔︎
Clearing loft and installed improved insulation ✔︎
Sorted out draughts in windows and doors ✔︎
EPC certificate ✔︎
Government grant conditions met ✔︎
Check by installers of suitability of locations for outside external equipment, ✔︎
and checks on space inside for internal equipment ✔︎
3. Project execution
There should be someone who is the point of contact for sorting out issues, acting as project manager (PM).
The team should arrive onsite with all the equipment and gear they need that matches the design. That includes the heat pump, new hot water cylinder, any new radiators, pipework, valves, etc. If there is a lot of going back and forth to local suppliers of kit then that suggests a poorly organised team.
A typical installation process would be as follows:
Introduction to installation team, and logistics agreed (eg. access times)
Old gas boiler and tank removed
Existing pipes and radiators flushed
Heat pump (external) and other kit (internal) moved into position
Plumbing in of kit (heat pump, hot water tank, etc.)
Plumbing in any new radiators specified
Heat pump connected to electrical power
Control system system installed (the ‘brains’ of the system)
One wireless thermostat placed in living room, set to 21°C
Various control setups competed
Setback thermostat e.g. by 3°C to 18°C between 10pm and 6am
Weather compensation setup
System put into operation
Radiators ‘balanced’ to ensure optimal heat distribution (after that, householders should avoid fiddling with radiator TRVs)
Metering installed if not inbuilt for flow/return heat and electricity usage
Certificates produced for MCS compliance
The householder should be briefed on the system setup, specifically:
the optimal location for the thermostat (this is typically a single one placed in the living room and set to 21°C. If the system is designed and installed properly, all rooms will achieve their target temperature if the living room reaches its target temperature – no need for clear controls in every room)
setup the operating regime over a 24 hour cycle e.g. any set back used overnight
that weather compensation is, as per good practice and to maximise efficiency, in operation (so the system only works as hard as it needs and when it is warmer outside, the flow temperature automatically is lowered).
The householder should be briefed on how they can use a console or App to ascertain:
current state of operation (e.g. flow temperature, tank temperature, mode of operation (space or water)
electricity usage by the heat pump over a given period
heat delivered by system over a given period
the coefficient of performance (COP) over a given period (e.g. day, week, month or year) (which is the ratio of the heat delivered and the electricity usage)
Over a period of a year, the COP is termed the Seasonal COP, and in a properly designed modern system, it should be at least 3. In my old house we achieved 3.3 last year. In a modern well insulated house, even better results (higher SCOPs) are achievable.
In addition
there is just one task, in my experience, that a householder needs to be briefed on, which is checking the water pressure in the system. With old plumbing, there can be air locks created even after the system was setup correctly, and this can lead to slight drops in pressure. A simple process is used to reestablish the correct pressure, and the householder should have received the simple instructions on how to do this (I had to do this twice in the first month, but not since).
4. Post Project service
The team should of course leave the site having completed all the tasks, ensured the system is operating correctly, and that everything is tidied away. If radiators have been replaced then old ones will be removed, unless the householder wishes to retain them for any reason (perhaps some are not so old and they can use in another project elsewhere).
Within a few days of the installation, the company / project manager should make a call to check that everything is OK.
The company should have already offered to carry out the annual service and indicate the costs for doing so (typically £150 or less). This service will check the status of the refrigerant in the heat pump, and other tasks. It is important that annual checks are carried out (just as they are for any heating system).
The company should respond promptly if it appears that the system is behaving badly e.g. if the COP is less than 2 for example for an extended period.
In a well designed and installed system, the householder can simply let the heat pump do its thing and will not need to do anything. No fiddling with the system console or radiators is required and to be discouraged. Just leave it alone.
But it is important to periodically check how the system is performing. I would suggest doing this weekly at first, but then monthly once you are convinced that the system is operating well. After some time you may choose to do it only every quarter. I would recommend that you always do an annual check on performance. When in the future you possibly come to sell the house, being able to quote the SCOP achieved for successive years will provide reassurance to any buyer.
If this is true globally, it is even more true for an advanced economy like the UK.
Our Government will no doubt claim we can use unproven carbon capture at scale, or deploy dodgy carbon accounting (we are world leaders in that at least), to claim they can still get to Net Zero, or ‘Not Zero’ as we should be calling it.
Rosebank is not about lowering bills and energy security as the Government claims, for several reasons:
Every tonne of carbon dioxide we emit increases the risks of extreme weather events, crop failures and health hazards – that damages everyone’s security
Most of the Rosebank output (oil) will be sold on international markets with UK consumers getting no preferential treatment in terms of bills or energy security
Renewable energy costs have dropped massively and the UK has the capability to max out wind and solar
Electrification will enable huge improvement in energy efficiency in transport and heating
Electrification is future proofing – it can take electricity from any source (wind, wave, solar photovoltaic, etc) and at different scales (your roof, community energy, North Sea)
Mixed signals creates market confusion that only delays the transition to a post fossil fuel secure and healthy future, and it harms our ability to show ambition and leadership
The IPCC says that every year matters, every tonne of carbon matters, every action matters. We need our Government to listen to the great majority of UK citizens that say they want action.
My interest in this question derives from many years working with large organisations internationally in both the public and private sector, who strive to improve their curation and uptake of institutional knowledge by the experts within the organisation. So, I am not thinking in terms of the general use of tools such as ChatGPT as simply a better Google, for use on the internet.
AI and Jobs
Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools make people redundant?
Some people, undoubtedly, particularly if they are doing mundane desk-based jobs collating information or giving advice that is based on a body of accepted information. In some cases, the jobs may not be regarded as mundane, but may be be subject to procedures that are relatively easy to emulate.
But will ChatGPT or subsequent AI tools replace experts? It depends a little on what we mean by an expert.
Imagine a community centre where experts are paid to offer advice to people on their entitlement to benefits. One can well imagine an AI tool very quickly replacing the basic role of synthesising the information needed to help someone know their rights.
Is this enough? I don’t think so. Context is crucial.
The person’s situation may be complicated by multiple factors including complex domestic relationships, mental health problems, access to transport, and many others. The adviser will need to display emotional intelligence not only knowledge of the current state of legislation. It may be that in being able to get support in checking knowledge of the latest legislation on benefits, the adviser can spend more quality time with someone who is in desperate need of support.
In this example AI would not be replacing a human, but would be helping redefine the role of the human, to increase their true value to society.
AI as an on-demand wikipedia without editors
In the context of knowledge in general, the AI models that are emerging today, are being seen as ‘oracles’, able to dispense accurate and well sourced summary answers to complex questions.
However, it is worth noting that AI models such as ChatGPT have to feed off source material. Who chooses the scope of this source material? If the material is of varying quality and provenance, what rules are embedded in the AI to help it decide on the level of trust it gives to different sources?
When such tools try to synthesise knowledge from public resources on the internet they confront the very real issue that much of what is written on a subject is copied; and often without being checked first. Even trusted actors can fall foul of using poorly researched information and unwittingly give it credibility by propagating it.
If you ask Google ‘when did the Titanic sink?’ you’ll get the basic answer pretty quick. An AI tool does not do much more. They will refer to the collision with an iceberg and broken compartments taking on water.
If I ask the question ‘why did the Titanic sink?’, things get more interesting, and the AI tool can do better than Google. However, it may not anticipate the 5 whys that inevitably result. Why was it going too fast, and so on.
I had to experiment with one AI tool to get the right question in order to get to the primary cause I was interested in:
What were the company pressures that influenced the captain of the Titanic to maintain high speed despite the risk of iceberg collisions?
The answer I received was:
There were allegations that Captain Edward J Smith was under pressure to maintain high speed despite the risk of iceberg collisions. It was claimed that he ordered to ‘make a record crossing’ thus indirectly causing the collision with the iceberg. However, it is also suggested that the Titanic hit an iceberg in 1912 because of a basic steering error, and only sank as fast as it did because an official persuaded the captain to continue sailing.
I still feel I would need a historian with expertise in this area to really delve into the history. Having a very smart on-demand dictionary is great, but is Wikipedia-without-editors (as some may see it) really enough? What about the intentions that lie behind a question or the specific context that it is being raised in?
A historian might conceivably point me to diaries written by the captain long before the ship sailed, and only recently discovered – and are not fully digitised – that reveal the pressures he felt under to go as fast as possible.
AI and complex questions of science and history
Let’s try a much more difficult question.
When was the science settled that the world is warming as a result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases?
I got the following answer from an AI tool (a ChatGPT derivative):
The science of climate change has been studied for over a century. In the late 19th century, scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change Earth’s energy balance and climate1. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was formed in 1972 as a result of growing concern about the impact of human activities on the environment. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme to provide scientific information on climate change. The IPCC Third Assessment Report in 2001 found “new and stronger evidence” that humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause of the warming seen in the second half of the 20th Century.
Not a bad answer, but not one I feel would satisfy an expert climate scientist.
This is what Spencer Weart writes in The Discovery of Global Warming, referring to the seminal 1967 paper by Manabe and Wetherald:
This was the first time a greenhouse warming computation included enough of the essential factors, in particular the effects of water vapour, to seem plausible to experts. Wallace Broecker, who would later play a major role in climate change studies, recalled that it was the 1967 paper “that convinced me that this was a thing to worry about.” Another scientist called it “arguably the greatest climate-science paper of all time,” for it “essentially settled the debate on whether carbon dioxide causes global warming.” Experts in a 2015 poll agreed, naming it as the “most influential” of all climate change papers.
So I went back to the AI tool, to ask the question more precisely, and anticipating something closer to what I expected:
When were climate scientists finally convinced of the greenhouse gas theory for global warming on Earth.
I got the following answer:
The greenhouse gas theory for global warming on Earth was first proposed by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1896. In his 1938 study, he showed that humans had already emitted enough CO2 into the atmosphere to increase the average temperature on Earth and that the Earth was responding: Over the previous 50 years, the average temperature had indeed increased as per Arrhenius’s proposed greenhouse effect. Many other theories of climate change were advanced, involving forces from volcanism to solar variation. In the 1960s, the evidence for the warming effect of carbon dioxide gas became increasingly convincing.
By around 2000, many climate scientists were convinced that the rise in temperature was likely to continue as greenhouse gases accumulated. Some predicted that an unprecedented global warming would become apparent.
Let’s forgive the fact that the tool confused Callendar with Arrhenius when referring to the seminal 1938 paper (it was Callendar who first showed empirical evidence of man-made emissions causing global warming), or the suggestion that Arrhenius was the first to understand the carbon dioxide driven greenhouse effect (Tyndall certainly did, much earlier, but Arrhenius was the first to calculate its magnitude).
The bigger surprise was that the AI tool did not cite or allude to the 1967 Manabe and Wetherald paper.
I am sure that new versions of ChatGPT and other tools will fix such problems when answering complex and nuanced questions.
AI in an organisational knowledge context
There is however a more fundamental issue with the use of such tools within organisations – whether public or private – that are aiming to become learning organisations and develop a body of trusted knowledge.
Chinese walls, confidentiality and other factors mean we cannot simply let rip with open access to the information held in organisations. And while quantity is useful to AI it is much less important to an expert than the quality of the information and insight being parsed.
Let’s consider a scenario.
A multi-national consulting engineering company has done thousands of projects around the world. It partners with diverse international and local companies – experts in specific disciplines such as new materials, acoustics, carbon accounting, and much more – in design, project management and construction
On the one hand, the consulting company wants its intellectual property respected, and in many cases, kept confidential. Clients and partners want the same for their contributions to projects. A complex Venn diagram emerges of private and shared information, and the insights (knowledge) that emerges from these experiences. Document management systems are used to apply both open access but also need-to-know policies, and often at quite a granular level.
Documents never get printed and left on trains because people who by virtue of their role need access to certain collections of information, get it – by design. Documents that are needed to be retained and never unintentionally lost, never are – by design. This is just basic content management good practice – notwithstanding the inability of Governments and many companies to apply these 20th Century capabilities effectively.
The issue for AI is that it would need to be able to navigate these complex access rights when providing answers to questions. The same question would have to give different answers to different people; even within the same organisation if chinese walls are not to be breached. This is the Achille’s heal of AI if it is to be commercialised in an institutional setting.
I am grateful to a relative (Jon Hayter) for making the following observation:
Isaac Asimov clearly gave some serious thought to this when he wrote “I,Robot”
At one point when the hero is speaking to a holographic version of his deceased mentor the programme gives him information but can only answer specific questions. At one point when he has made a statement based on his own thought processing the hologram says “That, is the right question”
On the other hand, the consulting organisation also wants to parade their experience and say that it uses its unique collective know-how on past projects in the conduct of new ones. This is in part through the tacit knowledge of their expert employees, as well as the codified experience within the organisation (guidelines, technique papers, anonymised project summaries, etc.) embodied in the lingua franca of knowledge: documents.
Resolving this tension between confidentiality and reuse is part of the art of working in complex organisations, and especially in consulting.
It begs a question as to the source set of information that an AI tool can or should use to answer a queries like:
We’ve been asked to design and manage the construction of a new theatre in north east China that will be a showcase for regional Chinese culture, and an exemplar of sustainable construction and operation. What projects should we learn from and who would we ideally partner with?
Financial constraints, unrealistic expectations, political interference and resulting scope creep will be at least as important as innovative design and engineering, and all have to be factored into the answer.
Much of what is most useful as source material will be the tacit knowledge that is often not written down, and by definition, unparseable. This is gold dust.
To counter the ‘not written down’ issue, some organisations conduct informal review interviews and workshops at the end of each project to tease out insights. For those enlightened consultancies that actually make time to do this, these reviews would aim to provide not only an overview of what was done (the what), but also why it was done that way.
Those candid reflections; those serendipitous encounters; those lightbulb moments – none of which appeared in the project file – might be scribbled in notebooks or might surface in those informal post-project reviews. Sometimes it has to wait till the exit interview or even retirement (to save the blushes)!
As things stand, only true experts can navigate the intersection between technical know-how, personal testimony, historical and current context, emotional factors, politics, deep insights, and much more, that explain the why’s and wherefore’s of key decisions on complex endeavours.
Would ChatGPT conjure up a Sidney Opera House design out of the blue if nothing remotely similar existed beforehand?
You know the answer.
That does not mean that the AI of the future cannot play a role as an assistant in these endeavours – taking on some of the mundane tasks that exist in the curation of information and even knowledge.
For example, in the business of applying subject-specific metadata based on controlled vocabularies, AI could certainly prove a powerful assistant by making time-consuming tasks more efficient, if not quite a complete replacement for the expert knowledge curator.
However, I am confident that for the foreseeable future, it will not replace the true expert within an organisation.
Update a: A survey by Nesta UK of Heat Pump users published 23 May 2023 finds high levels of satisfaction with heat pumps, see Note [7]
Update b: Following requests from some readers for more information on the data, an Appendix has been added to provide details of the data collection, analysis of the COP and SCOP achieved, and a comparison of running costs pre and post the heat pump installation.
Update c: Added a note on 26th Sept. 2025 about the Catapult study final report (Dec. 2024) relating variations in housing types and also use of high temperature heat pumps, see Note [8].
Here is a plot spoiler: my wife and I are delighted with the results of living in our listed Cotswold stone home heated by an air-source heat pump since December 2021. I want to share our story as a corrective to the belief, widely expressed in the media, that it would be impossible to do what we did: self-evidently, this is untrue.
In case you want answers to the burning questions I often hear, I’ve collected a few (see Note [1]).
Here’s our story.
Beginnings
Twenty five years ago my wife and I bought an old Grade 2 Listed property with friends and split it in two. It was a bargain; ignoring the subsequent years of work! Renovations of sash windows and shutters, valley gutter lead work, lime mortar of the end terrace, and so much more, followed over the years.
It turned out the party wall used to be an external wall when the property was first built in 1805, but about a decade later the mill-owner who acquired it wanted something much more substantial. He extended the small cottage outwards and upwards into what was advertised later as a “capital messuage”. Not a property I’d ever imagined owning, but somehow we found ourselves as custodians of this beautiful property.
When we arrived there was a higgledy piggledy array of partitioned rooms created for the care home it had been used for prior to its closure. We set about restoring it to its former Georgian glory. But there is always something to do on an old house, and the journey continues. That’s why it always amuses me when people talk about ‘retrofit’ as if it is some fast and easy project, because from my point of view, maintaining the fabric of a property is always a process not an event; a process that never really ends.
We couldn’t find any way to split the existing water, gas and electricity utilities in two, externally or internally. So we had to start again with new services, that were routed in at the back of the property, so as not to impact on the Georgian front elevation. Both households were essentially starting with a blank canvas and put in completely new plumbing and gas boilers. We called our plumber ‘Danny the ferret’ because of his ability to get into impossible spaces and never leave a mess. The small new gas boiler could now heat our now separate property in less than an hour; like a Ferrari, able to go from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds.
Little did we know then, but Danny did such a great job on the pipework and radiators that when last year we had an air-source heat pump fitted, the plumbing through the house turned out to be fit for purpose (big enough pipes in the right places). No new copper piping required except to connect the new equipment, and only one third of the double-panel (with fins) radiators he fitted needed fattening a little to be replaced by triple-panel radiators.
And those that were upsized (like the one illustrated) were a bit fatter but the same height and width, so fitted into their positions without any need to change the pumbing. This in effect increases the surface area of the radiator, allowing for a lower flow temperature to still heat the room to its target temperature.
Exploring opinions on heat pumps
While I am no laggard, I’m also generally not an ‘early adopter’ of anything, even when I believe its the right thing to do. It took me a decade longer than most to switch from a film to a digital camera because I was unconvinced they were good enough. I tend to prefer for others to learn the lessons and pass them on. I like it also when there is an inevitable reduction in costs as a market matures a little. So I did get a digital camera finally, 20 years ago now, and it’s been great, but I was hardly an advocate for ‘new tech’.
My old friend Chris runs a successful business, Yorkshire Energy Systems (YES), installing solar and heat pump systems (amongst others), and had already been giving me an education on heat pumps. I thought we should consider one when we had to replace our existing system, but again, I was in no rush, I needed time to explore the subject.
I invited Chris down to Nailsworth to give a talk to the local climate group I helped run (Nailsworth Climate Action Network), and also invited leaders of local political parties of all persuasions from the Stroud Valleys, including the then MP for Stroud, David Drew for Labour, and the prospective Conservative candidate, Siobhan Baillie (who in a subsequent election became our MP).
The talk went down extremely well – Chris is a brilliant speaker.
Chris later gave another talk for us online during Covid. This also went down well and was recorded, then posted on our website: What if we could all heat our buildings with renewable technologies? It addresses most of the myths you hear about heat pumps, and a number of people have told me how it helped make up their mind, and go for a heat pump.
I have a good natural science background, so I was not in any doubt about the soundness of the 19th century physics that underpin the workings of a heat pump, which we all blithely rely on every day (most people have a fridge, which pumps heat from inside the fridge to its outside). But understanding the science is rarely enough, even for ex-scientists!
While in one ear Chris was telling me that any building that can be heated with a gas boiler can be heated with a heat pump, in the other ear, other friends, including experts in insulating old buildings, told me that ‘deep retrofit’ was an essential precursor to heating an old building with a heat pump, especially an air-source heat pump. Doubts crept in.
It’s barely believable that this sea water has enough heat to warm anything, it’s pretty chilly at this time of year, but yet, thanks to an extraordinary technology called a heat exchanger, it’s the sea that’s going to heat this house.
But cold water contains enormous amounts of energy. Thermal energy is just the jostling of molecules. So the water Roger Harrabin was feeling, say at 7°C, is a sweltering 280 Kelvin (on the absolute temperature scale), with no shortage of jostling molecules from which energy can be extracted. Similarly for air. If you stand in front of an air-source heat pump the air blown out is colder than the surrounding air by a few degrees, because the heat pump has extracted thermal energy from it (using the same tech that a fridge uses to extract thermal energy from anything you put in the fridge). This is more than enough to heat a home.
Yet journalists and commentators have continued to assert that heat pumps can’t heat older buildings without substantial insulation work. Our national broadcaster (the BBC) is culpable, despite its duty to “inform, educate and entertain”. Most recently, during the 8th March 2023 episode of Jeremy Vine’s BBC Radio 2 programme, the host expressed dismay that a radiator was lukewarm. What hope is there when a key programme is failing to “inform and educate” in this way. A hint: it is the thermometer in the room that tells how warm the room is, not any preconceptions on how hot a radiator should be.
Roger Harrabin, Jeremy Vine and many others in the media do a great disservice by sharing their incredulity, and repeating unfounded beliefs about heat pumps.
Why did we decide to go for it?
For us there was a stark choice we faced that forced us to stop vacillating, and certainly stop listening to the naysayers:
Firstly, the 25 year old gas boiler was creaking and behaving a bit oddly even after a service. There was no ‘ripping out’ as the tabloids and others emotively campaign against, merely the natural end of life that could no longer be serviced to stay in operation much longer.
Secondly, I had seen the data from the Energy Saving Trust, and it was quite clear that getting off using gas to heat our home and replacing it with a heat pump would massively reduce our annual carbon footprint (as I wrote about in Are Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHPs) a Silver Bullet?). This is true even after allowing for an electricity grid that was not yet fully powered by wind, solar and other alternatives to fossil fuels. As a family who wanted to do their bit to reduce the impact of our household on global warming, this was a pivotal moment. If we didn’t take the plunge now, we’d be locking in a high carbon footprint for another 20 or so years with a new gas boiler.
Thirdly, the idea that we must carry out extensive insulation (as the The Retrofit Academy claims) before even considering a heat pump, was simply impractical. Even if we could have afforded the eye-wateringly expensive costs of ‘deep retrofit’, Listed Building approval would not have been forthcoming. Imagine wrapping this Georgian splendour in external wall insulation, or removing coving and panelling to somehow fit internal wall insulation.
Finally, at the time, the domestic Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) was still available but due to close at the end of March 2022, so we needed to get a heat pump system in by then if we were to benefit from the scheme.
Going for it – plans and preparations
So we made the decision in July 2021 to ‘go for it!’. I prepared an outline plan, checklist, questions, etc. We wanted to do it right first time.
I prepared a plan of the house showing the floor area and volume of each room, existing radiators, etc. We bought seven digital thermometers to distribute around the house to ‘benchmark’ how it behaved with the existing gas boiler. I did calculations using current bills and ‘what if’ estimates of future gas and electricity prices to determine whether we would break even on running costs. I remember saying to my wife “gas prices are likely to go up faster than electricity prices sometime in the future. So while our running costs may struggle to compete with cheap gas today, with the current ratio of units costs, that’ll change sooner or later, as the grid gets greener”. Little did I know then that a combination of Putin and a super efficient heat pump would make it sooner, not later.
The biggest challenge was our living room with its large bay window – a thing of beauty but also a significant challenge in terms of heat loss. When the sun is up, even in winter, the room receives a lot of extra warmth (so-called ‘solar gain’), but when the sun goes down, we have to use shutters to reduce heat loss. Not ideal, but sometimes compromises have to be made.
The project forced us to finally clear out the loft. About 100 boxes from our two daughters and us needed sorting, many unsorted from when we had moved in 1998! After several dusty visits to the loft we cleared it, cleaned it, then beefed up the insulation with 300mm depth of Knauf insulation rolls.
The first thing to be grateful to the heat pump for is that it forced us to clear the loft when in our late 60s, rather than having to face it in a decade or two when our knees will have gone. It was such a relief, I can’t tell you.
We had already done what we could to reduce draughts. Our beautiful sash windows could not be replaced even if we’d wanted to. When we had a major servicing job done on them (thanks to a local firm Simply Sash Windows with expertise in historic buildings). We had discreet brushes fitted that paid back immediately with a significant reduction in draughts (when our local climate group did a local ‘retrofit fair’ we included short video snippets on our website to explore options, such as for draught proofing).
For other homes and householders there may be good reasons for carrying out more extensive insulation and other ‘retrofit’ measures. However, bear in mind that if the objective is to get off gas, and thereby reduce your carbon footprint significantly, you really should leave enough in your budget to finance a heat pump system. I discussed this in an essay Insulate Britain: Yes, but by how much? that has attracted a fair amount of mostly positive attention.
For building regulation reasons when we took on the property, we’d had fire strips with brushes fitted around existing internal doors, and it turns out this was very helpful in reducing the turnover of air in the house, and so reducing heat loss.
We contacted two companies specialising in heat pumps. My old friend Chris’s company YES in Yorkshire, and a local company CEG (Cotswold Energy Group) which was recommended to me by a customer of theirs in Nailsworth. Both firms have a proven track record of installing high quality systems (my research assured me).
We had approval from the Listed Building Officer in August 2021 to proceed, based on outline plans I submitted for locating the external unit well out of sight at the rear of the property. The new services we got installed 25 years ago ran up the back of the building and into a boiler room that could be repurposed for the internal units required for the new system. We had a few lucky breaks like that. The new hot water tank would just fit. Another lucky break.
The surveying of the house is a crucial stage in the process and ought to be whatever heating system is installed. Overall, these were the checkpoints I ticked off on the project prior to installation:
Listed Building approval ✔︎
Electrical ‘load survey’ and mains fuse; existing 80 Amps would be fine ✔︎
Water pressure checks ✔︎
Sizing of pipework in the house ✔︎
Cleared loft and installed new beefed up insulation ✔︎
Sorted out draughts in windows and doors ✔︎
EPC certificate ✔︎
RHI requirements met ✔︎
Check by installers of suitability of platform outside for external units ✔︎
Check space inside for internal units ✔︎
We were now ready to proceed and made our requirements very clear. For example, I said I was not interested in a hybrid system with gas as a backup; that seemed a bit like buying a petrol car in 1910 and having towing arms for a horse, just in case. A few people tried that, but it didn’t catch on.
The instructions was clear: size the system properly to meet our requirements and those of any subsequent owner (including one who might have 4 teenage children who shower a lot).
The two quotes were very similar in terms of proposed design and costs. In the end, we felt that everything else being equal, going local swung it, in case we needed any call outs to sort out teething issues and future servicing. Chris felt this was an important factor to be taken into consideration.
System design
With a big enough heat pump you can heat any building that a gas boiler can heat. Geneva City Hall has been heated by a water-source heat pump since 1928, and a large air-source heat pump at Hillpark Drive, Glasgow has been heating 350 homes since 2017.
The system design followed MCS standards (Microgeneration Certification Scheme), which stipulates that the system should be able to achieve at least 21°C in living rooms, 18°C in hallways and bedrooms, and 22°C in bathrooms; and be able to do this on the nominal coldest day of the year for your location. For our system and location, that meant that the heat pump itself, and radiators, were sized to achieve these targets with a flow temperature of 50°C, when it was -1.6°C outside. The ‘flow temperature’ refers to the temperature of the heated water pumped to the radiators.
It is crucial that the assessment is done room by room. If just one large room has an undersized radiator, the room may not reach its desired temperature at the expected flow temperature, undermining expectations, for no fault of the heat source itself. In our case, only a third of the radiators
The heat pump itself must be able to achieve the peak heating demand for the whole house.
Because the largest heat pump available at the time was just short of the peak demand estimated for our home, we ended up with a so-called ‘cascade’ system, with two smaller heat pumps working in parallel, in conjunction with a buffer tank. In total, it had more peak power than we needed, but not so much as to cause an issue.
In a way, the so-called ‘cascade’ system (actually not in series but two in parallel) turned out to have the benefit that when it was comparatively warm outside, only one of these units needs to be in operation at any time. The clever electronics made sure that each one shared the work equally over the year.
The only issue was that both firms were maxed out with work because others like us were trying to get things done before the end of the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI). In addition the Covid pandemic had disrupted supply chains for heat pumps, like everything else, so kit was also scarce.
The installation
Consequently, the installation was finally done at the start of December 2021, taking just over a week. It was a larger than normal system for a larger than normal house, but the principles are the same, whatever the property.
The twin Mitsubishi Ecodans were placed on a platform we created outside the old boiler room:
The new internal setup looked as follows:
You may think that this looks complicated, but it is not a complexity that you need to deal with or even to understand, any more than you need to understand how a modern car works. In many ways, the increase in sophistication of systems (be they cars or heat pumps) reflects their ability to be ‘easier to drive’, extremely efficient, environmentally aware, and with very little in the way of maintenance to worry about. Hardware and software combining forces!
The installation process went as follows:
Introduction to installation team, and logistics agreed
Old gas boiler and tank removed
Existing pipes and radiators flushed
Heat pump and other kit moved into position
Plumbing in of kit (heat pump, hot water tank, etc.)
Plumbing in the few new radiators required
Heat pump connected to electrical power
Control system system installed
One wireless thermostat placed in living room, set to 21°C
Various control setups competed
Setback thermostat by 3°C to 18°C between 10pm and 6am
Weather compensation setup
System put into operation
Radiators ‘balanced’ to ensure optimal heat distribution
Metering installed for flow/return heat and electricity usage
Certificates produced for MCS compliance
In addition to the assessor/ designer who did the design we had two plumbers who did the physical work and ‘plumbing in’ of the new kit, followed by an electrician who did the setting up of the heat pump (see ‘The Team’, Note [3]).
As it turned out, only on a few very cold days (in practice, a minimum of -5°C) did the flow temperature ever get as high as 50°C (the maximum design ‘flow temperature’ for our system). The flow temperature is best kept as low as possible, while still doing its job (see Note [4]).
The results
So how did things turn out?
We get the space heating we need and plenty of hot water. Our hot showers have never been better. We have bills that of course have gone up due to the energy crisis, but less than they would have done if we’d stayed on gas.
A key measure of the success of a heat pump installation is the performance it actually achieves in practice – as opposed to some published figure that assumes an idealised situation.
For any heating system one needs to think of the performance of the whole system. In addition to the heating system, there are the radiators and fabric of the building, because it is all these together that determine how efficiently rooms are maintained at a desired temperature.
For our heat pump, performance was assessed using the ‘seasonal coefficient of performance’ (or SCOP), which is the heat energy delivered during the year (in kilowatt-hours (kWh)) divided by the electrical energy used by the heat pump (in kWh).
For our system, the SCOP achieved in the year to March 2023 was 3.3, or 330% in percentage terms; pretty impressive I feel. That means that for every 1 kWh of electricity we put in, we get 3.3 kWh of heat out of the heat pump (2.3 kWh of this is harvested from the ambient air). By comparison, the old gas boiler was only 72% efficient, meaning that for every 1 kWh of primary energy in the gas put in we got 0.72 kWh of heat out.
This means that even though the unit electricity price is greater than the unit gas price by a factor of over 3, this is more than offset by the relative performance of the new heat pump compared to the boiler it replaced. So our running costs are less by comparison.
This result is totally at odds with the naysayers we hear incessantly in the media that they are difficult to install, won’t work on older buildings without substantial insulation measures, or will cost a fortune to run. None of this received wisdom has been true in our case.
The project has not identified any particular type or age of property that cannot have a successful heat pump installation. The suggestion that there are particular home archetypes in Britain that are “unsuitable” for heat pumps is not supported by project experience and data.
So I don’t believe our experience is in any sense exceptional or to be treated as anecdotal. Rather, it demonstrates that even in a building that is ‘hard to treat’, as the experts would call it, there is no reason an air-source heat pump cannot be successfully installed and operated, with a little care and preparation.
I hope that our story provides an illuminating corrective to the media naysayers, and others who should know better.
If it gives encouragement to those wishing to get off gas for whatever reason, it will have done its job.
If you are doing it to lower your carbon footprint, then whatever your lifestyle, it will be one of the most impactful decisions you will ever make in your lifetime.
Q. So can you really heat a large old house with an air-source heat pump, without ‘deep’ retrofit?
A. Yes.
Q. But does it cost more to run than than if you’d stuck with a gas boiler?
A. No, comparatively it costs less. Of course, gas and electricity unit prices have both gone up, but gas proportionally more and the efficiency of the heat pump trumps the differential in electricity-to-gas unit price. See Will my heating bill increase if I get a heat pump? another essay I have written, where I show this in detail.
Q. But it’s really expensive to install surely?
A. It costs less than a new kitchen that is mostly MDF and air, and yet we all seem happy to pay for a new kitchen that the next owner of the house will quite possibly “rip out”. The heat pump will probably last for 25 years and will over its lifetime save you more in carbon emissions than anything else, for a typical householder at least 3 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year compared to gas with the electricity grid as at present (and even more as the grid gets greener). Octopus Energy are creating a market for a low cost heat pump installation, that may meet the needs of a majority of householders, if not outlier cases such as mine.
Q. But can we go green using biogas?
A. Burning stuff is so last century! And as Prof. David Mackay said, if you have some gas it is much more efficient to send it to a gas turbine to create electricity to power a heat pump in your home than to burn the gas in your home. The same would be true of biogas, an idea that has been heavily criticised by independent expert Dr Richard Lowes , and flies in the face of the clear recommendations of the Climate Change Committee, see Note [6].
Q. Should we hold on for hydrogen boilers?
A. No. Using ‘green hydrogen’ from excess renewable electricity to make hydrogen to burn in our homes would require 6 times as many wind turbines than if we simply sent the electricity direct to home to power heat pumps. Hydrogen will be in demand in hard to decarbonise sectors including fertiliser production, etc. Anyone who gets a hydrogen boiler will be locked into expensive hydrogen. The Climate Change Committee expect hydrogen to play only a niche role in heating (see Note [6]).
Q. Did you have to change all your radiators, and pipework?
A. No. The pipework did not need changing and only 1/3rd of the radiators needed fattening a little (from 2-panel to 3-panel); their width and height were unchanged.
Q. Is it noisy?
A. Not at all, even standing close by. If birds are singing you can’t hear it at all.
Q. Can it heat hot (tap) water?
A. Yes. It does that in shortish bursts, and because the hot water tank is under mains pressure, the showers are now much better.
Q. Does it use an immersion heater some of the time?
A. Not for day-to-day water heating. It does use an immersion heater periodically to boost the tank’s temperature from 50°C (the target temperature, achieved with the heat pump) to 60°C (required to kill the organisms); no point flogging the heat pump for this little job. This deals with the risk of Legionella, which is a requirement under current regulations (even though the sealed nature of the system makes it an extremely low risk). In any typical month, the legionella ‘purge’ occurs only for a few hours overnight every two weeks. It has very little impact on the measured performance or the heating bills.
Q. But my plumber said you can’t get the water hot enough?
A. Untrue. Because who wants the hot water from a tap to be more than the new building regulation of 48°C, which a heat pump can easily achieve. Why would we want young or older relatives and visitors to scold themselves?
Q. My plumber also said that radiators never get hot enough?
A. Your plumber is mistaken. Again the new building regulations (whatever the source of heat) are that the ‘flow’ temperature should not exceed 55°C. If your room needs to get to 21°C say, then (depending on the external temperature) you may only need 35°C, 40°C or 50°C (in the most cold days), to get the room to 21°C. Not as fast as if the flow temperature was 75°C, but just as assuredly, and more cost effectively. Your skin temperature is say 34°C, so a radiator at 40°C or even 50°C might feel lukewarm, but that is irrelevant. It’s what the thermometer on the wall says that counts. Don’t touch, look!
Q. Was the project disruptive?
A. Not the fitting of the heat pump, which took just over a week. For us, the most challenging thing was clearing the loft, in order to increase the loft insulation to modern standards, and get the grant.
Q. Do you have smart controls around the house?
A. No. A well designed system (whatever the source), which includes properly sized radiators and weather compensation, will always ensure that if the single thermostat in your living room is reading the target temperature there, the other rooms will also be at their target temperature. No fiddling with controls in rooms or zones. By keeping it simple in this way, we actually can forget we have a heat pump at all. It works reliably, without us ever having to fiddle with any dials or thermostats. We just let it do its thing.
You will have many more questions no doubt, but these are typical of the ones people raise with me, so I hope the answers have proved illuminating.
[2] History of heat and heat pumps
19th Century scientists developed the ‘kinetic theory of heat’.
They established that ‘heat’ in substances was no more than the jostling of molecules, and the higher the temperature, the greater the average speed of their jostling. Not only that, but that this jostling only ceases at ‘absolute zero’, which is -273.15 degrees on the Celsius scale. So the water Roger Harrabin was feeling, say at 7°C, was a sweltering 280 Kelvin (the name subsequently given to this new scale). No shortage of jostling molecules from which energy can be extracted. A balmy -5°C for winter air passing through an air source heat pump – no problem – it being a balmy 268 Kelvin.
The first working compression–expansion refrigerator (or heat pump) was built by Jacob Perkins in the 1830s. William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) first proposed using heat pumps for space heating in 1852.
For those interested in learning more about the history, Boltzmann’s Atom: The Great Debate That Launched a Revolution in Physics is a great biography of one the principal scientists who shaped this theory, and fought a long battle with naysayers such as Mach who couldn’t bring himself to believe in the existence of atoms.
[3] The Team, for our project overall were:
Senior manager, who provided oversight at every stage to ensure a quality delivery: during assessment, proposal, installation and hand-over.
The assessor/ designer. She was in her 20s, a graduate with a 1st Class degree in Geophysical Sciences who’d decided to not go into the oil & gas industry, and instead become a heat pump consultant. She did the surveying of the property, estimating heat loss for every room, and preparing a detailed design and costing for the system.
There were two plumbers who did the physical work, both young (also in their 20s). They first removed the existing boiler and hot water tank. They then got the units in place on the day, including a heat pump (actually two in our case) that had to be lumbered up a steep path to reach the back of the house (built into the side of a hill); a hot water tank; water pumps etc. They then connected all the pipework to the units. Because they were part of a team, these plumbers didn’t need a deep knowledge of heat pumps, just the principles of low flow temperature systems. They drained and flushed the existing plumbing in the house, and found no issues with it holding the slightly higher water pressure needed for a heat pump. Only a third of the radiators needed up-sizing to triple panel ones – and given all the dire warnings I’d heard (false as it turned out) I was pleasantly surprised by this. Once the system was operating, they ‘balanced’ the system, so heat was as evenly distributed as possible.
There was one electrician, who not only did the electrical connections, but also setup the controls for the heat pump(s). The so-called ‘weather compensation’ is a crucial part of the setup, as it optimises the efficiency of the system. The temperature of the water being pumped around the radiators is kept as low as needed to deliver the space heating. We also decided to have the heat pump on continuously but set back a few degrees at night. This meant that the heat pump was not having to work too hard in the morning to reach the target temperature in rooms. With our thick walls, it would not be a good idea for these to cool down too much. Paradoxically, we use less energy this way than if the system went off completely over night.
[4] Flow temperature is best kept as low as possible, that does the job
The larger the surface area of the radiator, the lower the flow temperature needed to deliver the required amount of heat. This is why underfloor heating is often able to operate at a mere 35°C. But even for a system like ours, the flow temperature can be relatively much lower than expected. For example, in the last 7 days, the external temperature has ranged from 8°C to 11°C, and the flow temperature has never exceeded 36°C.
Which is why the talk of ‘high temperature heat pumps’ to deal with difficult buildings strikes me as a non sequiter.
In any case, building regulations that came into force in June 2022 in the UK mean that all new systems must have a flow temperature no higher than 55°C, whatever the heat source, so those trying to flog high temperature heat pumps are barking up the wrong tree in my view.
Just design the low flow temperature system properly. Job done.
[5] Performance of air-source heat pumpbased system
The performance for the system relates to the heat pump, radiators and the fabric of the building itself. Any one of these can influence how good the measured performance is. The performance over a given period (say a day) is calculated as the ratio of the heat energy that the system delivers (in kilowatt hours, kWh), and the electrical energy used by the system (in kWh). Because a heat pump harvests energy from the ambient environment (air, ground or water) warmed by the sun, the performamce will be greater than one (or 100%).
For space heating the performance gets less the greater the difference is between the outside temperature and the required internal temperature. We follow a common practice of calling the performance measure the ‘coefficient of performance’ (or COP) and over a whole year, calling it the ‘seasonal coefficient of performance’ (or SCOP).
But what about the daily performance? Well, for our system, even when it was -5°C (colder than the nominal coldest day -1.6°C) the daily COP was 2.1 (210%) and over the year, the daily COP got as high as 5.4 (540%).
The SCOP we achieved of 3.3 (330%) was extremely good, in our view.
Another way to measure performance is the kilowatt hours required to heat one square metre per annum (kWh/m².a). The average British home needs over 130 kWh/m².a, but a new house built to Passivhaus standards would need just 15 kWh/m².a. The Association of Environmentally Conscious Builders aim for 50 kWh/m².a when doing retrofit on existing buildings, with a “certifier approved exemption” 100 kWh/m².a for difficult older buildings. Their standards for doing retrofit can be found here: https://aecb.net/introduction-to-the-aecb-carbonlite-building-and-retrofit-standards/
Our building was using delivered energy of 123 kWh/m².a to heat the house when using the gas boiler. After modest retrofit ‘fabric’ measures and moving to the air-source heat pump, the demand has reduced to about 114 kWh/m².a (not far off the AECB higher “exemption” of 110 kWh/m².a, although I should stress we have not asked an AECB member to review our fabric measures). The reduction in heat loss due to the loft insulation is possibly offset by the 24/7 operations of the heat pump (with overnight setback). See the Appendix for more details.
Nevertheless, I am convinced that the gentler heating with the heat pump (rather than the wild swings we had with the gas boiler) gives rise to improved comfort and energy management overall.
[6] Heat pumps will be primary tool in decarbonising heating
The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) in their 6th Carbon Budget stated (based on very detailed modelling of scenarios, costs and risks):
‘By 2030 37% of public and commercial heat demand is met by low-carbon sources. Of this low-carbon heat demand 65% is met by heat pumps, 32% district heating and 3% biomass. By 2050 all heat demand is met by low-carbon sources of which 52% is heat pumps, 42% is district heat, 5% is hydrogen boilers and around 1% is new direct electric heating.’
And the district heating itself can be provided by commercial scale heat pumps. Some can have a heat power rating of 48,000 kW (compared to a typical 3 bedroom home needing 6kW) – see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65321487. Since district heating will often be needed in towns which often have a river flowing through them, or are by the sea, water-sourced heat pumps can be used.
So in practice, combining the domestic and commercial/ district heat pump provision, heat pumps would eventually provide the great majority of the heat ti dwellings of all kinds.
Deputy Director of Nesta, Katy King, provided some summary points from survey on Twitter:
Satisfaction with heat pumps is high and, overall, satisfaction levels between heat pump and gas boiler users are very similar.
But heat pumps users were MORE satisfied with their running costs than boiler users.
People who installed a heat pump into their own home were the most satisfied (81% as or more satisfied than previous heating system)
When you include homeowners who didn’t commission the heat pump themselves in the sample, 73% of heat pump owners are as satisfied or more satisfied with their heat pump compared to their previous heating system.
Satisfaction with heat pumps is just as high in older properties – People living in Victorian houses were just as satisfied with their heat pump as people in mid-century properties or modern homes
As the overwhelming majority of heat pump users are satisfied with space and hot water heating, safety, reliability and noise – it’s time to put to rest outdated concerns about the heat pumps.
There are two important findings expressed in two consecutive paragraphs from the Project Summary Report p.33 (my bold added):
“As seen in the above statistics, most of the ASHPs (installed through the project) which were capable of operating at high temperatures (>65°C flow) used the R290 refrigerant. These were observed to operate at a similar annual SPF to the low temperature ASHPs. This is likely due to a combination of the higher performing refrigerants and the weather compensation controls meaning that they operated at lower temperatures most of the time.”
“Despite the high level of variation overall, house type and age did not have a statistically significant impact upon the heat pump performance results. This indicates that where trained designers and installers determine a heat pump as suitable for a given home, the house type (as categorised in the EoH project) should not impact upon performance.”
[and in conclusion, p.37]
“The project outcomes suggest that it is possible to install heat pumps across the majority of UK housing archetypes and that these heat pumps can operate with good overall efficiencies.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank my old friend Chris Wilde, who is Managing Director of Yorkshire Energy Systems (YES), for educating me on heat pumps over the last few years, and showing me the art of the possible. Always witty and wise, I have learned so much from Chris.
Also, thanks to the team from Cotswold Energy Group (CEG), who were very professional at all stages in the project. I’d like in particular to thank Zoe Phillips for her advice and support.
Thanks to Marilyn, my wife, for reviewing the essay and providing improvements, but most of all, for being my companion on this journey.
A number of people have asked me to provide additional data on the performance of the system. I was keen to keep the essay accessible and non-technical but I appreciate that some readers may want more. So here it is – for those that want more!
Data prior to heat pump when house was heated by a gas boiler
Prior to the Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP), the house was heated with a gas boiler dating from 1998 (both space and water heating).
The house is a large semi-detached dwelling with a floor area of 251 m² over three floors.
Prior to 2020 we had done what we could to the house to help reduce heat loss, including:
fixing guttering
fixing lime mortar on external walls
adding brushes to sash windows to reduce draughts
in a back area fixing insulation of the pitched room of a small extension room
But as to the main building, it is Grade 2 Listed and so certain measures (such as wall insulation). As part of the move to a heat pump (and as a condition for getting the RHI grant), we did add beefed up insulation to the main building’s loft in 2021.
In 2020 the gas usage was 45,567 kWh and cost £1,409 (with an average unit cost of 3p per kWh; including standing charges).
I estimated that 94% of this was for space heating, which gives 42,833 kWh/yr for space heating. But allowing for the old gas boiler being only 72% efficient (see Appendix Note [ii]), the actual house heat demand for 2020 was less, at 30,840 kWh.
This yields a unit heating demand of (30,840 kWh/a)/ (251 m²) = 123 kWh/m².a – when comparing homes this is a very useful measure to use because one can compare two houses of different sizes if one uses this measure of energy per unit area.
Now, given one estimate for the average heat demand for UK is 133 kWh/ m².a, it seems that my old house was already doing quite well – being slightly better than the UK national average per unit area.
Data collection
Most heat pumps come with consoles and / or Apps to enable a householder to monitor energy usage and performance. The Mitsubishi Ecodan does have this capability.
So normally, finding out the Coefficient Of Performance for a heat pump over a day, week, month, or any other period, should be easy and out of the box. Our situation was unusual and more complex than most people would have to experience for reasons I will explain.
In our setup we had two 11.2 kW Ecodans, that work in parallel (what Mitsubishi confusingly term a ‘cascade’ system), so that the peak heat output is 22.4 kW, although the peak heat loss estimated was a bit less than this (at 18.6 kW when the external temperature was at the nominal coldest day of the year, at -1.6°C)
To cut a long story short, it turns out that Mitsubishi’s marketing blurb was wrong and the standard metering features didn’t work with a ‘cascade’ setup as they do for a single unit (which is the most common situation). However, Cotswold Energy Group were brilliant and remedied the situation by installing 3rd party meters to enable performance to be measured and recorded. It did mean we ended up with a slightly more complex and bespoke setup. The good news is that it all works fine and now I don’t have to worry about it – I just read the numbers off a table or graph.
The heat meters get rate-of-flow data from the pumps and temperature data from gauges that were fitted to the ‘flow’ and ‘return’ pipes. The temperature drop between the warm flow and cooler return, multiplied by the flow rate, gives an instantaneous measurement of the heat being delivered to the house (e.g. to the radiators, but when in hot water heating mode, to the hot water tank).
These are the two heat monitoring meters used:
In addition, there was a meter for each heat pump measuring how much electricity they were using:
These 4 meters were then wired up to a data aggregation unit (Teracomsystems TCW260) which does the mathematics to work out the COP for each heat pump (and for the system overall). This local wifi connected unit stores the data over time, and can be accessed by a browser to produce reports, which can be configured in different ways.
I am able to download the data into a spreadsheet to then do further analysis if the raw reports are not quite enough to answer all my questions.
I also manually read the data for a while and did the calculations manually, just to satisfy myself that the system was setup correctly to give me the answers I needed.
In addition to the heat pump data, I also bought some digital thermometers to place around the house to assure myself that each room was reaching its design target temperature.
When doing visits of people thinking of getting a heat pump, I will get them to place their hand on a radiator and ask them “is that on?”. Oh, it doesn’t feel very hot? They often reply. I then get a thermal gun (cheap to buy – its not a camera – and a useful tool) and check the temperature of the radiator. Say, it is a typical 40°C. I then check the temperature of the palm of their hand – I typically get 34°C (a bit less than a human’s core temperature). “You see, not much different, so not surprising that it doesn’t feel ‘hot’ to touch!”. I then direct their gaze to the digital thermometer on the wall – “what does that say?”. Oh, it’s 21°C! “Indeed, just as it was designed to achieve, 40°C in this radiator is enough to heat this room to 21°C – so don’t be misled by touching the radiator and assume that tells you anything useful, it doesn’t”
By the way, there is just one thermostat in the house (in the living room). The design of the system ensures that when the sitting room is meeting its target temperature (21°C), then the other rooms will meet their temperature. So no need for thermostats or fancy controls on each radiator or in each room. I don’t even touch the TRVs. The system was ‘balanced’ by the installers, and we then just leave it alone.
The heat pump will adjust the flow temperature to deliver the right amount of heat to this and other rooms. The colder it is outside, the higher the flow temperature required and delivered. This is called ‘weather compensation’. In our system, the flow temperature never needs to get higher than 50°C. Most of the time it is a lot less than this. This ensures that the efficiency of the system is maximised (which also means the running costs are correspondingly reduced).
Needless to say, the system has performed brilliantly, thanks to the quality work done by Cotswold Energy Group in the design, installation and commissioning of the system.
We basically now do very little. No twiddling of dials. We just let the system ‘do its thing’.
Performance data for heat pump
In the year from when data was available for the new Air Source Heat Pump – from 1st April 2022 and 31st March 2023 – the total heat demand in the house was 29,689 kWh/a (‘a’ here standing for ‘annum’).
Only slightly (about 4%) less than the inferred heat demand for the pre-heat pump period (despite additional loft insulation).
Due to reduced occupancy, we estimated a slightly lower level of hot water usage, and so space heating was estimated at 96.6% of the total demand, that is. 28,681 kWh/a (see Appendix Note [i]).
In terms of unit area heat demand, that now comes to 114 kWh/ m².a
The Association of Environmentally Conscious Builders (AECB) aim during retrofit to reduce heat demand to 50 kWh/ m².a, but will allow exceptions for difficult to treat older dwellings like mine, with relaxed target of 100 kWh/ m².a. So, our figure of 114 kWh/ m².a is not too far off that relaxed target.
SCOP (Seasonal Coefficient Of Performance)
The total electricity used by the ASHP during the year in question was 8,843 kWh.
The SCOP can be calculated as ‘total heat demand’ divided by the ‘total electricity used’, which in our case was
= (29,689 kWh / 8,843 kWh) = 3.36
This is an astonishly good result for our old house. I had been told by some people to expect much worse. But Zoe had estimated accurately what to expect, and so it was gratifying to see her estimates confirmed in practice.
There is a slight error in this calculation as it does not separate out the direct hot water components (for taps/ showers). But it is only a small error as the great majority of the energy used was for space heating.
Winter COP
Ah, yes, but was it OK in winter? People will be wondering.
I have daily data on heat demand and electricity usage. Obviously this was greatest during the winter months. But interestingly the average COP (Coefficient Of Performance) held up remarkable well; remembering it is not an absolute measure of heat demand but the ratio of heat demand and electricity used.
This is what my analysis found (and is illustrated in the scatter diagram):
Average COP over winter months 22/23 (Dec’22, Jan’23, Feb’23), was 3.4 [note that the average external temperature was 6.2°C]
Design MCS coldest day for location was -1.6°C and on actual data fit line this gives a day-COP of 2.3
Actual coldest day was -5°C and data point gives COP of 2.
It is interesting that in summer, the COP can actually be worse in summer than in winter because, while much less energy is being used, the proportion of that energy being used for hot water rather than space heat is higher and that tends to be less efficient, so the ratio can be worse.
Overall, the winter COP was on average close to the overall annual COP (or SCOP).
Running costs comparison
My current (5th Nov 2023) flexible Octopus tariff charges 26.85p/kWh for electricity and a 52.32p/day standing charge. The gas unit pricing is 6.82p/kWh and 27.47p/day.
If this was the charge for the full 12 months, the cost would be:
(8,843 kWh x 26.85 p/kWh) + (365 day x 52.32 p/day)
= £2,565
Whereas for the same period, if we’d stayed with the gas boiler, we’d need to deliver 29,689 kWh of heat, but to do this with a 72% efficient boiler that would required burning gas with a calorific value of (29,689/0.72), 41,234 kWh, and the per annum costs of this would have been:
(41,234 kWh x 6.82 p/kWh) + (365 day x 27.47 p/day)
= £2,912
So, despite the fact that the unit price of electricity is almost 4 times that of gas (26.85/6.82), the efficiency of the heat pump combined with the inefficiency of the retired boiler more than compensates for the difference.
Of course the unit prices of both electricity and gas have risen since 2020, and even the differential in price has not improved, but the heat pump ensures we are better off than we would have been if we’d stuck with the old gas boiler.
Appendix Notes
[i] How much energy does it take to heat the 300 litre hot water tank?
The temperature in a modern unvented hot water cylinder is stratified with cold water entering from the base of the tank under mains pressure and hot water being delivered also under mains pressure from the top of the tank. The thermostat is in the upper part of the tank.
However, for simplicity, let’s work out how much energy would be needed to heat 300 litres uniformally at 40°C, up to the target temperature of 50°C.
Being careful to do housekeeping on the dimensions.
It takes 4180 joule to heat 1 litre of water by 1°C
So to raising 300 litre by 10°C (from 40°C to 50°C)
requires 4180 (joule/litre.°C) x 300 (litre) x 10 (°C) = 1.254 x 10⁷ joule
1 joule = 2.778 x 10⁻⁷ kWh
So the energy required can be converted to kWh units as follows:
(1.254 x 10⁷ joule) x (2.778 x 10⁻⁷ kWh/joule)
= 1.254 x 2.778 kWh
= 3.48 kWh
or 3.5 kWh approx.
I used this figure as an estimate of hot water daily energy usage during the period post installation of the heat pump.
[ii] Retired gas boiler efficiency
The retired gas boiler was a Glowworm Hideaway 120B (a Balanced Flue Boiler).
I used the BRE/SAP products database https://www.ncm-pcdb.org.uk/sap/ to get the efficiency figure for this boiler, which stated a ‘SAP seasonal winter efficiency of 72.9%’ and for seasonal summer efficiency 62.8%. Given that winter was when the boiler worked hardest, I used the former figure, rounded down to 72%. Given it was 25 years old, this may have been slightly optimistic.
I was asked this question by a householder who is in the process of considering making the switch from a gas boiler to a heat pump, in part due to a desire to reduce their carbon footprint. After an exchange where I learned their current situation and thoughts, they asked:
“One thing that keeps going through my mind are the electricity costs for the heat pump. We are billed for 40,000 kWh of gas, which is a lot. How much would it cost us for the electricity to run a heat pump?
Also, can we install a solar PV system that would be able to generate at least some of the electricity we need?“
I replied as follows:
“It depends in part on the extent of the fabric measures you do implement, although I understand that you have decided not to execute the ‘deep retrofit’ that an architect recommended due to the huge cost, for your 17th Century home. Can I just make it clear that your architect is ill-informed in saying that deep retrofit is essential before you consider a heat pump.“
No change in heat demand
“Let’s assume your current gas boiler has been operating at 80% efficiency.
That means the actual current delivered heat energy is 0.8 x 40,000 kWh = 32,000 kWh, which is then the actual heat demand!(You say that the bulk of this is on space heating, so I am ignoring the complication of the split in energy use between water and space heating, for simplicity).
Let’s assume in first instance that you don’t reduce this amount in the short term (through insulation etc.), in order to make a like for like comparison.
Let’s also assume that you achieve a SCOP (Seasonal Coefficient of Performance) of 3 (by the way, my listed house has a predicted SCOP of 3.6, so better than 3. So, for the calculation below, this can be regarded as a conservative estimate, as long as your system is professionally designed and installed; and remembering that the system as a whole may require some radiators to be upgraded).
That would imply the amount of electrical energy required would be
= 32,000/ 3 = 10,700 kWh (rounded up)
I am going to use capped prices (as at Autumn 2022) to get a ‘worst case’ for you at least this winter.
At the current capped rate of 34p/kWh for electricity this would mean an annual cost of
10,700 kWh x 34 p/kWh = 363,800p = £3,638 using the heat pumpsystem
The cost of using the current boiler, with 10.3/p/kWh for gas, would be:
= 40,000kWh x 10.3p/kWh = 412,000p = £4,120 using the gas boiler.
This calculation (with its assumptions) implies that the running costs would be less for the heat pump than with the gas boiler.
This might at first surprise you given the higher unit cost of electricity, but it rather demonstrates the impact that much higher efficiency has on running costs.
Obviously, this will change if/ when the unit prices change, but not necessarily in a bad way. If, as has been muted, electricity costs from renewables are decoupled from the costs of gas station generated electricity (which is dependent on world market costs, which then tends to drive up the costs of all domestically generated electricity irrespective of source. Then in future, we could see a drop in electricity, and this would be a progessive reduction as the grid gets greener and greener over time). “
After fabric measures
“It would also be different if – as would be prudent – any measures are undertaken like loft insulation to reduce heat demand.You said you planned some measures. As my essayexplained, there is a trade-off between insulation (and other fabric measures) and a heat pump, which depend in part on your overall retrofit budget. All I suggest is that you leave some money in the pot to get a heat pump, but that’s not to say that fabric measures are not important, far from it.
Suppose that following loft insulation and other fabric measures you decide to implement, the actual heat demand of 32,000kWh was reduced by 20%, to 25,600kWh.
With the same SCOP, that would imply the amount of electrical energy required would be
= 25,600/ 3 = 8,500 kWh
At the current capped rate of 34p/kWh for electricity this would mean an annual cost of
8,500 kWh x 34 p/kWh = 289,000p = £2,890 using the heat pump.”
With domestic solarPV
“Solar energy peaks in summer whereas heating requirements peak in winter (but both are middling during Spring and Autumn, the ‘shoulder’ months). Nevertheless, one could reasonably expect – thanks to the ‘shoulder’ months – that the home grown electricity would reduce the heat pump running costs by roughly 25% (only a professional house survey, taking into account the orientation of panels, tree shading, etc., would answer this question precisely).”
Summary
“With your current gas boiler your annual heating costs are: £4,120
With a professionally designed and installed heat pump system and no insulation measures your annual running costs should be no more than: £3,638
With a 20% reduction in heat demand following cost effective insulation/ draught proofing, the heat pump annual system running costs would be: £2,890
With solar PV, let’s assume a further reduction in costs of 25% giving the heat pump system annual running cost of: £2,168
EssaysConcerning 