Restless disposition in energy policy

In preparing for a conference on energy policy I came across this quote from Walter Bagehot. "If you keep altering your house, it is sign either that you have a bad house, or that you have an excessively restless disposition- there is something wrong somewhere" As a constitutional expert he was talking about the problems of Government in the 1800s but his comment is so true today. It was the phrase 'restless disposition' that caught my eye, as it is theme that Professor Anthony King uses in his book 'Who governs Britain' to describe one of the problems with 21sr century politics. All new minsters want to make an impact; want to be seen to be doing things; want to make announcements that attract headlines. They are always in a hurry. 

Energy policy has been a notable victim of this syndrome. This century we have already had 9 Ministers with cabinet responsibility for energy (counting both DECC and the various forerunners to The Department for Business). It's even worse at Minster of State level where we are on number 14. All this change means that the new minister who arrives with a restless disposition is also in a tearing hurry as they only have one to two years to make their impact; less time than it takes to build any assets in the energy industry. This timescale precludes thoughtful consideration, proper consultation and assessment of the impact of any change on the whole energy system before action and completely rules out any learning from the results of previous activity. The civil service used to act as the brakeman to the ministerial Bobsleigh but senior officials change almost as often as Ministers and rarely build up expertise in one policy area seeming to need to switch departments to get promotion. It is no wonder that we have such a patchwork of interventions and plethora of changes and amendments and no wonder that we do not have a joined up, robust energy policy. We are getting what the politicos system is designed to produce- 'something wrong' to quote Bagehot. 

If we are to have a thought through, robust and enduring energy policy we need a fundamental change to the governance and political arrangements that determine this policy. The stability, longevity and independence of the Governor of the Bank of England is the sort of role we need.  And no; I am definitely not interested in doing that job!

The importance of good design

I've been on the Board of the Maggies Centres cancer charity for quite a time now and over the years have come to appreciate that good design can make a real difference. For someone whose idea as a child of a Lego building was one of lots of straight lines using bricks of the same colour, this is a real progress. 

 Maggies uses well known architects such as Richard Rogers and Frank Gehry to design purpose built drop in centres based at cancer centres throughout the UK. These buildings are all deliberately created as a contrast to the medical institution they sit next too. They are all different and demonstrate creativity that is beyond an accountant like me. However, they all share some common characteristics; they are all set around the kitchen table, they are all loved by their local communities and they all facilitate the social, emotional and practical help that Maggies offers. It was well summed up when I visited the centre in Oxford. A group of ladies who had meet during their treatment for Breast cancer said that the new Maggies Centre 'made them feel well'.

The importance of design and architecture was brought home to me when I read about the history of the UK Houses of Parliament. Apparently, it's architecture and design is a matter of history as in 1547 King Edward VI gave parliament a disused chapel for use as their debating chamber. Although it has been rebuilt since then, the original design features were maintained. It means that we now have a chamber that is far too small for the number of MPs and one that deliberately encourages confrontation by sitting MPs from different parties directly facing each other across the aisle. It does not faciliate dialogue and debate but encourages aggression and confrontation. No wonder it is likened to a bear pit at times.  It also looks and feels old fashioned with the Speaker propped up on a platform that looks suspiciously likes an altar and where voting involves walking through a series of doors to reach the right room. No wonder people feel that politicans are out of touch. 

Maggies was founded by Charles Jencks and in his book Architecture of Hope he says "Architects have designed us good buildings that last, which sustain our staff and ethos. They have raised the fighting spirit of many patients, lifting their hearts at a time of desperation." In our efforts to bring a Maggies centre to other parts of the U.K we are continuing in this spirit with Norman Foster designing the centre in Manchester and Thomas Heatherwick working on the one in Leeds. As the UK parliament faces the challenge of repairing and refurbishing the Palace of Westminster I hope they take the opportunity of using great design and great architecture to produce a building fit for a 21st democracy. I am not hopeful. 

Why can't we get engaged?

I have spent over 25 years in the energy industry and the attitude of society to that industry has change over this time. Over the first period the industry was largely taken for granted. In fact, when I told friends I was joining the energy industry the general response was bewilderment because they thought it was boring. However, my experience has been the exact opposite. I have had a fulfilling and interesting career but that isn't my point. It's about how attitudes have changed.

Over the last ten years or so, I have found that people are generally much more interested in energy. They want to know about what is happening to prices, who owns the industry and what choices the industry is facing. There is a lot of debate nowadays. It could be whether we should build a new nuclear power station. It could be whether the UK should start fracking. Or it could be whether wind farms are a blot on the landscape or a modern and clean form of electricity production. 

However, there is a problem. The industry has struggled to engage in these debates in a meaningful and positive way and I have been wondering why that should be. I have not got a clear answer just a few theories. Is it because our industry is an essential commodity so we haven't had to really invest in branding and sales like the makers of shampoo, baked beans or summer holidays? Maybe it's because our industry is generally populated by engineers and accountants (guilty as charged)? Or maybe it's because we all have different views ourselves on what we think the right answers are to the choices we face, so society hears a cacophony of voices coming from our industry. Finally, I wonder whether the complicated and long term nature of many of our decisions don't play well in our 24 hour instant media world. What do you think?

Unburnable Carbon and the energy industry

For too long the issue of carbon has been the elephant in the oil and gas room but it has to be one of the mega trends facing the industry. Mega trends are ones that play out over two or three generations and not two or three years and the risk of stranded assets or unburnable carbon definitely fits that bill. 

 The science that underpins climate change is now well established and the fact that man made emissions of carbon, mainly from fossil fuel burning, are one of the principal causes is becoming increasingly accepted. On this basis there is a finite amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere without triggering harmful and disruptive climate change. There is of course a lot of carbon embedded in fossil fuel. This means there is growing conflict between maximising the production of energy and minimising climate change.  For example, the UKs Energy Reserach Centre says that "a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80% of current coal reserves globally should remain in the ground and not be used before 2050 if global warming is to stay below the 2 degreeC target agreed by policy makers". Or to turn it round we can only use two thirds of the oil, half the gas and 20% of the coal we have already found. 

If you are not convinced of the importance of this issue let me list for you the leading signals that have been apparent in just the last few months, the canaries in the Coalmine if you like.

1. The G7 group of leaders talked publicly about the end of fossil fuels by the end of this century with an almost carbon free electricity system by 2050. 

2. The Saudi oil minister said "one of these days, we are not going to need fossil fuels, I don't know when" but he then added the dates of 2040, 2050 which really surprised people. 

3. The IEA, the West's energy club, said "it is clear that the energy sector must play a critical role if efforts to reduce emissions are to succeed" 

4. A group of European oil companies have called for a carbon tax.

5. The IMF has proposed the ending of fossil fuel subsidies as a way of reducing demand and risk to the global economy.

6. Medical opinion has come out in favour of reducing fossil fuel use as an improvement in public health as illustrated by an article in the Launcet. 

7. Shareholder resolutions have been passed at both BP and Shell calling for more action and disclosure. 

8. The fossil fuel divestment campaign is gathering momentum.  The pressure is being applied initially to resource owning companies and even when there isn't divestment the question of unusable reserves is already a feature of many investment meetings.

If that isn't enough to get you thinking even the Pope and the Anglican Church weighed into the debate in June. The energy world has, is or will change. 

Every energy business needs to address the impact of this. All the recent signals suggest we will not be burning all the reserves of oil, gas and coal we have already found. It may be felt first in the exploration business; why look for more oil when we cannot use all we have found? The second impact could be on high cost production areas as economics rear their head. Thirdly, our use of fossil fuels will become, in effect, rationed by a combination of value to society and the ease of substitution with low or zero carbon alternatives. Finally, it could give opportunities in areas such as carbon capture, improved efficiency in energy usage and the development of alternative sources of energy and feedstock. 

We are being given clear notice that today's energy business will die. The issue isn't whether it will take 40 years or 80 years but what are you going to do in the next 40 months or 80 months.

Marchant's three laws of energy

We have probably all heard of the three laws of thermodynamics, Newton's three laws of motion and Azimov's three laws of robotics. Using the power of three as an inspiration  I have come up with my own three energy laws.

LAW 1 

The carbon intensity of electricity generation (as in grammes of CO2 per kWh) should halve every ten years. I have written more of this on earlier blogs. It would mean that electricity would be largely decarbonised by 2050. 

LAW 2

The energy intensity per unit of wellbeing should halve every ten years. I admit that this is a little vague but it is intended to focus on all energy and is about more than just GDP. As we improve living standards we need to reduce the energy taken to achieve these higher levels, hence the rule.

LAW 3

The longevity of energy policy should double every two years. Energy policy has been too fragmented, disjointed and short term for too long. The average duration of an initiative seems to be around a year but we need more stability and more certainty and predictability to stimulate the investment and innovation we need. 

Generation in 3D

One thing that I now have more time to do is to step back and think about some of longer term trends that might affect the energy industry. This time I have been pondering the future of electricity generation  and I have come up with 3Ds which I think will drive investment over the long term.

DECARBONISATION 

The science that underpins climate change is now well established and the fact that man made emissions of carbon, mainly from fossil fuel burning, are one of the principal causes is becoming increasingly accepted. This means there is growing conflict between maximising the production of energy and minimising climate change.  For example, the UKs Energy Reserach Centre says that "a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80% of current coal reserves globally should remain in the ground and not be used before 2050 if global warming is to stay below the 2 degreeC target agreed by policy makers". This potential conflict is starting to have an impact through the policies of major investment firms. This pressure is being applied initially to resource owning companies. As well as resource owners this will also start to apply to resource users and electricity producers will be in the front line. 

We will, therefore, need to largely decarbonise electricity supply over the coming decades and this has been the focus of a number of disjointed policy instruments. However, electricity has some unique features as a kWh is the same the world. A gramme of carbon emissions is the same the world over. Taking these two factors means that the carbon intensity of generation (ie grammes of CO2 per kWh) is comparable over both time and space. That gives us a foundation for policy. Every country and every large geneator should halve their carbon intensity every ten years. In the UK it's typically around 500g now so by 2025 it would be 250g, by 2035 it would be 125g and so on. This is technology neutral and would allow nuclear, renewables and carbon capture to compete. It can be used as the basis of a global deal in the electricity sector. I have called this idea, modestly, MARCHANTS LAW.

 The key point is that we are moving from high carbon to low or no carbon generation. 

DECENTRALISED OR DISTRIBUTED 

That past investment also tended to be on an industrial scale, with large utilities exploiting economies of scale by building ever larger power plants. We created the era of 'big iron' with coal sets reaching 500MW by the 1960s and now, in China, units of 900MW are common. Nuclear power stations have also got bigger and bigger (and more and more expensive but that's another story) with the latest targeting 1600MW. These big stations also created the need for a big transmission grid. As a consequence most people became disconnected, physiologically, from their source of power when they became physically connected to the grid. I think this is one of the reasons why we waste so much energy; we are remote from its production.

In the future, and increasingly in the present, we are reconnecting with sources of power generation. We are seeing the emergence of farm scale anaerobic digestors, community owned and scaled wind farms and there are nearly a million solar roofs in the UK already. When we own the means of production we start to care about our usage. When the power is produced close to demand it improves security of supply. These new technologies are generally zero carbon and are displacing high carbon, grid based fossil generation. Distributed energy is making a contribution to all three aspects of the energy trilemna. 

It is not just in the developed world that decentralised and distributed energy is making a difference. In Africa the availability of solar lamps is transforming the lives of the 500 million people without access to grid power. It is improving health, increasing education levels, eliminating carbon emissions and reducing poverty. It is rapidly becoming a disruptive force for good.

We are moving from 'big iron' to 'small silicon'. 

DIGITAL 

As well as being big and dirty generation used to be dumb. There may have been smart controls in the station itself and in the centralised grid despatch centre but the relationship between the two was and generally still is, definitely analogue. I suspect despatch orders are now sent by email but only a few years ago it was still all done by fax! Whilst some generation was load following this usually applied to a few large coal plants and other plant were either on or off. Processes and systems were designed in the 1960s and applied largely unchanged. It also meant that in times of stress generation plant just tripped off the system to protect itself. Indeed, the cause of many large scale grid outages around the world has been put down to exactly this response. 

The expontential advances in technology over the last fifty years or so are only starting to be felt in the generation industry. In the next few years we will see augmented technology being increasingly used in system control and plant despatch, possibly even extending to full scale artificial intelligent systems. This means that as we move from hundreds of large generation sets to thousands and thousands the system will cope faster and better than it does now and will be self healing. The tremendous reduction in the cost of sensors and data storage combined with the advances in data analytics will change the processes used to operate and maintain the stations themselves. For example, with the Internet of things leading to billions of connected devices there will be an order of magnitude increase in pieces of kit in a power station being monitored real time leading to the elimation of unexpected plant failures and simple time based maintenance. Nanotechology, addative printing and robotics will change how plant is built and maintained, what ever size it is. Finally in the next ten years one of the important and productive areas of research and innovation will be energy storage; be it batteries, phase change materials, electromechanical devices or some form of storage I haven't even heard of.

We are at the start of a revolutionary move from an analogue to a digital generation sector.

DISRUPTIVE 

 

The three themes of decarbonisation, decentralisation and digitisation will work together to completely transform the generation sector from the predictable, ponderous and polluting one we have now, to decarbonised, decentralised and digital one. This change will be as  radical as the shift from fixed line telephones to smart phones. A digital control system with enhanced storage will allow the integration of thousands of small, clean power stations to work together for the common good. The transition will be disruptive and leave some behind and create winners out of others. The only thing that is inevitable is change itself. 

 

Benchmark against the future

I believe that all businesses should apply a sustainability lens to their whole operation but this belief is firmly routed in a long background in business. Sustainability and long term valuation can and should go hand in hand. In fact I would argue that it is essential. However, I do not mean the version of sustainability that has been effectively hijacked by the green movement but I have in mind a much wider and deeper version. I start with my own definition which has at its core the more standard definition of sustainability. My definition is as follows;

 Growth that meet the needs of the present stakeholders whilst enhancing the ability of the                          organisation to meet the future needs of all stakeholders. 

This isn't just about shareholders. I think there are five stakeholder groups; staff, customers, communities where you operate, the environment (or natural capital providers if you want) and providers of financial capital. Sustainability means keeping the needs of all these in balance, itself a tricky task, as well as thinking about future needs. That got me thinking. Businesses of all sizes use benchmarking as a performance management tool. We benchmark ourselves against the past. Did our KPIs improve on last year? What is our five year track record? We benchmark ourselves against the present. How am I doing against my peer group? Where do I stand against best practise? However, we also need to benchmark ourselves against the future. This generates lots of questions that can be useful in developing a sustainabile business plan. Here are a few that spring to mind.

1. Is my resource usage robust against a scenario of increasing global scarcity?

2. Will my business model survive in a world of exponential technological growth?

3. Am I prepared for fundamental shifts in global demand, influence and power?

4. Where is our future generation of leaders going to come from?

5. Are we innovative and flexible enough to survive the pace of change which is only accelerating?

Understanding the right questions is the first step to a path of sustainable devolpment and growth. Businesses need to think through whether today's threats and opportunities are just that, today's problems, or are they are actually harbingers of mega trends that could have profound implications in the long term? Where are the weak signals of long term trends that we may be missing? What could happen, good or bad, and how would we respond to it?

By benchmarking against the future and embracing sustainablilty, businesses can prosper today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.