Sussex Energy Group new projects: IDRIC, CREDS & more

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The UK Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre (IDRIC)

The decarbonisation of industrial clusters is of critical importance to the UK’s ambitions of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. The UK Industrial Decarbonisation Challenge (IDC) of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) aims to establish the world’s first net-zero carbon industrial cluster by 2040 and four low-carbon clusters by 2030.

The vision of IDRIC is to become a world-leading, high-impact research and innovation centre, acting as the national focal point and international gateway for UK industrial decarbonisation research and innovation.

SEG Director Benjamin K Sovacool is co-director of the Social, Economics, and Policy Research Innovation Theme. This theme examines social attitudes, preferences, and the sociotechnical dynamics of industrial decarbonisation. Read the University of Sussex IDRIC launch press release.

IDRIC’s strategic objectives are to: accelerate challenge-led research through transformative innovation; develop leadership by nurturing talent, building capacity and mapping skills; co-create and share knowledge by stimulating cross-learning, active networks and outreach; support policy and mission advocacy by providing evidence to policy makers and the public.

IDRIC is backed by £20m funding until 2024. The initiative is part of the £170m Industrial Decarbonisation challenge, delivered through the UKRI Industrial Decarbonisation Challenge.

CREDS: Digital Twin project

This Centre for Research Into Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS) project, starting in September 2021, aims to examine the development of the digital twin (DT) concept within the built environment sector. It will investigate the drivers and barriers for DTs to transform understanding and practices to reduce energy demand.

The DT concept is increasingly prominent in the built environment and infrastructure sectors in the UK. A DT is a virtual replica of a physical asset or system that uses system data to provide a representation of it in operation; the technique has been used on equipment like jet engines and power generation turbines. Its application for systems within the built environment presents potentially powerful tools for both system and policy innovations to shape and reduce energy demand.

The project aims to answer the following questions:

  • How can the development and use of DTs in the built environment connect with understandings of energy demand to facilitate transformation for net zero?
  • Where and how is the DT concept being developed within the built environment sector?
  • What are the drivers and barriers to incorporating energy demand understanding within DT tools and their use?
  • What opportunities exist (or should be generated) to connect DT tools to energy demand understanding and transformation for net zero?

CREDS: Place-based business models for net-zero

This project will investigate how place-based business models for net-zero are being developed through digital living/working since the global Covid-19 pandemic, and how these place-based business models reduce energy demand.

To do this, the project will examine three prominent and emerging areas for net-zero action in Sussex and beyond involving: i) new opportunities for financing net-zero projects; ii) nature-based solutions for net-zero; iii) capacity building for decarbonisation skills.

The project will seek to study the ways in which these three areas have emerged through digital living, working and connections.

For example, the pandemic response encouraged people to minimise travelling and work from home, producing increased engagement and interest in nature-based solutions. However, the question remains how these fit with other, more technically oriented, net-zero-driven business model in Sussex.

The project also seeks to directly investigate how these three factors shape place-based opportunities for energy demand reduction, a gap which could lead to powerful asymmetries in the inclusion of energy demand action in developing place-based net-zero responses.

Research questions the project aims to answer include:

  • How do digital living, connections and working shape the emergence of place-based business models for net-zero?
  • How do emergent place-based business models shape opportunities for energy demand reduction?
  • What are the financing options and opportunities for projects/action on net-zero?
  • How is capacity building for decarbonisation skills for net-zero developed?
  • What are the nature-based solutions for net-zero?

Democratising the Just Transition: the role of Community Wealth Building

Dr Max Lacey-Barnacle has recently been awarded the Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Research Fellowship, which he will begin in October this year, with supervisory support from Professor Tim Foxon.

Democratising the Just Transition: the role of Community Wealth Building will seek to draw upon principles of Community Wealth Building to understand how to democratise the forthcoming transition to a net-zero economy in a way that diversifies ownership and reorients a green recovery towards local economies and supply chains.

Using a mixed methods approach, the fellowship will draw on three contexts (Europe, the US and the UK) and in-depth interviews to synthesise cross-national insights on democratic pathways to a Just Transition. The fellowship’s outcomes will include publication in high-impact journals, collaboration with policy practitioners and an international research visit for cross-institutional knowledge exchange.

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Long Run Trends in ICT Demand and its Impact on Energy Consumption

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Phone screen being held in one hand

This article was written by Dr Roger Fouquet, Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, on his CREDS Digital Society project.

Understanding ICT Long Run Trends

Social distancing rules associated with Covid-19 have led many in the UK and across the world to work and meet remotely, as well as shop online. In other words, there was an acceleration of the digitalisation of society that has already been underway for several decades. The purpose of the CREDS Digital Society project led by Dr Roger Fouquet at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment is to place the digitalisation of society within a longer run perspective of information and communication technology (ICT) demand and its impact on energy consumption, with a view to anticipating future trends.

The project collected data on the price and consumption of communication for the UK. Figure 1 shows the dramatic increase in communication in the UK over the last 150 years, as new technologies appeared on the market and diffused across the population. One of the key factors driving this rise in consumption was the reductions in the cost of sending a letter or making a telephone call (see Figure 2). Indeed, today, email and app mobile phone calls are effectively free for many people.  

The Benefits to Users from New Communication Technologies

Despite the upward long-run trend in communication since the mid-nineteenth century, Figure 1 shows the acceleration in communication use from the beginning of the twenty-first century. The first task of the project was to use the data to estimate how communication consumption changed with variations in income and communication prices. One of the main results is that as people became richer and communicated more, they were less responsive to changes in income and prices – a similar observation was found in relation to energy services, such as heating, transport and lighting (Fouquet 2018).

This information on consumer responsiveness then enabled the estimation of the net benefits (i.e., consumer surplus) of different communication technologies, using a method developed in Fouquet (2018). This method uses historical information about how much people in the past were willing to pay for communication (e.g., to send one letter or make one phone call) and, taking account of changes in income, extrapolates this forward towards the present to construct a full demand curve for communication. The net benefits (i.e., consumer surplus) are calculated as the difference between the benefits (measured by the willingness-to-pay) and the costs (measured by the price).

Figure 3 reveals the increases in net benefits to consumers from new and diffusing communication technologies. This started with the reduction in the price of postal services due to the railways in the 1840s (seen in Figure 2). Then, with the democratisation of telephones in second-half of the twentieth century and the liberalisation of telecommunication services leading to lower prices in the 1980s, benefits increased again. Figure 3 also highlights that some of the benefits are simple substitutions of fixed telephones for mobile phones and letters for emails. Nevertheless, the digitalisation of communication has helped increase consumer surplus even more, especially because they are so cheap to use.

Taking Account of the Environment

An important angle for future research is to understand how this digitalisation of communication and information and its acceleration due to Covid-19 will impact society and the environment. Indeed, on the one hand, teleworking, virtual meetings and online shopping have reduced energy use and emissions (Hook et al. 2020). On the other hand, digitalisation, especially associated with data centres, is responsible for increasing energy use (Koomey et al. 2013). Thus, a crucial question to be explored further will be to compare the benefits to the consumer with the costs to the environment, and understand when consumers benefit more than the cost to the environment, and when policies should discourage ICT use because the costs dominate.


Figure 1. The Consumption of Communication in the UK, 1800-2015
Figure 2. The Price of Communication in the UK, 1700-2015
Figure 3. Consumer Surplus from Communication Technologies and Services in the UK, 1830-2010

References

Fouquet, R. (2018) ‘Consumer surplus from energy transitions.’ The Energy Journal 39(3) 167-88.

Fouquet, R. and Hippe, R. (2019) ‘The Transition from a Fossil-Fuel Economy to a Knowledge Economy’ in Fouquet, R. (ed.) Handbook on Green Growth. Edward Elgar Publications. Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, MA, USA.

Fouquet, R. and Hippe, R. (2021) The Twin Transition: Energy and Communication in the Structural Transformation of European Economies.

Hook, A., Court, V., Sovacool, B.K. and Sorrell, S. (2020) ‘systematic review of the energy and climate impacts of teleworking.’ IFP School-IFPEN Working Paper. No 133.

Koomey, J.G., Matthews, H.S. and Williams, E. (2013) ‘Smart Everything: Will Intelligent Systems Reduce Resource Use?’ Annual Review of Environment and Resources 38: 311–43.

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Letter: New nuclear plants would be hopelessly problematic

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Nuclear cooling towers at sunset

This letter was originally published in The Financial Times on 21/06/2021.

By failing to consider alternatives in a balanced way, Admiral Lord West of Spithead (“Investment in UK nuclear power is long overdue”, Letters, June 18), treats UK energy policy as an arena for asserting individual partisan affections for nuclear power. Yet the challenge is not about parading obscurely driven personal enthusiasms, but rigorously comparing how to achieve environmental targets as rapidly, securely and cost-effectively as possible.

Here, even government assessments have quietly long been clear that new nuclear power is hopelessly costly, slow and otherwise problematic. The comparative performance gap with renewables is growing rapidly. The National Grid has for many years abandoned notions of “base load” as “outdated”.

So why should nuclear still command such intense attachments, as if it were an end in itself? That it is a Navy man who urges this, might be a clue? Parliamentary evidence documents how a major hidden driver of official UK nuclear commitments are pressures to launder consumer electricity bills into supporting a wider national nuclear skills, education and research industrial base, without which nuclear-propelled submarines become unaffordable, if not unbuildable.

Governments of other countries like France and the US are open about these motives. It is time for some candour about the real interests driving expensive nuclear support in the UK.

If not, it will not just be carbon targets and energy futures that are undermined, but British democracy.

Professor Andy Stirling
Sussex University

Dr Paul Dorfman
Energy Institute, University College London

Dr Phil Johnstone
Sussex University

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Heat pump users in Finland and the UK: How low-emission technologies can grow from enthusiast projects to a mainstream industry

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Technician installing heating system

The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently reported that gas boiler sales should stop by 2025 to meet emission reduction goals. Heat pumps, which operate by extracting warmth from the ground, air or water, are often regarded as one of the viable alternatives to heat homes without relying on fossil fuels.

Some countries have already made substantial progress in phasing out fossil fuel based heating technologies such as gas or oil boilers. Finland is one example which has seen a widespread transition to heat pumps: in a country of just over three million households, an estimated 1,030,000 heat pumps have been sold to date. Meanwhile less than 200,000 heat pumps have been sold for the UK’s 27.6 million households since 2000.

A recent study from SEG researchers explains why home heating developments have taken very different paths over the last 45 years in these two countries, comparing in particular the role of different user types (explained in the following section) in the different phases of these developments. What led to heat pumps in Finland becoming “the normal and rational choice for a heating system” (Hyysalo et al., 2018, p.880) when they remain a rare sighting in the UK?

The Finnish heat pump transition

Off-the-shelf heat pump options available in Finland. Photo of a heat pump installer’s office in Finland (by Mari Martiskainen)

The successful heat pump transition in Finland can be outlined under the following three phases:

The start-up phase (1975-1985) featured pilots with ground source heat pumps (GSHPs), largely in response to the global oil crises of the mid 1970s. There were a handful of small manufacturers developing GSHPs and user producers progressive enough to experiment with geothermal heat. However, uncertainty over the technology’s reliability, negative media narratives, and bankruptcies among GHSP suppliers due to falling oil prices in the 80s meant that just 10,000 heat pumps were installed over this decade.

The acceleration phase (1995-2015) saw user-producers continue to advocate heat pump technology at trade fairs. Improvements in technology, the introduction of air source heat pumps (ASHPs) and positive examples from neighbouring Sweden supported expansion. Crucially, in 1999 the Finnish Heat Pump Association (SULPU) was formed with a vision that by 2020, a million heat pumps would be installed in Finland. SULPU, which took a key user-legitimator role, worked together with Motiva, the Finnish energy efficiency agency, to raise awareness, develop standards and train installers. The market was also encouraged via Government policies phasing out fossil fuel based heating and incentivising low-carbon heating options. The emergence of user-intermediaries on independent websites and forums, who shared their user experiences, also helped. These factors led to total sales exceeding 600,000 by 2014.

And finally, during the stabilisation phase (2015-present) the established industry offered off-the-shelf products, giving all users affordable, low-maintenance heating options that meet the demands of the Finnish climate. Total heat pump sales reached 1 million in 2020 and heat pumps have become an established heating choice for many households.

The type of users and the activities they may perform in an energy transition. The researchers found not all types may be needed in a successful transition. Source: Martiskainen et al. 2021, p.127

The British heat pump non-transition

In the UK, heat pumps are used in barely 1% of households, meaning the technology has been stuck in the start-up phase since the 1970s. The UK and Finland’s enthusiastic user-producers shared the same early challenges: lack of awareness, technological difficulties, and opposition from the incumbent fossil fuel industry.

UK policy efforts to address low-carbon heating options in the 2000s included VAT reductions and grant programmes to support uptake. But heat pump field trials underperformed similar ones in Europe: users frequently reported difficulties operating their new heat pumps, indicating lack of knowledge and support by installers and peers, in contrast to the widespread expertise and informal guidance available to owners of the ever-present gas boilers.

Building a heat pump constituency

One key difference between the UK and Finland has been that British heat pump enthusiasts lacked the policy support and networking opportunities to enable an acceleration phase of the transition. In contrast, Finland’s successful uptake for heat pumps benefited from the presence of SULPU and their active awareness raising, networking and lobbying. Finnish actors could also access Swedish expertise, their neighbouring country having faced also heating challenges and sharing similar climatic and cultural preferences.

While the UK now has established heat pump organisations, their voices have not been as unified or loudly heard as SULPU was in Finland. As a result, the UK’s fragmented organisations have not had enough political impact (yet) to expand the heat pump niche into a flourishing industry. Lacking a prominent vision for the sector, the UK has taken longer to overcome the broad lack of awareness among consumers, architects, installers and housing developers.

In contrast, with the help of Motiva, the early user-producers who formed SULPU cultivated a broad constituency behind Finland’s developing heat pump tradition, contributing to a successful transition. Even outside of SULPU, user producers in Finland shared a strong history of cooperation. Users for example attended housing fairs and organised “heat pump days” showcasing different options, and run dedicated online user forums, blogs and websites providing practical advice and a visible demonstration of the technology’s value for Finnish homes. These efforts were reflected in the broader distribution of motives given by Finnish heat pump users, compared to more concentrated UK motives operating within a niche and responding to more specific demands. The interview subjects also illustrated how financial and comfort motivations in Finland compare to environmental motivations in the UK.

“Gas mafia”, regime resistance, and how users can help overcome them

Gas boilers in the UK are popular and supported by advantaged incumbent gas networks. Source: Martiskainen et al. 2021, p.136.

As well as lacking these key factors which encouraged heat pumps uptake in Finland, some UK-specific challenges impede the widespread adoption of heat pumps. The incumbent gas networks are powerful in terms of their lobbying reach, along with competitive supply prices which appeals to consumers. Attempts to encourage renewable alternatives such as the Renewable Heat Incentive left heat pumps competing with solar and biomass options, resulting in comparatively little money allocated for heat pump installation.

The example of Finland’s active users offers potential paths forward for the UK’s stalled heat pump transition. Strong actors, like SULPU in Finland who had a clear vision for the sector and its policy needs, have the potential to challenge the gas network’s influence. Meanwhile, active peer-to-peer learning and networking can further raise awareness and build trust of the technology amongst user-consumers. Over time, this can legitimise unfamiliar technologies like heat pumps, and encourage the replacement of gas boilers with low-carbon heating systems. This requires that positive stories and examples of renewable heating options like heat pumps move from niche trade press to the mainstream media. In addition, policy should aim to support the development of strong communities of user-producers, avoiding the comparatively passive user roles found in the start-up stage of the British heat pump transition. Subsidies and education should be paired with the sustained, deep involvement of user-groups throughout the transition process to benefit from their capacity to accelerate transitions and overcome market uncertainty.

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Can nuclear power play a large part in getting to net zero?

Posted on by Gordon MacKerron — 3 Comments ↓
Nuclear cooling tower in countryside

In late 2020, there was a flurry of announcements about climate change and energy – first a ten-point plan for a ‘Green Industrial Revolution’[i] followed a few weeks later by a much–delayed energy White Paper[ii]. Nuclear power figures prominently in both narratives, with three possible ways forward. In this blog, Professor MacKerron, CESI Associate Director and Professor of Science and Technology Policy at the Science Policy and Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex discusses these routes.

Three possible ways forward

First, there is a long-term hope that a UK-only commercial fusion design will be ready by 2040. This is frankly wishful thinking and, even if it could be achieved, involves a new type of compact design that would have no impact on 2050 zero-carbon objectives. This is because it would be a small prototype 100MW machine with a current price tag of £2bn[iii] – three times more expensive per unit of output than the already very expensive twin reactors being built at Hinkley C. 400m has been ‘already committed’ to this endeavour by Government,[iv] a sum that could have been spent instead on projects that could genuinely contribute to net zero. 

The second possibility is a push (‘aim’) to have one more large nuclear plant brought to final investment decision by 2024, following the almost-decade-late Hinkley C. As Government makes clear, achieving this will depend on a radically new funding structure.[v] This could be a regulated asset base model, in which consumers would take on most construction risk, allowing investors a more or less guaranteed rate of return, and/or  Government putting up some taxpayer cash. Since the White Paper, it has become clear that developments at two of the only three plausible big-reactor sites – Wylfa (abandoned by Hitachi) and Bradwell (paused for a year by EDF/China General Nuclear) – are now effectively no longer in contention. Only a further Hinkley replica at Sizewell seems at all possible, and large institutional investors have recently made clear they will not put up any of their own money for this. Significantly, and credibly, Government makes no mention of any further ventures along the large-nuclear path.

What’s wrong with option 1 or 2?

The problems in these two nuclear avenues inevitably throw a lot of weight on to the third strand, the development of so-called modular reactors, both ‘small’ (SMRs) and ‘advanced’ (AMRs). The relatively near-term part of this involves Government spending up to £215m to help develop a domestic SMR design by the early 2030s.[vi] The attraction of SMRs is that they could offer the possibility of relatively rapid factory manufacture of components, followed by fairly simple on-site construction. Their main drawback is that they will be based on cut-down versions of existing light water reactor designs, in the process losing the economies of large-scale current nuclear plants. In practice the only credible SMR involves a consortium already built up over several years by Rolls Royce, using its technical know-how as designer and manufacturer of small reactors for UK nuclear-powered submarines. To be at all competitive many SMRs would need to be built, thus achieving economies of scale in production to offset the loss of economies of large reactor size. In this pursuit, Rolls Royce want to build up to 16 of these SMRs at a cost currently estimated by them[vii] (and therefore probably optimistic) of just short of £29bn.  This is a highly inflexible proposition, risking very large sums of public money.

Rolls Royce have also suggested that such reactors might generate at around £60/MWh initially, falling to £40/MWh for later plants.[viii] By contrast, in terms of real projects, as opposed to very early and potentially optimistic expectations, offshore wind is already committing to deliver in the near-term at auction prices of around £40/MWh.[ix] According to the White Paper, the global market for modular and advanced reactors might (as ‘estimated by some’ – actually the National Nuclear Laboratory) be worth £250bn to £400bn by 2035. This is at best heroic, given that the current global market is zero. In any case, the idea that the UK might win a large share of such a market (if it did exist) is made hopelessly implausible by the fact that the UK is well behind several other countries’ SMR development. These include Russia, the USA, Japan and China, with the Rolls Royce planned design only one among over 70 SMR designs currently being pursued around the world.[x]

The second leg of the modular reactor story involves ‘Advanced’ reactors.  The ambition here is to have a demonstrator ready by the early 2030s ‘at the latest’. For this, the Government may be willing to spend a further £170 m. Here we are in highly speculative territory. As the White Paper very briefly explains, AMRs would be reactors that use ’novel cooling systems or fuels and may offer new functionalities (such as industrial process heat).’[xi] Such designs would most likely involve high temperature gas cooling; many such designs have been developed in the past 50 years, none of them proving commercially viable. It is not clear why work in these challenging technological areas can be expected to do much better in the future. Even if such technologies eventually prove more commercially tractable, having a demonstrator built by the early 2030s is extremely hopeful. 

Reasons for optimism?

The optimism displayed in these plans includes the up-front claim that ‘the UK continues to be a leader in the development of nuclear technologies’[xii] – a proposition, when applied to commercial reactors, that has no basis in fact whatever. However, Government does qualify its enthusiasm by making clear that its plans, including expenditure, remain conditional. For a large reactor, bringing a project to fruition depends on ‘clear value for money for both consumers and taxpayers’[xiii] and the £385 m apparently to be spent on SMRs and AMRs reactors is ‘subject to future HMT [Treasury] Spending Reviews’.[xiv] But even if all nuclear plans worked out as the White Paper hopes – in terms of developing new low-carbon capacity on the predicted time-scale – it is far from clear that this would be achieved at anywhere near competitive cost. Even if nuclear power does well, large reactors will play, at best, a very small part in the move to net-zero carbon by 2050. While modular reactors could do more, there is huge uncertainty, probable extended timelines and no guarantee of any kind of success.

[i] HM Government (2020) The Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution November

[ii]  HM Government (2020) The Energy White Paper. Powering our Net Zero Future December CP337

[iii]  ‘UK takes step towards world’s first nuclear fusion power station’ New Scientist, 2 December 2020.  Numbers are quoted from the UKAEA, the fusion R&D proponent

[iv]  The Energy White Paper, p. 51.

[v]  Ibid., p. 49

[vi] ibid. p. 50

[vii] World Nuclear News ‘Rolls Royce on track for 2030 delivery of UK SMR’ 11 February 2021

[viii]  ibid.

[ix]  https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/prices-tumble-as-u-k-awards-5-5gw-of-offshore-wind

[x] IAEA Advances in SMR technology development 2020 September 2020, in which 72 designs are listed

[xi] The Energy White Paper, p. 51

[xii] ibid. P.50

[xiii] ibid. p.49.

[xiv] ibid. p.50

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