Taking the bigger view of the Energy Trilemma

In a guest post for The Green Edge, Tim Rogers sets free the bee in his bonnet around energy, education and politics.

For some years, I’ve been banging on about grid-scale storage – in other words, shipping container-sized batteries. They are really important, though mostly just for frequency response at the moment. We’ll need new technologies to deal with very long duration storage and resolve the obvious problem of renewables not always generating electricity when it’s needed.

But three things have my attention right now. First, the distribution system, which is broadly everything downstream from the high-tension side of the networks all the way to the consumer. Second, education and skills. And third, politics.

Just to set up the energy problem again I’ll frame this around the UK’s National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO), though the same is true for most systems in any country.

The UK has a target of being ‘fully decarbonised by 2035’ and ‘net zero by 2050’. What does that mean in practice? Well, we’re still working it out, but ESO regularly publishes its Future Energy Scenarios in which it outlines several paths for the development of the energy system over the next 25 years or so. This is really interesting, talking about four possible scenarios which in a nutshell are…

Leading the way, meaning being ambitious with net zero targets being hit by 2046. This would take huge public and private investment, and very large adoption by consumers, embracing smart technology for flexible demand, triple glazing and wall insulation, heat pumps, EVs and so on.

Customer Transformation would still mean a lot of change for customers. Smart homes with things like demand side response, smart home charging, heat pumps. Plus EVs, of course

System Transformation means some customer changes – maybe hydrogen fuelled boilers, EVs or hydrogen cars, some solar but not as much as with the customer transformation. But most of the change will be on the supply side, probably including more carbon capture and storage, and hydrogen.

Falling short – well this means we miss the target entirely. Some progress but not enough, so that means some EVs, some level of heat pumps and solar at a domestic level. Not a great position.

So what to do about it? To me there are three crucial elements: innovation; education; and, dare I say it, politics.

Image: Powerstar

The politics of all this are complex and are driven by the so-called ‘energy trilemma’, meaning broadly that energy must be clean, secure and affordable. To be fair, for policy makers that’s a tricky balance. Emotions run high when we talk about the climate. It’s clearly changing and we don’t fully understand all the mechanisms and consequences. But as a species we’re not generally very good at acting on ‘long-term logic’. Nevertheless, a lot of smart people are working hard to make changes. The sort of technological and infrastructure changes we’ll need have never been seen on this scale over such a short period.

The affordability leg of the trilemma is easily overlooked in climate conversations. The fact is that getting the UK to net zero will be expensive in the short term: £61bn over the next 6 years according to the Climate Change Committee. I don’t often hear talk of the long-game and this, for me is where energy security comes in. Security of supply is essential. Being reliant on Russian pipeline gas or US and Middle East LNG for such a fundamental commodity is risky to say the least. But imagine a future where we get past net zero targets, emissions are under control – perhaps negative thanks to carbon capture – and the marginal cost of energy is extremely low.

In reality we’ll be paying off the debt for a long time – but not forever. That £61bn is a very big number, but again we’re not good at seeing these things in context – that’s 1% of GDP. It’s still big but we won’t go broke. Just file that fact away – I’ll come back to the politics in a minute.

I’m disappointed that we don’t really see this long-term thinking. As I said we’re not good at this as a species, but we can do it, and we should. There are many reasons we might fail but plenty of opportunity to make it happen. And the benefits are immense.

So, what is actually being done?

I hosted a webinar recently and spoke to three entrepreneurs at various stages in their business journeys. This gave me hope. They were innovating in the distribution side of the network: one was looking at smaller scale storage for homes and small businesses, evening out the load at the demand side; another was solving a problem in the US where roadside chargers are taking months for the state to roll out - these guys are doing it in days; and another was looking at how data and tooling can be made available, stored and accessed via standardised interfaces.

That data piece, by the way, is a massive challenge. Think about any of the positive scenarios the National Grid talks about. Tens of millions of homes, perhaps hundreds of millions of generation points, plus who knows how many small-scale storage points. Add to that, public EV chargers and industrial off-take. Balancing all those systems will require a level of understanding we are only just getting to grips with, it needs automation (no human can control that stuff at such a granular level) and truly vast amounts of data.

Talking to the entrepreneurial community, I’m hugely optimistic. Private funding is queueing up to get behind many of these projects and a few of them will be huge. There’s been a slowing down in funding recently but I’m not worried about that. These things are cyclical by nature and the long-term requirement for energy innovation is massive. Patient money will win.

Image: MIT Tech Review

What all these businesses will need, of course, is industry expertise and that gets us back to the skills gap. We struggle with this in the energy industry in general. In previous lives I used to hire people into technical and sales roles. Finding professional people like software engineers, salespeople and data analysts with a good understanding of energy is hard and getting harder.

The International Energy Authority (IEA) reckons there are 65 million people working in energy, globally. About half of them are in ‘clean energy’, which I take to mean things like wind and solar production, installation and management. IEA reckons that to be on track for a positive outcome by 2050 we’ll need around 14 million jobs to be created by 2030 – that’s 2.3 million a year for the next six years!

Now, not all of those jobs will be in tech, data, trading and innovation, which is the bit I tend to focus my training business on. But it’s clear that there will be a huge skills gap as we try to address climate change targets. I’m working with clients at the moment who see the same thing and are forced to hire people who have no energy knowledge, then train them. It’s not an unusual scenario but all this takes time, money and mental bandwidth.

So, the Grid is clearly of the opinion that what it calls ‘social change’ is a key component in decarbonisation. I agree with that completely. To me that requires not just public acceptance but new and innovative technology downstream in the distribution system, like smart homes, demand side response, storage, and electric vehicles.

In general, I’m an optimist. But this is a complex problem which needs clear heads and focused policies. We do have to recognise that a lot of the funding will have to come from public money, and change will need to be driven by legislation. It will be expensive, but public opinion will shape policy. We’re still developing the technology to support decarbonisation, so putting a fully formed rigid plan together is probably not going to be the best bet. It will be wrong as soon as its published.

What we need, as always, is open, well-informed debate. Informing and educating those not involved day-to-day in the industry is incredibly important. This is one of the reasons I like the Green Edge and others – straight forward, independent information. The National Grid’s energy scenarios is free to download but how many people really have the time to understand what’s required and what the implications are?

Returning to the energy trilemma, this was highlighted clearly in the government’s recent ‘reframing’ of climate policy, relaxing the ban on the sale of new ICE vehicles and effectively moving the date from 2030 to 2035. It’s created a firestorm of press comments and debate, which is maybe not a bad thing. But the Home Secretary’s recent quote defending that decision “[we’re] not going to save the planet by bankrupting British people” is a stark reminder that politics may focus on affordability, directly appealing to voter’s emotions first – particularly when faced with an upcoming election.

But people have a natural hierarchy of focus: first, my financial security; second, my country’s security; and third, the global climate situation. Logically the third point could bring the most catastrophic consequences if mishandled, but for most it’s somehow a distant threat. Whereas the possibility of not being able to heat your home over winter, put food on the table, or (let’s be honest) being able to go on that sunny vacation, gets the most immediate attention.

Sadly, this propensity to be more concerned with the short-term is where politics will focus. Soundbites like that from people like the Home Secretary puts people’s emotions in direct conflict, which to be honest I find to be an insidious, lazy and cynical approach to an immensely complex problem.

We need consumers to be on board, fully engaged and enthusiastic about the change. If they are, then we could meet clean energy targets, have affordable energy, and be largely self-sufficient. The knock-on effect could be a game changer for humanity.

If not, then ‘Falling Short’ may be an understated foot note to a to failed period in human history.

Our thanks to Tim Rogers for this guest post. Tim has 17 years in Energy, working on a range of projects from Energy Trading and Risk Management systems to Battery and Renewable Energy platforms. He’s worn many hats, including start-up founder, software engineer, project manager, technical architect and sales & marketing leader.

Tim is also a husband, father, mountaineer, motorcyclist, professional pilot and wannabe guitarist (not always in that order).

His current focus is on building his new business, Energy Wise Training, which delivers targeted courses for people new to the industry or wanting to upskill in certain areas.