Dogma on Fire
“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies” – Friedrich Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human, 1878)
A fundamental premise of my book, The Edge, is that we risked looking the wrong way with well-meaning policy, for government, and approach for business, on the road to net zero.
If one consequence of doing so is that you might end up in an unintended place, then maybe here we are. Nothing like the levels of decarbonisation either intended or needed have been achieved, for all the investment in renewables and focus on the grid, grid, grid. And if one problem, as I have argued, was that the consensus view pinned its hopes on producing more rather than wasting less, then our current position is particularly edgy, because the consensus conviction, and some of the dogma that went with it, appears to have caught fire.
The burning substation next door Heathrow airport the other week offered a graphic illustration of precisely this point. The flames effectively smoked out the plug that Heathrow needed to connect to the grid, and it was unable to switch to another plug in time. Worse, there was no, or at the very best, insufficient backup generation in place to ensure a level of resilience that could avoid a total shutdown. As I explained on Sky News that day, the design of the energy systems proved just too fragile to cope.
This is not a criticism. It’s a wakeup call to a solvable problem, which if acted on could mark a turning point in a shift towards looking the right way, beyond the fragility of an ageing and carbon intense centralised grid system where most energy is lost in extraction, conversion, generation (entropy), transmission and distribution, and instead towards a lower cost, lower carbon and more secure energy system, underpinned by efficient and decentralised generation of energy (‘Edge’). On-site energy generation could have saved the day. After Superstorm Sandy blacked out New York in 2012, the City shifted its focus own on-site generation and efficiency.
On-site generation, designed as an energy-island to meet the 40MW needs of Heathrow (relatively small compared to hyperscale datacentres, one of which was connected to the same substation but was fine), should have been able to start or re-start once the grid failed. The most reliable solution for on-site generation would arguably have been a high combined electrical and thermal efficiency combined cooling, heating and power plant, where both the electricity and heat generated could have been used by the airport using less than 3 acres of land, and no mess.
However, Heathrow has a biomass combined heat and power system. Unfortunately, perhaps constrained by design, space, cost, availability of wood chips and responsiveness, the system provides relatively little power and no backup service. The Heathrow website contains a link to an announcement that sets out the carbon footprint of the biomass CHP compared to a natural gas system. It explains that the decision to use biomass rather than natural gas was made on carbon emission grounds.
The good news is that it is, however, possible to deliver a combination of reliable, and lower cost, and low carbon energy solutions on a decentralised basis. The technology exists today to build energy generation on site, or far closer to where it’s needed, using a wide range of commercially proven systems such as waste heat recovery, cogeneration (preferably biogas), ground and air sourced heat, and renewables such as solar, often paired with storage, which are usually ‘in the money’ in major markets. Small modular reactors that use nuclear fuel to produce decentralised energy are touted for the next decade, but we don’t have to wait for them.
Although a bonfire of decarbonisation policy in the United States has left smoke clouds over some ‘out of the money’ renewable technologies and lots of hydrogen ideas, perhaps a silver lining is the opportunity for the good to prevail over hopes for the perfect. Datacentres are turning to on-site generation and storage to accelerate availability, to manage cost and to provide round the clock resilience, a lesson that Heathrow airport – and for that matter most other airports in the UK, Europe and the United States – might learn.
There are indeed some grounds for optimism or tempered fears. In its first days and weeks in office, the Trump administration got to work setting fire to the Inflation Reduction Act, to anything ‘woke’, and to diversity, equity and inclusion policies within government and corporate America. But despite his fire cry of ‘drill, baby, drill’ evoking the vintage days of oil and gas, relatively few have so far jumped at the invitation, which risks containing elements of a scorched-earth defence of the traditional energy sector, rather than a boost for it. But big oil and gas remain key weapons of war or peace. President Trump has so far threatened Russia more with attacks on its oil export revenues than with military manoeuvres.
Back home, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has meanwhile homed in on government spending and launched a programme to unearth waste and ‘grift’. Its ‘attack surface as the Economist pointed out, is however only 15% of the government’s US$7 trillion annual budget that is not redistribution. It might therefore be astonishing to consider this. The United States consumes around US$4 trillion a year in energy, at the same time as it loses or wastes some two thirds of the primary energy used to make it. For Mr Musk’s sleuths looking for waste, this one is elementary. I’d be all in to help with that one.
These are darker times for the climate movement. The USA is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement and its Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reconsidering the 2009 ‘endangerment finding’ that established greenhouse gases as a public health threat and underpinned federal climate regulations. References to climate change on its website have been amended and funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which I often reference, is being cut or redirected. But the focus of the language of the most senior energy officials in the Trump administration is not on disputing the existence of climate change, but rather on the economic and practical implications of dealing with it.
Strangely enough, just at this time of heightened pressure and peril for the green movement, at the other end of the argument, its very protagonists appear to be retreating of their own making and accord. Green labelling and other – sometimes even dogmatic - standards, not just lawsuits from litigious States complaining that returns are sacrificed for ESG objectives, are forcing investment funds to leave climate groups in droves and de-classify funds from climate, environmental or climate categories. Parts of the sustainable investment universe, if we look back in a few months’ time, will look simply decimated.
But if dogma is burning, perhaps there’s a beacon of hope that we can light with it. Perhaps we can look the other way and take from challenge the opportunity to expand and re-frame our objectives, to a focus on efficiency first for our energy system and to solve its dirtiest secret – that most of it is wasted. After all, making the world around us more efficient is one of the greatest economic and commercial opportunities that any developed nation has. And in the energy business, it is the largest, fastest, cheapest, and cleanest form of greenhouse gas emission reductions, economic productivity gains, and energy security.
Picture credit: ChatGPT 4o
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