Powering the UK: Dr Aidan Rhodes & Dr Nadine Moustafa

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We live in a time of global transformation. The Energy Futures podcast explores how we can accelerate the expansion of clean energy technologies and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, from heating and cooling our homes to moving around our planet and beyond. We bring together researchers, scientists, business leaders and communicators to exchange knowledge and try to answer one important question.

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nd the road to zero-carbon by: 2050

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rding this at the end of July: 2024

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oal to carbon, zero carbon by: 2050

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% of emissions, compared to: 1990

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That's done. So definitely going in the right direction, there's works for nuclear power. There's a lot of wind happening. The energy mix is quite, you know, a mix. There's quite a lot in there. But definitely, the carbon intensity, for instance, of the electricity grid is going down as we speak. So it's going in the right direction I would say for sure.

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Unknown

What a great way to start feeling really positive already. That's what that's the direction we want to go in. Well, we'll eventually move into doom and gloom a little bit here because we do have some big challenges, don't we, in the country. So do you want to touch upon like what are the current challenges that we've got now with this new government to, to get things in the right direction?

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Unknown

So yes, I mean, we do absolutely have a new government, which is a lot more positive, I think, on the energy transition than our previous government, which was towards the end, especially if the term wobbling a bit. However, there is massive challenges still ahead. Well, as Nadine pointed out, we are absolutely a world leader in actually decarbonizing our grid.

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Unknown

There's still big challenges in actually finishing that decarbonization and balancing the grid in installing an awful lot more wind power, solar power, and also connecting that up to the grid via large scale pylons, and expanding the national grid to areas where it wasn' t usually there in the first place. So offshore and in sort of more rural and dispersed areas of the UK.

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Unknown

So there is substantial challenges ahead there, as well as the challenges in, electrify more of our energy use in order to, use renewable energy. So electrifying our heating, electrifying our transport, electrifying our industry. All of these are big challenges and will require an awful lot of work going ahead. So while we've done an awful lot of progress in the last 15 years, I think there's still an awful lot to go.

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Unknown

And maybe the hardest stuff is still ahead. Yeah, still a long way to go. Okay, so we've mentioned briefly then about energy mix. I'm mindful that we've probably got some audience, and listeners that, probably don't know everything about the energy mix to be used to oil and gas and coal, and I will say they will not be familiar with renewables.

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Unknown

Nadine, do you want to just jump on the current mix and what have we currently got in the UK? Where does the majority of our energy come from? So there's a lot of gas. there's a little bit of coal. But as I said, this is finishing up this year. There's nuclear, there's a lot of wind. there's some solar.

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Unknown

and then there's some hydro power. So I think the UK is again a global leader when it comes to wind power, for instance. The past 15 years was an easy part because you could just, like switch from coal, for instance, to natural gas, which already gives you massive emission reductions.

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Unknown

So that was the easy part. Now the the harder part is, as Aidan said, electrifying all of this. So like, what are we going to do with all of this natural gas. How are you going to, you know, increase our nuclear, capacity just to have a base load of electricity? How are we going to do the

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grid infrastructure for renewable energy, as we want to do more and more renewable energy to kind of, you know, accommodate the demand? Mind you, the demand increases, right? So it's not just that we have to accommodate the demand we have now. The demand will increase in the next decade and so on. And so forth. So we we really need to start thinking about the next 15 years and seeing how that works.

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Unknown

But the current energy mix has a lot of different things. as with anything like I there's I always say this, I think there is no silver bullet technology. We're going to need a bit of everything. Some of the things have challenges. Some of the things have advantages, and they kind of, accommodate each other so that we can get the energy we need in terms of like, and security, but also to, look into the demand and accommodate that in the UK.

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ean energy and zero carbon by: 2050

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Unknown

I was your your feelings. I know it's a loaded question, so it is a bit of a loaded question, but like, I'll do my best to answer. I think at the moment, I would say we're probably not on track. If you look at what the committee on Climate Change has been saying, they are forecasting for the first time the UK might not meet its carbon budgets, for the next, carbon budget accounting round.

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Unknown

So we are maybe falling behind where we should be at the moment. And part of this is due to, I think, a slow down, a slowing down, the roll outs. So I would say that’s a slowdown not necessarily in actual terms, but in where we need to be compared to where we are. So while we are accelerating and, you know, putting in large scale offshore wind and putting in large solar farms, we are not accelerating fast enough.

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Unknown

And I think the scale of this is actually really quite substantial. We are needing to put in a large amount of generation and also connect that generation. So an awful lot of why we've been slowing down so much is not because the investment necessarily isn't there for the generation or the will isn't there, or the planning permission isn't there, though sometimes that is the case, but the good connections aren't there.

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Unknown

So we are having at the moment big queues to join the national grid to connect up these disparate solar farms, these disparate when wind farms

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And sometimes these grid

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t to the grid is in the early: 2030

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So they just sitting around on their hands for the next ten years basically. And

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if we want to get where we need to go, we need to really I say accelerate and streamline

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these delivery processes. So

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Unknown

all these various components, go in the same way basically. Yeah. It would probably like we can almost break this down into sort of three areas.

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Unknown

Almost isn't. It's like energy production, energy transmission and delivery. But then actually we could what we could talk about is a little bit about consumption as well. Because although we need policy, we need finance. We need these infrastructures to make this work. But it's it is a little bit down to individuals as well to understand how much energy we're using, etc. I'm very mindful that we've only got about 35, 40 minutes a day, so we probably won't need to go into too much detail.

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Unknown

but you know, looking at the current energy mix and what, you know, what we've currently got and where would you like to see more investment, more time? What's missing here? I don't know if this is like. I don't know if this is an easy answer. just because it really depends.

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Unknown

As I mentioned, there's. So it's easy for me as a scientist or engineer or whatever to go, like, you know, let's. This makes sense. This technology makes sense. Let's go do it. but more often than not, it's not as simple as that. There's quite a lot happening at the same time. So it could be something like the grid infrastructure.

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Unknown

It could be something like the planning permissions, it could be public acceptance. There's quite a lot to kind of look into before you can say, you know, this is what we should be doing. and so for that reason, I don't think that there's we should be doing like one thing, but there's quite a few that we should be doing at the same time.

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Unknown

One of them is the grid infrastructure for renewable energy. One of them is nuclear power to have our baseload electricity. And, like, rely less on imports, for example, from France. One of them is, you know, in the interim, if we need CCS for natural gas, then that we might need that. So we should be doing that.

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Unknown

And so there's quite there's not one single answer. There's quite a lot of things we need to be doing. And in terms of also renewable energy, energy storage for example, technologies. so yeah,

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Unknown

it's a mix and it will always be a mix. So we need to kind of figure out what's the mix that makes more sense in terms of economic feasibility, in terms of technical feasibility, in terms of, public acceptance in terms of, you know, resource availability.

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Unknown

So like land availability, water availability, material availability. And also when you look at materials thinking about the sustainable supply chains

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Unknown

that you can get those materials from. So yeah, it's not one answer. It's a bit of everything. And like looking at what would be the best to kind of reach our net zero targets.

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Unknown

And that's interesting because the mix, like you said, is going to keep changing. It will change with policy. It will change with the weather. It will change with, things that are happening globally in terms of markets, etc. it will change with technology etc.. So yeah,

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Unknown

that's great for this podcast because we're going to keep revisiting these.

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Unknown

We're going to talk about different areas of the mix and all the nuances and all the things that come with those different areas in terms of that mix. You mentioned nuclear. we've all been working together because we've been putting together an amazing briefing paper, white paper that just was launched a few weeks ago. Should we talk about nuclear?

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Because it's something that you're very,

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knowledgeable about where we are we currently with nuclear and where does it need to go? What what's what's the plan going forward? I feel like this has been mentioned quite a bit this time, but again, UK was a global leader in nuclear power. but then a lot was decommissioned over, over the past decade, and some are still being decommissioned now.

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Unknown

And so that massively fell compared to other countries in the world. there are excessive plans for nuclear power. I mean, UK is really good at this though. Like they have plans and pretty much everything. So, you know, sustainable aviation and and energy storage and energy mix and nuclear power and so on. So they're really good at this.

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Unknown

They have plans, they have funds. They're releasing consultations and so on. But the plan is essentially that we want to increase nuclear, capacity. in the UK, basically, I think to 25%. and so that's, that's the plan, whether we're, you know, on track as, as right now, not clear. We're not actually on track right now.

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Unknown

There's quite a bit of financing that we're going to need to do. I think there's also a lot that we can get from the current, nuclear plans that are happening. so, for example, with EDF and so we can transfer this knowledge to make things go faster next time and we could do them cheaper. and so this is quite important.

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Unknown

So like, yes, we're not on track, but how can we be on track. and what can we do in terms of learning from past projects? And then the other thing that I think we mentioned quite a bit in our paper is the fact that. So the technical feasibility is there, like most of the technologies that I think will go on this podcast are technically feasible.

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Unknown

That's not the issue. Science and engineering has been doing really well. but then the issue then comes from economic feasibility. So, yeah, you know, technically it works, but it could be very, very expensive. And so that's why, you know, we're still doing science and engineering so that we can make it cheaper, either by increasing its efficiency using different materials or so on and so forth.

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Unknown

So make it so economic feasibility. So how expensive it is. When it comes to nuclear power, it's also you need to kind of, integrate and see what's happening with the public and whether they kind of want the nuclear power plants there. And then, last but not least, but the skills and the jobs that you will need.

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Unknown

So as I said, so Nuclear power all though UK was a global leader for nuclear power ten years ago. Quite a lot of this has been decommissioned. And so there's been a shortage, in nuclear power skills. And so we need to kind of focus on how are we going to make sure that we, you know, before the, the current workforce retires, how are we going to transfer this knowledge, to the upcoming workforce?

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Unknown

by: 2050

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that in: 2050

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Unknown

But our paper shows that, you know, that still falls short. We've also done, for example, another paper on sustainable aviation fuels, again, based on the target that the UK has, it falls short. and so we need to kind of start thinking about where are we going to be doing these plants, how much are they going to cost, how are we going to finance them.

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Unknown

and whether those will meet, the targets that we've set, but that hasn't been done yet. So there were projects that were going to happen. So there were more projects that were going to happen, but they got canceled. But even with those, so even assuming the planned ones go ahead and the canceled ones went ahead, we're still very short.

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Unknown

so I think this kind of reiterates Aiden's point, like we've done really well for sure. Also, it was the easy part. Like, we have to say that that was the easy part. Like fuel switching was the easy part. The hard part is the rest of this. and we do have all these targets, but we're we're not on track.

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Unknown

And pretty much any of them. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think this comes through sort of maybe a deeper malaise a bit in the UK that we are very good at planning, very good at setting targets, very good at having comprehensive waste. Is that the to do the plans and they're not so good at actually delivering. So we have a lot of work and it's very good work on how to reach these targets.

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Unknown

very comprehensive. But the actual delivery is where maybe we fall short. And I think this is a problem across the energy sector, maybe across the UK as a whole. that we, we do fall short in delivery, a lack of joined up strategy in coordination in both governments, both nationally and locally, and call it coordination with companies often changing political priorities.

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Unknown

It's yeah, it's sometimes quite difficult. And we are now moving out of the sort of planning and initiation phase of net zero into the full scale delivery phase. So this decade is crucial. We need to build, I think the current, government target is 50GW of wind, offshore wind. We've got about a quarter of that so far.

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Unknown

So we're going to need to expand that. We will need a massive expanded upgrading connections. As indeed, as pointed out, we will need to massively expand on nuclear. and if we don't do this, then we will fall short of our targets. and this is where we can't dilly dally around. Basically. We can't we can't say we're going to carry on this same rate.

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net zero electricity grid by: 2035

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ectricity grid to net zero by: 2035

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K government as a whole has a: 2035

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Unknown

but the actual sort of joined up thinking to actually push it through from national government down to local government to consultation with companies to, basically ensuring planning permissions there, to ensure that the skills are there to the, to push it to ensure that the financing there there's a sort of, I guess, a sort of let's leave it up.

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Unknown

You know, we're going to tell National Grid they need to do this, but let's leave it up to them. And they can't develop this on their own. They they need help from other places. and I think that sort of that sort of lack of joined up coordination governance right from the top actually was has been a real issue.

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Unknown

Policy and governance keeps coming up over again. The tech’s there, the will’s there, the strategy there. But the actual delivery and doing of it, doing it is, is, is lacking. Is there anyone that’s getting this right in terms of other countries or is everyone in the same boat? It's an interesting question. I think the UK is quite far ahead in terms of just deployment of generation.

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Unknown

We're quite far ahead in deployment of offshore wind, and it's difficult to point to another country, which is absolutely perfectly getting it right. There's going to be there's countries it's maybe have a slightly easier ride. For example, France has already got a lot of nuclear power. So in order to decarbonize its generation, it doesn't need to do as much work as we do.

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Unknown

But in terms of, the actual sort of, I guess the actual sort of facts on the ground, the actual interaction, the public getting people on board is I think countries across Europe are struggling on this. We saw France with the yellow vest movement, we saw Germany and basically a bit of a backlash against heat pumps, insulation.

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Unknown

and of course, we see in America that it's quite a political issue. Republicans really don't like clean energy at all. And even though Joe Biden has pushed very hard for, you know, clean energy in the Inflation Reduction Act, it is still very much in the supply side and not the demand side, the actual changing people's lives side.

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Unknown

You all you need a heat pump, you need to let your vehicle, you need to put up with renewable energy near you, that kind of thing. This sort of sacrifices out a lot of people we need to make if we go down this route, isn't really there. So no, I don't think there is necessarily a country that could point out, go, this country knows what's going on, like a little bit of everything.

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Unknown

Yeah. An electricity generation is very localised. It's very localised problems in each country. So sunnier countries have more solar, maybe less wind, countries, less coastline have to have more onshore wind. The UK has a lot of natural advantages basically. But yeah, I don't think we can necessarily point anything. But I think in our particular point of view, I think a lack of coordination and governance is a real problem.

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Unknown

And actually it's very interesting that one of the first things the new labour government has done is set up these sort of missions. One of them being is climate change sustainability net zero mission, in order to attempt at least to streamline some of these decisions. so different government departments or at least facing the same way and doing the same stuff rather than working independently.

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Unknown

Yeah, amazing. And then when people need to pick up that as well, that the sort of strategy, coordination and governance challenges, obstacles, what's, you know, what's on your radar in terms of what's happening and, and what could we be doing a bit better? I think it it really depends on the technology. So some technologies, for example, would the major challenge would be public acceptance, where some technologies the major challenge could be the permitting issues.

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Unknown

And, and and some like it just really, really depends on technology that you want to kind of, like deploy. I think one of the things actually that's really good about the UK in terms of, just like governance, is that actually there's quite good public acceptance in terms of like wanting to do this, like clean energy and reaching net zero targets.

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Unknown

And, and so sometimes you would think that, you know, you're going to have a backlash because of public acceptance But then I think after speaking to like quite a lot of people in the field, it seems like actually the public acceptance is quite high of the majority of technologies like everyone is in on getting to net zero.

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Unknown

but yes, like in terms of it just really depends on the technology and I'm not really sure why we fall short when it comes to deployment. but I think Aidan did pointed out some really good, things. And they've done the research We mentioned a bit about like buy-in and trust and, and, kind of getting people onside with some of this.

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Unknown

And I agree, I think everyone would is everyone I speak to are in the camp of, you know, this is the direction that we need to go in. But I know from the nuclear side that there has been some pushback. And I suppose it's trying to get community cohesion and getting people in on this journey. Where are the sort of the pushbacks from the general public at this stage?

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Unknown

so, yeah, it really depends on technology. So with nuclear power, a lot of the pushback comes from safety and like nuclear waste handling. I think one of the things, for example, when it comes to waste handling, we've been handling waste for a very, very long time. And we've been handling worse waste for a very, very, very long time.

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Unknown

Then the nuclear waste. And in terms of, safety, I mean, there's a lot of statistics on this, but like, you know, it's it's really, really safe. in terms student nuclear power, especially that we have a lot of boards, we have a lot of policies, we have a lot of governance when it comes to nuclear power.

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Unknown

So it's quite safe. and so but I would say this is one of the major things. So when we, when we had, when we had, the launch for this, there was, there were people asking these questions about safety and, and it was, it was answered quite well with like, all the statistics, that I can't really tell you right now, but those statistics exist to show that it's safe.

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Unknown

And I think it's just that the right information might not always be disseminated to

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Unknown

the public. And that is true for like a lot of different technologies. And I think, for example, based on a lot of conversations I've had with the general public, I think a lot of the general public assumes that, you know, we could reach net zero just by doing renewables.

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Unknown

And they're like, why? Why are we even looking at anything else we should be doing just renewables. And, you know, we can't like we can't reach net zero with just renewables. It's just not possible. It's not scientifically about it's not engineering. Like it's just not possible to do just renewables. And you will need a mix inevitably. And so that's why I always say there's no silver bullet technology.

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Unknown

we can't just do renewables for everything. For example, even if we assumed, you know, we could do all of electricity from renewable energy, there are still process emissions. and that's even if that's not possible, I just want to clarify that. But, like, we still have process emissions. We have, transport emissions and so on and so forth.

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Unknown

And so it's not as simple as, you know, let's just deploy renewable energy in it. And I think that the facts or the information is not reaching the general public. Well, or with the statistics and the, the science and everything. and then some assumptions are made and then that's, that's kind of, you know, propagated forward. so I think that's the major I thing. That's why they call them wicked problems, because, you know, we've gone from, drilling to mining.

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Unknown

And if we are to put thousands and thousands of turbines everywhere that comes with its own problem, if we're going to put solar panels, it comes the same problem. So and I think it's trying to find a mixture of solutions so that depending on what happens in terms of materials, in terms the weather, in terms of what happens globally, we need to be making sure that we've got a range of different inputs, energy and, and different things that fit within the right infrastructure.

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Unknown

I don't, I don't view into to touch on that in terms of public buy in and people's opinions of what's going on at the moment. So I think public buying is actually this, that having said, pretty good in the UK compared to other countries. Part of this, I think, is because the public haven't been asked to do that much.

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Unknown

oad with electric vehicles by: 2050

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Unknown

you're basically saying we're going to replace your gas boiler, which you know how to use with this other technology, which tends to be bigger, bulkier, probably noisy as well, because you've got a big fan outside and, may well, it doesn't heat up your house as fast, so you need to use it in a different way, slightly more continuously, maybe heating up your house to in the night time, for example, he said just turning on the heat when you when you want it and having to have a warm house half an hour later.

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Unknown

So I think we've seen this already in other countries as, as I said earlier, Germany, for example, that there's been some pushback to heat from heat pumps because this is technology which isn't sort of centralised and outside people's, daily lives, like the electricity tends to be. It's technology, which is in your house and requires disruption and movement and a fair amount of money as well to change.

:: 28:28:01

Unknown

And people don't really think about heat that much. So people have a gas boiler. When that gas boiler breaks, they buy a new gas boiler. It's called a distress purchase. You don't usually go out and buy a gas boiler because it's better than the previous gas boiler. People don't think about it that way. So the idea of changing change to a heat, is something which is going to be I think we're going to run into trouble there, especially if you look at the low uptake rates, electric vehicles as well.

:: 28:51:07

Unknown

May be I think they've been a lot more successful in public acceptance, are seen as bid status symbols. They're fun to drive. They are in some ways better technology than the petrol cars that they are replacing. They accelerate faster. They're just more fun to use basically. but you are going to get pushback from people who like petrol vehicles, who like the family engine, who like, the sort of, it's sort of gearhead sort of tweaking and stuff, which you just can't do electric car and you'll get that pushback and the sort of, I guess innate conservatism.

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Unknown

dn't be seen as a choice come: 2030

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Unknown

He loves cars, loves bikes. And there's a there's a slight sadness in his eye when I talk about electrification and he understands it's the way to go. But, you know, like there's a lot of people that love and the heritage of cars they love, and this luxury might lead quite nicely into consumption. So we've talked about generation distribution a little bit about grids.

:: 30:06:15

Unknown

We could talk about grids a lot more, but I think this would be quite a nice time to talk about people and the fact that we've all got a part in this story and the narrative and your people are. And when it comes to personal choices, a car is one of the one of the most expensive things that someone will buy a house.

:: 30:25:03

Unknown

And the way that we operate a house is very personal to people, and we have to be quite sensitive how we talk to people and how we get people to, change the way that they heat their homes. Well, what your experience in terms of going forward and then about how we're going to get people to buy into this electrification and to change the way that they live their lives.

:: 30:49:11

Unknown

I think it goes back to my previous my like just being honest and transparent, like genuinely, giving the right information, and being honest and transparent about it. So for example, I had a bit of, I did a bit of work with, with fast fashion. and it's, it's one of the main things is that like, we can, at least in my opinion, to be honest, I, I don't know if we should be, you know, making this the consumer problem, just because, you know, like, if, if we're gonna say that, you know, this is fully your problem, you're the reason we're not reaching net zero.

:: 31:26:06

Unknown

I just don't know for achieving much. but if we work together and, like, make sure that the right information is out there giving, giving the consumer the choice, about what's going on in terms of, like, you know, what's more sustainable, what's not more sustainable. And I think acknowledging that, as Aiden said, a lot of it is, is psychological.

:: 31:44:16

Unknown

So for example, you know, people are willing, for example, for fashion, people are willing to pay a lot more for a certain dress or a certain bag and, and so on, because of either status or anything like that or like quality, for instance. And so I think the way we market a lot of things is just by the fact that, you know, it's more sustainable and that might not appeal to everyone.

:: 32:08:13

Unknown

So maybe we should be changing that in some instances at least maybe for fashion. So yes, I can market a sustainable dress, but maybe market it in a different way. So I think thinking about these things, as more than just targets and thinking about, you know, how are we going to transform them into business models. And that is actually also true when it comes to industry, because you need to it when you do the policies

:: 32:31:04

Unknown

we're really good at that, targets ... We need we need industry to get in on this. But to, to to to get them in on this, we need some form of business models that would make it work and make and make it competitive and you wouldn't have a monopoly in any of the technologies. And then when it comes to consumption, again, like you need some form of business model, which is way, way out of my expertise, but I think I'm just using the fashion example because it's something that I worked on, and that was very with the public.

:: 33:00:09

Unknown

but as far as I saw that people were very they're interested. But you're going to have to do more, I think, than just say, you know, this is sustainable. You're going to I mean, with heat pumps, there's like, grants and subsidies and stuff like that. and so it's going to have to be it's going to have to be more than just it being sustainable because I think, you know, we have a lot to think about during our day.

:: 33:23:22

Unknown

and people don't often know what sustainable means. And I like the fact that you talked about awareness, education, guidance and a lot of people talk about, choice architecture, you know, by giving people the choices so they're, they're aware of the different choices and then educating them why it's a better choice. I don't think we've got this right at all.

:: 33:44:09

Unknown

And I think in terms of working towards zero carbon and, and sustainability and getting people to live, make better choices in their life about more sustainable choices, whatever sustainability means to them is an educational thing. And that's why I enjoy working in communications, because that's it's a communications challenge now to get people to to understand why we're making these decisions, why things are moving in these directions.

:: 34:12:12

Unknown

Aidan I don't know if you wanted to jump on that and look at sort of communication and education in this area. Well, I was actually yeah, one of the things I was going to maybe say is that I think a focus on individual choices is maybe not the best way necessarily to go forward. while people obviously want to know how to minimise their carbon footprint, and the individual, level, really this is a kind of drop in the ocean compared with where we need to go.

:: 34:38:19

Unknown

We need to think about this stuff at a society level. Very much a corporate level as well. Big companies, big industry need to be directly responsible for their own carbon emissions, rather than expecting their consumers to take more sustainable options. For example, if we just look in the last couple of years, the rise of AI technology has increased world energy consumption by about 1 to 2%, I believe.

:: 35:00:05

Unknown

and that's just basically the big tech companies jumping on these very energy intensive AI technologies and then delivering them to the consumer. So it's really up to those companies to make that, that, consumption sustainable. There's very little consumer that can do there. I mean, previously we had the rise of cryptocurrency and the Bitcoin network was at one point using more electricity, the entire country of Argentina, and most of that was going on basically completely useless, worthless cryptographic transactions, which were just, because the, the, cryptocurrency algorithm itself was, badly designed for scalability.

:: 35:40:10

Unknown

So it was incredibly energy inefficient. So there needs to be, I think, not just to focus on what, you know, whether you walk or take or drive to your school or whether you get sustainable fashion on, on non-sustainable fashion, but actually, a sort of idea that corporations, that governments are themselves also, could be responsible for these.

:: 35:59:02

Unknown

And their carbon footprint needs to be dropped dramatically. Can i just add something? So yeah. So like even when it comes to carbon accounting organisations. So there's different scopes. They have to kind of consider scope 1 is their direct emissions within their building for instance scope 2 is their electricity and heating. Very easy. You get a bill. You can you probably know the energy mix of the country you're operating in.

:: 36:23:12

Unknown

And then scope 3 has like a lot of different categories both upstream and downstream. And and one of them is end of life use of the products. And so a lot of companies, you know, talk about how are we supposed to be measuring this and so on. And, and sometimes some of those companies, for example, are producing something that is just not recyclable, for instance.

:: 36:41:19

Unknown

And so yeah, if you're if you're producing something that's not recyclable has zero circularity in the design, it's not like produced for longevity. Like if you're doing that then obviously just maximise that. You're not doing it well. So so yes, absolutely. Like I think this goes back to my point of saying like, I it's I find it hard to say, you know, this is a consumer problem.

:: 37:04:19

Unknown

because it's up to organizations to do better. Yeah, I agree. So we've mentioned a lot about we've talked about generation, we talked about distribution. We've done talked a bit about the consumer. And we've kind of keep sort of anchoring back to industry and policy about these things. And there is probably is a lot of listeners that are listening to this thinking, what I want to do my bit, there may be activists, environmentalist, doing work in conservation, but they want to do more.

:: 37:30:20

Unknown

We know that policy and industry is where the big changes will happen. Let's talk about jobs because, is something that I know that you've been doing a lot of work in recently where where are the opportunities for, for for young people or for students or for anyone that's looking to develop their profession and career and their pathway where the opportunities at the moment.

:: 37:53:19

Unknown

Yeah, well, we are going through a large transition here, so we are transitioning away from oil and gas, fossil fuels to renewable energy to electrification. And I think electrification mostly is where things are going on. So while we had, about 75, 80% of our, total energy consumption being through primary fossil fuel, through gas burnt in your house, through gas burned in your, office through petrol burned in your car.

:: 38:24:00

Unknown

We're moving to electrify new sectors. So eventually the idea would be that wouldn't happen that much. And it would all go through electrification. So we need to massively expand the grid. So if you're interested in, power systems engineering, power engineering, there was a huge amount of work there. If you're interested in, basically implementation, construction work for all this stuff, engineering on the ground, that's all important, if you’re interested in installation.

:: 38:54:00

Unknown

So we need a lot more heat pump engineers, for example, to go out and install these heat pumps, we talked about, and, yeah, we need to also transfer, a lot of the offshore oil and gas jobs we had. And I think this is happening already to offshore wind installation jobs because an awful lot the skills are directly transferable.

:: 39:16:05

Unknown

I've got, my brother in law and one of my best friends are electricians. And I'm always sending them, like, courses in, like, doing solar PV and and heat pumps. I think they're probably getting a bit annoyed with me, but I think any if anyone's an electrician or an engineer and they are, I've got the curious about this and they're interested.

:: 39:34:08

Unknown

There's also a lot of support now for engineers and, and for electricians and, and anyone in this space to kind of work in these areas. And we know that the green economy is is booming already. I think eventually won't be called the green economy. It will just be called the economy. And so I think if people are wanting to move into this space, this is a great time.

:: 39:55:19

Unknown

But in terms of the other areas you're looking at policy, the government in terms of, driving industry in the right direction. But what other areas could, could, could people listen to this move into in terms of careers? So industries are going to need to think very carefully about what they do. And I think the, the challenges told by this bit already, I mean, there's some like for example, tech industries need to work out where the electricity is coming from.

:: 40:20:11

Unknown

If a stuff's getting more intensive, for example, industry, actually heavy industry in the UK will need to decarbonize. And this is this is where this is one of the more challenging areas, I think. How to decarbonize cement production. How do you decarbonize steel production? How do you decarbonize a lot of the process industry we've got in a way which is sustainable and successful?

:: 40:41:11

Unknown

So we need to think about carbon capture and storage for these industries like, low carbon industry hubs, hydrogen hubs, those kind of things. And there's going to be a lot of work in developing this. Yeah cool and Nadine are there other areas, jobs, work and the opportunities that you've seen in your in your work. I mean we've we've talked a bit about the nuclear power jobs.

:: 41:04:05

Unknown

So that's I think that would be I mean that's crucial. and just to make sure we don't lose those transferable skills. And I think, as Aidan mentioned, there's quite a lot that we can transfer the skills to. So for example, the offshore oil and gas to offshore wind, but also like, all the infrastructure that we had built for with oil and gas of pipelines and so on and so forth, we're going to need pipelines for CO2 that we capture.

:: 41:28:15

Unknown

We're going to need pipelines for hydrogen that we're going to be using. and then another one that's for example, that’s directly transferable is CO2 storage. So once we capture that CO2 we need to store it somewhere. And again that's directly transferable from the oil and gas industry. And, and so there's there's a lot of skills that's transferable, which is really good.

:: 41:46:21

Unknown

And I think we just need to make sure that we do transfer those skills and we don't lose them in between. and then when it comes to like the energy transition and just getting to net zero, there's I mean, if you get into any job that's related to that, I think you're good for the next 50 years.

:: 42:03:19

Unknown

Yeah. You're sorted. I'm going to keep pushing like, engineers and scientists roles for my children. I'll keep it like they want to be singers and actors at the moment. And I'll watch this space. You know, you're going to be an engineer or scientist. Yeah. I think there's also another point here. We talked about this at the beginning, that the UK is relatively far ahead on this side, on this curve.

:: 42:24:09

Unknown

So there's not just jobs necessarily in the UK, but people trained in the UK could be also consulting in other countries, working of countries, because there are countries which will acquire expertise if we develop it well. So there is an opportunity for global leadership in some areas here and I'm, you know, very, privileged to be working here at Imperial, where there is a big, big emphasis on industrial placements, learning key skills, very good connections with industry and and the and the the qualifications here are really set up well to to be able to move globally into these different areas.

:: 42:59:07

Unknown

And also coming from a communications creative point of view, any, any career now could be working towards or be in an industry within the green economy. So from communicators to lawyers to designers and engineers and software development. We mentioned there about, cryptocurrencies. And we've talked about AI. So if we could get more software engineers, more people that are building, more entrepreneurs, that are building these companies to be thinking sustainably about how they how we what service they're using, how much energy is being consumed through their applications, is that if you've seen any opportunities in terms of or any areas where we're seeing people moving into other sectors and other verticals or

:: 43:43:10

Unknown

categories where they're using sustainability to drive that business forward? Yeah, for sure. I, I was actually going to comment on that. I, I work with a lot of people that do very different things in science and engineering and are still contributing to the energy transition. So, for example, I was I'm working right now on a paper that is that involves a lawyer.

:: 44:05:11

Unknown

and it's a response to a consultation. But essentially, she, she looks into, for example, all the litigation processes when it comes to, greenwashing, for instance, and whether you're doing your carbon accounting properly or not and so on and so forth. My sister is a machine learning scientist. So we are, for example, working on things and seeing how we can, look at CO2 emissions and, and profile them and demand and so on and so forth.

:: 44:29:16

Unknown

But also we're going to start looking into like the CO2 emissions of, of AI and how are we going to do that, which is quite interesting to kind of use AI to kind of look into it. So that's like from a software perspective, but also, for example, my sister takes a lot of courses in terms of she has to take a lot of courses in terms of how to make her stuff more sustainable.

:: 44:51:06

Unknown

So like her her coding more sustainable and lose use less lines or just use less power and how to make it just more efficient essentially. which was well, it's more sustainable, but also it just means her code's more efficient so she can get more done faster and and so on. And so I've worked with economists when it comes to carbon carbon to carbon markets.

:: 45:13:14

Unknown

not worked. I still do work with economists. Science communications and, and so there's, there's I mean, in the past couple of years, I've actually worked with a lot of different professions that are working towards, sustainability. and, and so, for example, I also like consulting on a project that has to do with, medtech.

:: 45:31:24

Unknown

They were looking at devices that would, that would basically kind of get you the, the diagnosis faster. and or like earlier, which would mean, you know, a less load on the NHS. So there's, there's and that's built on the NHS with little less emissions basically. And so there's a lot of things that are working towards this, and you could pretty much be in any space and still contribute to sustainability because you could basically do whatever you're doing just more efficiently and taking into account.

:: 46:03:21

Unknown

oh, and the last example, sorry, is my friend. She's an architect and she's an architect, and, she actually models how to build buildings more sustainably. So where should we be putting our electric sockets and how what materials should we be using? And so on and so forth. And so again, I talked a lot about this.

:: 46:19:02

Unknown

So it's really interesting because I think when I, for example, when I started doing my PhD, a lot of people didn't really know what I was doing and they were like, why why do we care? Like what is happening? and then now, as I, when I finished my PhD and as I do my research now, my parents like, every time there's an article about climate change, they're like, look, this is this is something you're working on.

:: 46:41:01

Unknown

I'm like, yeah, I told you, that's like seven years ago. I love the coupling of here at university, the coupling between employability and sustainability that you can't be more employable if you're more educated and more passionate about sustainability, but also in terms of career pathways. And you can progress further, you can diversify your career in other areas by using sustainability, by being more sustainably minded, by implementing more design thinking within sustainability.

:: 47:14:00

Unknown

And that's I think that's really exciting. That's really nice. And anything you wanted to add there in terms of opportunities or where careers or jobs are going? I think that Nadine is absolutely correct, sustainability needs to be woven through every sort of part of our society. And I think that's what we talked about a bit earlier with corporate responsibility needs to be just as important, if not more so, than personal responsibility.

:: 47:35:07

Unknown

And I think intelligent corporations, I think well-run corporations are well in sustainability because sustainability means less energy use. It means smarter, smarter business. It means, less cost. And especially now with our high energy prices from a year historically high energy prices, energy use is important to get down as much as possible. So, yeah, smart companies will be sustainable.

:: 48:00:24

Unknown

They will be the companies that you want to work for, because they'd be the ones who will do better. And better, basically. but it will. I'm going to start bringing this, podcast to a close in a bit, but we've touched on something. I'm going to bring it to an end with. I wouldn't normally do this, but I actually quite like to talk about finance very quickly because we've talked about money and we talked about industry and financing.

:: 48:24:14

Unknown

the transition is going to be a huge thing. Would it be finance personally? But financing from the government. I know maybe finance is not our specialism, but the money we've got to pay for these things. And I suppose maybe that might be slowing some things down in terms of how the money's moved around. And Aidan i'll kind of put this on to you, like where, where does the money need to be moving now?

:: 48:44:13

Unknown

Where should we where should we be investing finances from a from a government perspective? so, I mean, from a government perspective, what the government's mostly interested in doing at the moment with its launch of Great British Energy and its mission created thing is, attempt to sort of steer private finance towards these large, sustainable projects. So the idea that a government wouldn't fund finance it all itself, provide some seed funding to basically, I guess, secured projects, make them more, safer for large scale investment to do.

:: 49:14:08

Unknown

So. This is sort of, I guess, leveraging. But what we need to do it is we we have a huge amount of money, globally, which goes into fossil fuel extraction, refining and use. And we need to transfer a lot of that, investment flow to renewable new technologies. So it's not that sustainability will cost more over the long run, that the net zero cost over the long run, that there is, however, high capital costs to get us going.

:: 49:40:19

Unknown

And then there will be lower variable costs with that, because when the wind blows and the sun shines, you know, you know, burning fuel that you were before. So a lot of this is getting that capital funding done so we can build the infrastructure so we can get going. And this is where this sort of streamlining process needs to go, basically.

:: 49:59:12

Unknown

So this is where you do need industrial strategy. You need government and industry working together and government knowing that it will be industry feeling secure the government isn't going to change its targets like we saw with last conservative government just overnight. there's a there's a long term plan and they will be supportive for that. And government knowing that industry is interesting and willing, interested and willing to invest.

:: 50:21:01

Unknown

And I think that is probably the major difference between this government and last government. The idea that there should be this industrial co-ordination, which I think has been missing in the UK for a bit, amazing.. And Nadine, if you had the keys to the safe where should we be maneuvering the finance now across the country? I think I completely agree with Aidan, like in terms of just long term business models.

:: 50:44:16

Unknown

and when I say long term, it's because it decreases the risk for private financing. So they need to know that there is a clear long term signal, from policy and so they'd be they basically it would just mean that there's less risk on whatever they're financing, whatever project they're financing. And based on like talking to a lot of people in industry, that is the one thing everyone kind of looks into, like, what is the long term policy?

:: 51:09:21

Unknown

Will that change if you know anything changes where if governments changes, or is it a long term thing? And so and I think once we do that, at some point I'll just, you know, there will be a business model, there will be a market for it just kind of like how we have oil and gas markets and everything.

:: 51:24:21

Unknown

And then, you know, the government can back off that and that, like, can just be like, okay, we're done here. So we've, we've helped in the beginning and then the rest will just work itself out. Okay. Good. Well, I think we've just solved the UK and it's a challenge there in that 40 minutes. So thank you very much.

:: 51:40:17

Unknown

Nadine if people want to find out more about you and your research and what you do, where can we send them? Where's the best place to contact you? I will say LinkedIn. But also the Imperial profiles are up. So our emails should be there for anyone to contact and we can put that all in the show notes.

:: 51:56:15

Unknown

So with you Aidan Yeah. I mean, both my LinkedIn page and also just the Energy Futures Lab website as a whole. You can find our briefing papers and white papers that we publish there. Great we’ll put that on the show notes. But yeah, thank you for your time. That's been amazing. And I look forward to chatting to you about all those different topics in due course.

:: 52:13:01

Unknown

Thank you. Thank you.

:: 52:16:11

Unknown

Thank you for tuning in to the Energy Futurist Podcast here at Energy Futures Lab. We are dedicated to addressing global energy challenges through pioneering research, innovation and advocacy. To learn more about us and the exciting projects we are working on. Visit our website and follow us on social media. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and share and subscribe to stay up to date with our latest content.

:: 52:48:02

Unknown

Until next time, stay curious.