Ep 3: Planet A, it’s the only one we’ve got
Meet Planet A Solutions, the energy architects behind Zero Bills in Cornwall
This episode we introduce Amanda Forman and Dr Dave Parish, co-founders of Planet A Solutions, sponsor of the Netting Zeros season in Cornwall, and among the smartest and most passionate sustainability professionals you could ever hope to meet. Planet A is a Community Interest Company (CIC) that blends architectural and engineering expertise to help industrial clients and residential developments integrate renewable energy solutions to the benefit of their bottom line.
Team Cornwall (from left to right): Amanda Forman, Dave Parish, David Green & Nate Maynard.
Introducing Cornwall’s Zero Bills energy architects
Planet A are the ‘energy architects’ behind the UK’s first first fully Zero Bills residential developments, which are built by Cornish developer Verto Homes.
The Octopus Energy scheme offers homeowners with the right combination of solar panels, home battery and heat pump a zero-cost energy bill. Keep an eye out for a local development as Octopus scales up the scheme to reach 10,000 Zero Bills homes by 2025.
Billed as the new gold standard for green homes, Zero Bills accreditation not only obliges developers to build high quality, energy and heat efficient housing, but also takes a significant step towards remedying the UK’s chronic electricity grid inflexibility. Octopus' Kraken platform aggregates control of multiple home batteries, allowing the housing development to sell surplus power back to the grid when the homes don’t need it, and the grid operator to better balance energy flows by storing energy when required.
Dave: “You roll that out en masse and that's a very powerful body of home batteries that are capable of balancing the network at all critical times.”
Amanda: “It takes the risk that some people perceive of installing a heat pump in their home away; the risk isn't on them anymore. They don't have to pay what may be expensive bills. And it also puts the requirement back onto the developer to build a home that they know is of good quality.”
Planet A’s modelling is now being incorporated into retrofit Zero Bills developments in Falmouth, as well as new builds in Devon and Exeter, as the southwest prepares for a new marketing campaign about the scheme.
Listen now: On Apple or Spotify podcasts
Why a CIC and why Cornwall?
Amanda and Dave cover what it means to be a CIC, and how Planet A’s work differs from typical consultants, before delving further into the UK and Cornwall’s problems integrating new renewable power capacity, what is being done to solve the issue, and how it has been allowed to get to this parlous point in the first place.
We also hear about why Cornwall is home to so many renewable energy pioneers, its history of wind, tidal and wave energy innovation, and why floating offshore wind is likely to be a mainstream energy source for the UK in future.
Cornwall Council’s Climate Emergency Development Plan returns as Amanda explains how developers can work with ecologists to abide by stipulations to foster a 10% net biodiversity gain, add 15% extra tree cover for The Forest for Cornwall, while mitigating renewable energy installations’ impacts on bats, birds and other wildlife.
Finally, Dave comes up with a simple solution to climate change (no, really)!
Please let us know what you think of the conversation – we are enormously grateful to Dave and Amanda for backing our trip to Cornwall!
Green and pleasant skills
Last week on the podcast, Chris Coonick lamented the dearth of green skills across the UK supply chain, so we are delighted to share that Planet A is gearing up to deliver “Integrated Energy Systems in the Built Environment”, part of ‘The Future is Green’ Green Skills project at the University of Exeter. This very timely skills development project is part-funded by the government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. Expressions of interest open in early May – contact green.skills@exeter.ac.uk for more information!
Illustration: Tom Sears
As a member of Social Enterprise UK, the UK membership body, for CICs Planet A commits to 30-50% of its profits being reinvested in the business, or in a decarbonisation scheme such as the carbon offsetting partnership they operate with Cornish Hospice Care. The premise is simple: visiting Cornwall can be carbon intensive, especially if arriving by air, so the scheme uses offset funds to improve insulation at two local primary care facilities. We travelled by train but contributed what we could!
Thanks for reading! Next week we will be at the Innovation Zero conference in London, so please come along and say hi if you see us standing around with a microphone, or send us a message if you want us to ask any of the attendees a question!
Read the transcript:
This text is exported from an audio editing platform and lightly edited. We apologise for any discrepancy with the final audio recording and for grammatical errors.
Nate: Hi everyone. I'm here with Amanda Foreman and Dave Parish from Planet A. Could you go ahead and please introduce yourselves?
Amanda: Hi Nate. I'm Amanda. I'm a director and co-founder of Planet A Solutions.
Dave: Hi, there. I'm Dave. I'm the other co-founder and director of Planet A.
Amanda: We're overlooking the Truro River. From our offices in Newham. Planet A Solutions is a CIC, we're a social enterprise. We set up four years ago in an attempt to really tackle the climate emergency –
Dave: We use a combination of engineering and architectural expertise really to help clients understand how they can do better with their energy systems to reduce emissions. We map out decarbonisation pathways, put together novel complex solutions for them, model those solutions both numerically in terms of energy and in terms of cash flow. We help as best we can with those organisations’ ambitions to decarbonise.
Nate: And Planet A is a CIC or like a social enterprise. Could you explain to our listeners what that means?
Amanda: Absolutely. We set out to tackle the climate emergency. We wanted to present ourselves in a way where we were not seen to be making profit out of the climate emergency. So the role of Planet A is to design solutions for the climate crisis. We wanted to be able to put pressure on larger organisations to cut carbon emissions. Potentially where the business case wasn't as good as they might be used to. But they were doing it for carbon related reasons, not just for profit related reasons. And we felt like we had a stronger stance to do that when we were a not-for-profit.
Nate: What does that mean for tax purposes or kind of how your company spends money?
Amanda: We've committed to somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of our annual profits being reinvested back into the business or invested into a decarbonization scheme. So for us, that's the direct removal of greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. We are technically a not-for-profit. We're a member of Social Enterprise UK. So we've got that badge.
We did think at one point that it was going to open up more grant funding for us, but it actually doesn't. We are operating as a normal commercial company. We work business to business, so we charge people and do work for them. And we're still subject to corporation tax. So we're subject to all of the same taxes as any other limited company, but without the sort of tax free dividend status that other shareholders would get in that sort of company.
Nate: What are the benefits of being a social enterprise over being a limited company?
Amanda: That's a good question. So financially there aren't really any benefits – more of an ethical status. So for me personally, I believe that every company should be a social enterprise or something similar. There's a whole network of people that want to see social and environmental change to how we do business. We would pay our staff a fair salary. So the idea being when you're reinvesting money back into the company, there isn't so much of a cap on salaries, we could pay ourselves as much as we would feel is appropriate for those roles. But what that does is sort of generate this share of wealth amongst everybody who's working for that company, rather than having directors sitting at the top taking you know, triple figure salaries while they're employing people to work for them on low incomes.
So traditionally, and it's certainly encouraged within social enterprises, there's not such a pay gap. A lot of social enterprises will publish their pay scales as well. So everybody is earning good money in a secure job and money is reinvested into the company rather than taken out by shareholders.
Nate: And why Cornwall? Is it because this place is like a unique environmental hub? You know, is it because there is a lot of renewable energy? Why'd you set your business up?
Amanda: Oh, all of those reasons. Cornwall has a draw for people. For me personally, I studied here in Falmouth at the Marine School back in the early 2000s. And I just fell in love with the place. I'm a nature lover. I love being out on a windy beach or in the sea. So that draw and that mix that you get in Cornwall of rural and wild elements. And community and culture. Good music.
And there is a really strong network of innovative businesses that have set up here. There's a really nice network of professionals that come together, network, share information opportunities, and it's a really vibrant place to be.
Dave: And of course, Cornwall's the only place in Britain that has that unique combination of a very strong wind resource and a really strong solar resource. Scotland obviously has a good wind resource, arguably even better than Cornwall, but it has not got a good solar resource.
The combination of that solar resource and wind resource, led Cornwall to adopt renewable energy as an industry and as a training program really. So the first ever undergraduate degree in renewable energy was at the Penrhyn campus of University of Exeter, and that attracted a lot of students, a lot of expertise, a lot of lecturers. So that was part of the development of renewables, within Cornwall.
Amanda: In the early 2000s, the Wave Hub was set up off St. Ives. Unfortunately, it never really materialised into an actual testbed, but there was a hub set out offshore of St. Ives with a cable coming back to land and a connection to the grid with the aim of introducing wave energy converters in their trial phase.
So I actually wrote my dissertation around marine energy and wave energy potential for the UK. And Dave also studied and lectured in that. So Cornwall with its obviously massive marine history has also drawn that innovation and that technology here.
Nate: Wave energy never really took off though – solar and wind is what we are talking about, there's also biomass, what happened with wave energy?
Dave: That's a complicated one. I was a wave energy research engineer, for nine or ten years and [it is an] immensely challenging, very difficult environment to work in, very difficult environment for machinery to exist in and survive in.
The escalation in forces during peak events is many orders of magnitude. So whereas a wind turbine has to endure an escalation of forces during wind, that relative escalation of forces at sea during a storm is many, many factors greater
Nate: So waves are really, really –
Dave: Very, very powerful. Wind energy is concentrated solar energy. Which makes it very effective in terms of energy capture. It's concentrated solar energy because obviously you've got heating of different parts of the globe causes the wind. Wave energy is the next step. It's concentrated wind energy. So it's tertiary solar energy. But you concentrate something that's already been concentrated and you stand a chance of over concentrating it. And then you get forces that are just too extreme to withstand, on an economic basis. We engineered solutions, but we couldn't engineer solutions that were cost effective.
Nate: I was going to ask if it was a cost or a policy reason, because I feel like wave energy is something that's appealing to people now?
Amanda: Technically, the concept of it is fantastic. But there's been a lot of those prototypes for wave energy converters that have been ripped from their tethers and smashed.
That happened in Scotland, I think it happened in Portugal. It's a really difficult industry to continue to put money into when there's technologies like solar and wind and wind energy is the cheapest source of electricity that we can produce. So a lot of the focus has gone on to on to wind and solar – proven reliable technologies that are cost effective.
That's where we're really focusing the efforts. I say we, but you know, the global movement is focusing more efforts on those technologies now.
Dave: We shouldn't forget to mention floating offshore wind. Whereas you typically would target a very energetic piece of sea for a wave energy converter, because you want that high energy, you wouldn't do that with floating wind. You'd target more sheltered sea locations, but with a good wind resource, if that's possible.
And the way you moor a floating wind converter is very different to a wave converter. The wave converters use dynamics to achieve their energy exchange, so you have to use more of them. Floating wind can be moored in a different way that doesn't incur those very high dynamic loadings. So floating wind is an industry that is being successfully trialled and will undoubtedly be a mainstream energy generation for the UK in the future.
Amanda: I think we should also differentiate between wave energy and tidal, which are two really different things. So the tidal industry is still progressing quite nicely. Again, it's expensive, but it's not in that dramatic wave environment. It's in more sheltered locations.
Nate: So we've been talking about a couple of different types of energies and their different drawbacks, wind and solar, kind of much more conventional, much cheaper than other types.
You've both been working in decarbonisation renewables for a while in the UK. What are the overall challenges that you see to renewable adoption? How are we doing now? And where do we need to go?
Dave: Massive challenges in terms of government commitment to the right solutions and consistency in government. We had a policy come into force probably 30 years ago now, called the Renewables Obligation, and that benefited hugely from cross-party agreements. Cross-party agreements of that type are becoming less and less common and renewables are increasingly becoming, especially under this, latest leadership a politicised thing, which is not good. So government needs to be consistent and lead the public rather than kowtowing to the public for electioneering. And the networks need to be resolved on an urgent basis. Having networks that are crucial to decarbonization in commercial ownership, with all the pressures that commercial ownership bring to bear is perhaps slowing down the required modifications to those systems. So, two big challenges there.
Nate: Cornwall was the first rural county in the UK to declare a climate emergency. And we've been talking with different companies that now cite the climate emergency as something that's helped them either get new projects or new investment. In your work, how have you seen the climate emergency accelerate or, maybe not, give the boost necessary to climate projects around Cornwall?
Amanda: In our work we've placed ourselves to be doing lots of work within the built environment. So we've certainly seen a drive from the housing sector in terms of new build and retrofit. There's a lot of new standards coming out. So organisations like RIBA have launched their own housing standards.
Cornwall council – we've seen them drive forward policy change in terms of what will be acceptable at planning permission level for new developments. We've seen town councils, parish councils declare climate emergencies and then really look to seek information as to what that means for them. How do they tackle this?
So the big drive a few years ago was incredible, the energy that came out of people saying “Hey, no, we want this to stop. We don't want fossil fuels anymore”. And the councils and businesses starting to declare, okay, yeah, we're we're gonna change how we do things.
As a follow on from that, we've heard people talking a lot about doing stuff differently. We've certainly helped some local companies here. We've dived deep into new business models for them. What will happen if we change this? How do we become more sustainable? What does this mean? What's the difference between net zero carbon and net zero Britain?
How does it all fit in all of that terminology? So we've done a lot of investigative work over the last few years. Dave and I were just talking this morning about how the work that we've done, for example, with Verto Homes and zero bills that's going to be one of the first projects we've worked on where we're actually seeing the product of that work being built out.
In terms of things that are actually happening, there's been quite a long period of talk and understanding and seeking information. And I hope that the next few years will actually be a push for people doing things differently. The Forest for Cornwall is an initiative that Cornwall Council have done to, you know, to protect land, rewild that land, absorb carbon.
So tree planting is very necessary. It's a great incentive and it's something that a lot of people can get on board with. But actually, what every business needs to be doing is looking at their operations and saying, how can I do this better?
And those operations have also got to be viable, financially viable and operational. And if they're not, how do we move ahead? So the last few years for us, certainly as a company specialising in solutions and consultancy, has been about advising, thinking, drawing up new ideas and looking at how we move forward. How does that actually translate into action on a tangible level?
Nate: Right, because it's not good enough to just say, let's do a bunch of solar, because then it won't connect to the grid. Or, oh, let's do a bunch of heat pumps, and then the home isn't designed correctly. These things are all interconnected, you can't just throw something up – we have the technology, we're done.
Amanda: Well, that's interesting, actually, because if we go back to 2010, where we had the feed and tariff subsidy for renewable energy and the renewable heat incentive subsidy for biomass and heat pumps – that was the boom for a lot of renewable energy industry industries.
So particularly solar has come out of that, and is now financially viable, almost a no brainer. The regulations allow you to put solar on a house, but if you put solar on a business roof that uses electricity and it's open during nine to five, that's a great match for solar energy generation.
A lot of solar and wind went up, a lot of biomass was installed. That was all actually based around financial subsidy. And then as those subsidies got cut, the industry had to start thinking about how do I actually use this energy? Because in that initial five year period, it was very much plug and play.
Pop it on the roof, forget about it. And you get a check at the end of every month because your renewable energy systems generated some energy and all of that's uncontrolled piling onto the grid in some cases, causing constraints on an over-trafficked grid.
What we're doing now is looking at that whole system integration. How does that energy get generated? When is it being used? How does it interact with the grid? How are we going to try to control it so it doesn't have a negative effect on the grid, but it has maximum benefit for the client. So the whole business model is changing now, rather than just being paid at the end of the month. It's more about how do I effectively use that electricity for my business.
Planet A Solutions is a solutions provider. That's what we set out to do. We never set out to just be a consultancy. We're working on that retrofit, problem solving angle at the moment. We've done some work for other organisations, but we're also doing internal work to deliver a product that's going to help with that transition for old houses to become more thermally efficient.
Nate: How does a solutions provider differ from a traditional consultant?
Dave: I think a traditional consultant is given a slightly tighter brief than we often take. We like to be more open with our creativity. Let's say an industrial site comes to us, might be a dairy or a university campus, and it might come and say, right, this is what we want to achieve in terms of decarbonisation and maybe, you know, cost saving or just cost neutral. And let us decide exactly what the mix is to achieve that. And that's where we specialise in complex multifaceted solutions, whereas a more traditional consultancy will be given a tighter brief.
Nate: Just writing the report, being done with it, doing the same type of work over and over again?
Dave: Yes, we see, let's say, some uninspiring work in this sector. That‘s not a criticism of the consultancy sector, but the solutions we need have to be bold and have to be increasingly more complex to achieve what needs to be achieved.
Nate: What's an example of one of these multifaceted projects that really looks at the whole energy picture?
Amanda: So recently, we've been working with a Cornish housing developer, Verto Homes. They have just achieved the first site to be accredited with Zero Bills. So Zero Bills is a premise, from Octopus Energy, in order to meet the Zero Bills criteria, homes have got to be built to a certain quality, a certain standard, with integrated renewable energy systems.
That means the house operates on a low heating requirement and a low electrical load. Now, some of that is within the control of a house builder. Some of it is within control of the people who live in the house, in terms of how much they use. But Planet A has worked hard with Verto, and with Octopus, in order to, to accredit the first whole housing estates to go through with zero bills, which is quite a breakthrough. And we won an award for that collaboration at the Exeter Property Awards. So Verto won Best Developer and, overall winner
Nate: This is zero bills even with rising utility prices that the UK has become a bit famous for. How does that work?
Dave: There's a significant amount of PV generation on the roof in this case. And a battery system. The energy supplier, Octopus, have control of the battery system and in essence they discharge the battery into the UK markets at advantageous times to earn money. And they can earn more value during those periods than the householder uses in terms of energy use within the home.
So that's how zero bills works. It's a really important step because in releasing that energy onto the system at the right time, it is actually helping the system. The system needs that balancing in various different ways that the markets manipulate energy to balance the system.
But critically it needs that balancing and it needs it more and more as we introduce renewables, because the renewables are intermittent. So that's a major step forward for the networks to have someone like Octopus contributing with the very first building site or home site of 40 homes.
You roll that out en masse and that's a very powerful body of home batteries that are capable of balancing the network at all critical times. So that's a step forward for the network. At the same time, it's a step forward for residents because electrification of heating is an expensive thing to do.
So yes, you need to upgrade your fabric and make things as minimal in terms of load as possible, but having a facility like Zero Bills to aim for, may well make electrification of heating more affordable to the masses.
Amanda: It does two things there as well, doesn't it? It takes the risk that some people perceive of a heat pump in their home away; the risk isn't on them anymore. They don't have to pay what may be expensive bills. And it also puts the requirement back onto the developer to build a home that they know is of good quality.
There's a lot of talk around new build houses not being of very good quality, isn't there, at the moment. That's generally a perception around some of the bigger housing developers that they're just thrown up in a matter of minutes and that they're not actually as good as they're supposed to be.
They're slapped with a B, roughly, you know, somewhere between a C and an A on their, on their EPC. An EPC is an energy performance certificate. So every new build housing has got to have an EPC. I think every house that's sold on the market has got to display their energy performance certificate as well. So going back to that problem where lots of our existing houses are quite poor if you're looking at an old stone farmhouse, you're likely to have sort of an E or –
Nate: Does it go all the way down to F? Oh, okay.
Amanda: Down to F, maybe to G might be the worst. What we're looking at in new build homes, you know, my house is relatively new – mine's a B. If I'd had solar on the roof, it might have pushed it up, but when you're looking at houses that are built with heat pumps and solar and good building fabric and are thermally efficient, you're looking at an A. So all of these homes that are achieving zero bills are A rated homes.
In fact, one of the homes on this project we're working on achieved absolutely full marks. Top rated energy certificate. That's really great. But that's the kind of standard that we're looking for now in new builds. That's that's what needs to happen – you've got to have a combination of excellent building fabric so that your heat loss is minimal. You've got to have good ventilation in the house to create healthy airflow.
You've got to have renewables on the roof and you've got to have a heat pump. And that's the standard that's also being pushed through in Cornwall by Cornwall Council. That's what they want to see. And in terms of getting planning permissions through for new housing estates now, they've got to meet much stricter criteria than you find anywhere else in the UK.
The work that Planet A does is oftentimes around predicting what that space heating demand is going to be, what that electrical usage is going to be, and proving that the house is going to be built to a performance standard that is suitable, for using less energy and potentially for achieving things like Zero Bills.
Nate: So it's not just using renewables, energy efficiency, or heating, it's combining all of these things together with the grid and the utilities themselves?
Dave: And all the best solutions are complex. When people say we just want, you know, one size fits all solution for what we do, and roll it out multiple times. It's not that simple. It is a complex landscape that we have to navigate.
Nate: No, magic bullets here. Cornwall Council has developed the Climate Emergency Development Plan. How has that impacted your work?
Dave: In a few ways, really, it's good to see a cohesive plan that maps out how the county can change the way it behaves with respect to emissions. It gives some clear and positive guidance in terms of renewables. Nominating a preference for wind and solar in certain regions, and making it quite clear where planning applications will be most likely to succeed and in what circumstances, and there's some revised sort of rules and guidance on planning in that respect.
So that derisks some projects. It sets new standards in terms of the built environment, in terms of housing, and non-residential building and the standards that they have to be built to. All of that feeds into our work. We take notes of those policy guidelines and requirements, and work with our clients to configure solutions appropriately.
And it has certainly prompted some of our clients to take action that they wouldn't have taken maybe because they didn't have to or because they weren't able to before.
Amanda: We should talk about a couple of those specifically that are quite interesting – there's the 10 percent net biodiversity gain. So at least 10 percent of biodiversity gain – the clues in the name – for every single development that goes through planning. That's a great one. And an increase, I think, of 15 percent of the site area, you need an increase in tree canopy cover. So, that's another one that's really incentivising that biodiversity protection.
Nate: A little philosophical question I have about that, I mean, how do you prove there's a net biodiversity gain? When, from my ecological perspective, you know that some of these ecosystems are unique, you can't really just tear down one and grow a bunch of trees somewhere else.
Is that an issue you run into? Am I being too ‘environmental ethics’ for this? Well, how does this play out in practice?
Amanda: Well, it's a very good question. There is a toolkit for calculating net biodiversity gain, which when you engage in a planning project you also engage an ecologist, so for the sites that we've worked on and I'm talking renewable energy developments, we don't generally at the moment work in planning permissions for housing, we work for planning permissions for wind or solar projects we always engage an ecologist, we do a preliminary ecological appraisal at the start, which is a habitats and protected species assessment, to see what's on the site already, what do we need to protect?
And what do we need to enhance and where is the route of least impact? So things like Cornish hedges. Cornish hedges are wildlife corridors. They're very protected. So we need to minimize damage and disruption to those. They produce corridors that link other wild areas together. So they're incredibly important for species diversification.
Nate: Animals can’t cross the road that easily. They need some kind of natural path.
Amanda: They do. And linking those corridors, those areas is incredibly important. So to go back to your original question, how do you prove it, is actually a job for the ecologists that are engaged on the project. And they will quantify what's already on site and suggest mitigation for impact and do that assessment for biodiversity net gain.
Nate: While I have you on that topic, a lot of people are of the impression that wind turbines kill birds, bats, you know, what are some of the biodiversity impacts of renewables and how does that compare to other types of energy generation?
Dave: Well, it's a really interesting discussion that you've opened up now.
Amanda: It is [laughter].
Dave: So, yes wind turbines do undoubtedly kill some birds and some bats. You are required in the planning system to evaluate that risk and if it's a very high risk to a large percentage of a local population, then that will count very strongly against that project going forward.
So there are safeguards in place. That said, there is obviously a need to protect the entire species and the entire collective of species on the planet, which is all under threat from climate change. So there's some tension in that argument there.
I think that the sensible view is that the climate emergency is the big emergency. If there are some local casualties, which don't endanger the full local species, then that is not as bad as climate change decimating all of the species at some time in the next 50, 100 years.
Amanda: There's some evidence with bats that they are attracted to wind turbine sites once they're up and running. It's almost unknown. I don't know if there's ever been so much bat monitoring that's happened, but that's only a good thing that our understanding of those species is growing because there's a lot more survey work happening around bats foraging, commuting, feeding. So there's opportunity there as well.
Dave: Yeah, I'm going to go back to – putting bats to one side for a moment, lovely creatures – birds. There's a very interesting quote that's been used by the industry several times. It's that many more birds are killed by domestic cats than by wind turbines every year. We always have to temper our discussions with some perspective. And that's an interesting one to remember.
Nate: So cat owners should have to buy biodiversity credits in order to own a cat. That's kind of what I'm hearing from –
Dave: I don't think I'd necessarily go that far –
Nate: It’s my own opinion.
Amanda: I think the high level point here is that there's impact from a lot of things that humans do. We see a lot of roadkill. There's a lot of animals that are killed, you know, by the side of the road. It's not just renewable energy, it's not just wind turbines that have an impact, but it seems to have gained momentum because there's a large proportion of people, or a seemingly large, maybe it's a small proportion of people with a loud voice, who don't like the look of wind turbines.
Nate: I found that so strange. That's come up a lot in Cornwall, the visual impact.
Amanda: Absolutely, and you by law have to do a visual impact assessment for every wind turbine. That's you know, that's fine. That's understandable. I think a lot of different developments do. But as Dave said earlier, the emergency here is that we need to stop using fossil fuels.
We've got reliable technology by which to do that and we need to put them in the right place, with the right level of wind, where they have the least impact to ecology and biodiversity, and the maximum amount of gain in terms of combating climate change. And everybody needs some form of power unless you are living in the woods.
I can't get on board with an argument where someone says, no, I don't want that because I can see it. Well, I don't want a nuclear power station up the road from me. I don't want fossil fuels being burnt in a combined cycle gas turbine for my electricity. We've got to look at the global picture here. And know that the priority is we need carbon free power.
Nate: Well said. While we've been in Cornwall so far and something that keeps coming up is this grid connectivity issue. And there's been some headlines recently that renewables projects are getting so far delayed from grid connectivity. They're actually thinking about leaving the UK. Is that an issue that you encounter out here in Cornwall with grid connectivity and how can we kind of simply explain that?
Dave: Yeah, so every project we work on virtually suffers from a problem with the grid capacity as it stands. It is a huge problem. That said, the organisation is running the grid which are three types of organisation really:
There's the national grid electricity system operator that doesn't own any assets but controls and balances the system. There's National Grid Electricity Transmission and another transmission company that own the transmission network – that's the big wires and the big substations.
And then there's the distribution network operators that own and operate the regional networks. 10 years ago, we started suffering problems, severe problems with the distribution networks in areas like Cornwall where there's a lot of renewables.
But, it's not just the distribution networks, it's the big networks as well and the system operator struggling with a whole electricity system that was never designed or built for what's called embedded generation – that is embedded all around the nation rather than centralised. The system is designed and built for a centralised generation model where all the energy flows from top down and now that it doesn't, there are all sorts of technical difficulties.
It's just a big electrical circuit and it has to obey all those laws of physics that every other electrical circuit obeys and it has to be kept safe and reliable, and being used for something which it wasn't designed for makes it quite problematic.
So the network design has to transition very quickly or as quickly as possible to suit that embedded generation. And that's where the stress comes that it is now at a point where it isn't moving fast enough to keep up with what is expected in terms of decarbonisation.
Nate: Sounds like a problem in many parts of the world. What are some of the solutions? Is it just we need to build more power lines? Do we need more engineers? Is this like an administration issue? Do we need to bribe someone?
Dave: So flexibility, in one word, is the solution – massive amounts of flexibility and that encompasses all sorts of things, including energy storage. So the ability to be able to turn loads up and down, and turn generators up and down within certain technical and financial constraints will ease the burden on the network.
That's only possible to a certain extent with ordinary loads and ordinary generators, but increasingly we're seeing schemes put forward, which are deliberately facilitating that flexibility. And one of those schemes is the Zero Build scheme that we've worked on with Octopus.
So by being able to flex those generation assets, the batteries up and down, you can service what the network needs. And the more we can apply flexibility actions, whether it comes from storage or whether it comes from loads going up and down, or generation going up and down, the less reinforcement of the system we have to undertake. And then the lower cost for everyone in the long run.
Nate: Anything else you want to say about this grid connectivity issue? Is anyone to blame? Is this a problem that we could have seen coming?
Dave: We absolutely could have seen it coming, did see it coming. It's been discussed in the power sector and the renewable sector for at least 20 years to my personal knowledge. And not enough has been done to avoid the big bottleneck we have now. And that may or may not be partly due to the fact that it's private commercial ownership.
So more investment at an earlier stage would have been good. Interestingly, the reason that that wasn't done is with the commercial model that we have at the moment, the transmission network company and the distribution network companies and the ESO, the system operator, have to claim back their costs through charges, and they're only allowed to claim charges over a certain period.
So they're not allowed, or they weren't allowed, to do what was called anticipatory investments. So they weren't allowed to build out infrastructure that was going to be required in five years time or ten years time because they would have needed, in that model, to then start claiming charges against that infrastructure immediately.
So Ofgem's role in the government's drive to keep costs as low as possible for energy users prohibited that early move on building out assets. And we've just changed that model. Where they are now allowed to plan anticipatory investments. So network upgrades ahead of need, which is a little ironic because it's already behind need.
Nate: But,
Dave: But but that is now an action that is being undertaken. But the network companies are now planning those changes. And planning to make this design and infrastructure changes in the most logical sequence, that most logical sequence doesn't necessarily help with individual projects.
So whereas an individual project, let's say you wanted to put up a new wind farm a couple of years ago, you might have had the option of paying a large sum of money to get the network reinforcement done that was required. But you were somewhat in control of that timeline. Now you're not at all in control of that timeline.
And if you want that upgrade, you wait until the time that's allotted , in the grand plan. And we're increasingly seeing 2036 referred to as the first connection time for projects that would ordinarily connect in two or three years.
Nate: And there's a 2030 carbon target, right?
Dave: There's a 2035 zero carbon power network target, yes.
Nate: Seems at odds.
Dave: It absolutely does, yeah. And, I'm not sure how that's going to play out.
Amanda: To add to that, there's a skills gap in people that can design the right systems in the right environments. The renewables industry in the UK kicked off quite heavily around 2010 with feed in tariffs, there were renewable energy obligations, basically subsidies for people to install renewable energy. So that happened and that gave the industry a great kickstart, particularly solar, but it also massively meant that people were installing renewable energy for financial gain rather than designing them appropriately to use the energy in the right space at the right time.
So now we're moving into an era where there's no subsidy and what we need to do is create better business cases for the match between renewable energy and demand, and that leads into all of the problems that Dave just linked about: the grid, the network capability, because we can't just keep throwing loads of uncontrolled generation onto a network that's not suitable for that. So we have to match generation and demand and some of the work that we do looks at, for example, private wires.
So if you put up a wind turbine or a solar farm, can we directly push that towards a local load? We've also done some work on micro grids, which helps to control local generation and the modeling that we've done shows that micro grid models can increase the amount of renewable energy generation that is consumed onsite. So again, when we look at carbon footprinting and things like that, it's much better for a business or a housing estate or whatever that model is to consume as much as it can onsite before it goes back to the grid.
Yeah, so the skills challenge is one that's still present in terms of installers and designers, and that collaboration of bringing everything together with the right knowledge and expertise to design a system that really works well.
Nate: Works well.
Dave: And going back to the government, the government needs to be stronger in this country. They tend to rely on market forces to find solutions. A classic is electric car chargers. There's still four or so different ways of charging an electric car. It's very easy to rock up at a charging point and not be compatible with the charger. The government has just allowed the sector to define what works and put it out there. Rather than mandating that this must be done in this way so that everyone has, you know, the same access. It's a free for all on commercial models. Lack of strong direction from the government holds things back.
Amanda: There's probably one thing that we haven't been really clear on here that covers everything you've asked, and that is we're here running Planet A Solutions because we're in a climate emergency and we've got to act quickly.
And that really was a big part of us setting up this company, was that we were both working for other people on short-term projects and we both really felt that we wanted to make changes and be empowered to make those changes. So, setting up a social enterprise, bringing our skills and knowledge together, and being able to really drive forward change in an emergency is what we need to see now.
That's what needs to be happening in a climate emergency. It's not business as usual. We need to take drastic action. We need to make changes to how we do things.
Dave: And on that emergency basis, it's not enough for us to think about what's going to happen in 2050 and make nice, gentle plans to get to a position in 2050. What we do in the next three years is critical to so many people on this planet and so many species.
It already looks like we're going to miss the 1.5 degree maximum temperature rise. All the scientists that we read agree that that's no longer viable. So it's looking more like 2.5, 2.8 even, I've read from the UN, is a likely projection and this is catastrophic change, so we need to really limit that as quickly as we can.
So what we're trying to do at the same time as we're delivering solutions is trying to get the message out that we have to act and we have to act really quickly. It's not enough for governments to make plans pointing at 2050. They need to embrace the crisis that it is now and act and bring a nation together to act jointly.
Amanda: I think that statement's actually one that Greta Thunberg used. It's an emergency, I want you to act like your house is on fire. And she's right. We need to, but we're not acting quickly because people are not acknowledging the changes that we're seeing. We're seeing them all over the place.
Dave: If you wanted to ask us what we need to do in the face of that emergency, it's a really easy answer.
Nate: What should we do?
Dave: We need to stop burning stuff. Everything.
Nate: No more barbecues?
Dave: That's a bit extreme. But no, we do need to stop burning things. No matter what we burn. We create greenhouse gases and there's all sorts of things that are not as bad to burn as other things. But even, you know, burning timber from managed forests, for instance. If it's an emergency which is playing out over the next three to five years, really strongly, then that cycle of reabsorption from managed forestry is a 20, 30 year cycle. That's no good. So we have to stop burning things.