Ep 2: Sustainability pioneer Chris Coonick on funding energy innovation and robot swarms

Plus tips on making your sustainability career sustainable.

While in Cornwall, we caught up with Chris Coonick as she left a position as Programme Manager of the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem)-funded Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) at Innovate UK, the UK’s national innovation agency, to a new role at the National Grid as UK/US Innovation Management Office Senior Manager. 

Image credit: Chris Coonick

Net zero position: Since living off-grid in the Pyrenees as a young traveller, Chris has enjoyed a richly diverse career devoted to the cause of getting clean energy delivered to the places it needs to be in as efficient and sustainable a way as possible.

Listen now: On Spotify and Apple podcasts.

Innovating to meet the UK’s 2035 net zero energy challenge

Chris reflects on her work with the SIF, a five-year £450m programme to accelerate the innovation needed to transform energy networks for the future — at lowest cost to consumers. As the UK seeks to transition to a Net Zero energy network by 2035, the SIF’s Giant Leap Together initially focused the challenge across four key segments: heat, zero-emission transport, whole systems integration, which includes renewable energy grid connections, and data and digitalization.

When we spoke with Chris, Innovate UK had just wrapped the “Prospering from the energy revolution” challenge, a £104m programme accelerating innovation in smart local energy systems. Her team sifted pitches from companies, particularly smaller players, in fields as diverse as agritech to engineering that could use a funding boost, plus incubator-style legal support and business mentorship, to help decarbonise the energy system. In the past, successful applicants delivered an average return of investment of £7 for every £1 of taxpayers’ money spent.

We also hear about Chris’ journey from sci-fi and architecture-interested childhood, through a brief stint in finance, to a degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master’s in Renewable Energy in the Built Environment, before going on to roles installing solar panels and delivering solar-powered vaccine fridges to UNICEF. She offers thoughts on practical steps the next generation can take to find their net-zero niche.

Illustration credit: Tom Sears

SIFt the funding opportunity and join us viewing Alpha Round 2 projects

The Fourth Round of funding for the SIF was announced in March 2024, and focuses on faster network development; greater heat flexibility; embedding resilience; and accelerating towards net zero energy network. If you have an idea for how to overcome one of these challenges and are interested in applying for funding and support through the SIF, further details can also be found in this report.

Next week, SIF will host Ofgem Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) Show & Tell webinars, Alpha Round 2, which are free online events showcasing projects incubated in the SIF proof-of-concept phase – they run for six months with funding of up to £500,000. “This is a great opportunity to engage with the networks and their partners, and ask questions about their projects; what have they learnt so far and what do they have planned next?” as Innovate UK suggests! 

Hear it here first: In an example of SIF’s emphasis on fully thinking through the consequences of any energy transition effort, the UK has completed a demonstration project to store hydrogen in underground salt caverns, potentially allowing for large-scale low-cost energy storage (although Nate is sceptical about this and most things hydrogen!).

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, this is Nate Maynard from Netting Zeros, And we're here speaking with Chris Coonick, who is from Innovate UK. And I think for our listeners it might just be helpful. Chris, who are you? And, what are you working on?

Chris: I mean, how long do you want, Nate?

Nate: Briefly, two minutes or ten years is fine.

Chris: Okay, I can condense. I am currently working at Innovate UK, where I head up a program that is funded by Ofgem, who are our energy regulators in the UK. The program is called the Strategic Innovation Fund and it's all about supporting the energy network operators, whether that's gas or electricity, transmission, distribution, to essentially overcome the challenges that there are, of which there are many, to transition to a net zero energy system.

Nate: Who or what is Ofgem?Is it a jewelry market, or…?

Chris: That would be amazing. No, it's the Office for Gas Electricity Markets. It's a kind of ex-government department type situation, and they are set up as a regulatory body to ensure that our energy markets in the UK give the best value to consumers.

Nate: I'm from the US. We have a lot of private companies. I'm from California. So we have a lot of questionable private companies running our grid. What is the situation in the UK? I understand there's a lot of private companies doing energy generation?

Chris: Yeah, there's a couple of different layers, really. The energy system in the UK was designed and set up in the Victorian ages, whereas before energy went from a power station along some lines to somebody's home or it came from a gas well and it was piped through the country and to people's businesses, for example. These days, you know it's flexible, it's agile, it goes in different directions. Sometimes it needs to be stored. Sometimes it needs to be accelerated and at the same time we need to still provide that quality. 

So the way equipment is set up, you know laptops, Computers, et cetera, in your home, they require a certain quality of power. The networks have been designed to be able to manage that quality of power to get to people's homes and the quality of the gas for people to use in their homes and businesses as well. In the UK, there's about just over 20 companies. People get confused as well about how the market works because they pay their bill to British Gas or they pay their bill to, you know, E.ON or Octopus or whoever the energy supplier is. They are players in the energy market. They're the ones who buy and sell energy. They're not the ones who actually manage how the pipes and the wires work.

Nate: Okay, that is, that is confusing, because I want to get mad at the utility company because they charged us a lot for heating, but Is that their fault, or is this the market, can we blame the market?

Chris: It's a bit of both really. I mean, there's market movements with the Ukraine war, we had to move our gas supply from Russia, et cetera. As a small island, you'd think that we would be quite independent, but actually we're not. We have lots of interconnects for our gas, we have lots of interconnects for our electricity, we get quite a lot of our electricity from France, for example. 

Ofgem come in and make sure that all of these various different players – from the generator, through the network operator, through your utility supplier to everyone else that's involved in the energy market all the way down to you as a consumer – that everyone is playing by the rules and is doing it in the fairest possible way

Nate: Where does the Strategic Innovation Fund come in, bringing that back in? This is to make it so there's more low-carbon energy in the grid.

Chris: The Strategic Innovation Fund funds the network operators. The challenges to get to net zero are huge. Especially getting to a net- zero power system by 2035, which is the ambition that the government has set out

There's many things – not only to upgrade our transmission and distribution systems to make sure that generators can connect and all that sort of thing, the whole data and digitalization point. There's some really great innovative companies out there who we work with. They do their pitching sessions, bring forward their ideas, and we help them hone and refine those ideas.

If you're constantly fishing in the same pool of organizations to try and resolve the challenges that we have, you're going to keep pulling out the same sort of ideas. So we're really there to try and broaden and widen the net as much as possible and we're doing loads of work around kind of like cross industry, cross sectors, like looking at agritech and healthcare and things like that…

Somebody may have made some amazing digital widget or whatever that works really well for aerospace. And we're saying, hey, how about you try and apply that to an energy system situation? What does that look like?

But also a lot of those organizations are small. They can't scale up the pace that is needed to hit that 2035 target. If you've got a startup company that started last year, brilliant idea, but they don't have the financial backing or the wherewithal to work with somebody like national grid – a big organization – just even trying to get onto their procurement register and negotiate contracts…

They haven't got legal expertise in their companies. You know, this is like three guys from Redruth or something. So what we do is wrap around that incubator business kind of entrepreneurial support to then help grow the companies or give them the right nurturing that they need to be able to then start working with the networks.

We've just wrapped up a program called ‘Prospering from the energy revolution’ that was directly funding businesses looking at those local energy markets…Looking at the unique aspects of particular areas to say, okay, these guys have got salt caverns – let's have a look at energy storage for salt caverns and looking at how to get local authorities more engaged.

Local authorities have got the power and the reason to want to try and push some of these things forward. So Innovate UK's work, as well as obviously funneling government funding for certain policy initiatives, we're there really to bring the right people together to discuss stuff in a room and make things happen.

Nate: What are typical types of companies that Innovate UK supports? Is there like particular types of, you know, most of your work is with transmission. Are there certain types like virtual power plants or some kind of energy efficiency thing?

Chris: Yeah, historically, certainly for my part of Innovate UK with all things network innovation, there has been quite a small pool of organisations, more kind of consultancy based I guess, which is why we're trying to widen the net – it's why I mentioned about the cross sector aspect and trying to get types of companies involved because there have historically been, relatively few organizations involved in network innovation up until now.

With regards to what we're looking for, it's ambition. We want disruptive ideas. we're there to support them regardless of who they are, whether or not they're a one man band or, you know, we've got AWS and Rolls Royce and other huge organizations that are part of project consortia that we funded.

We really do embrace all scales. We want to try and focus more on the smaller end because they're more agile and able to deliver innovation typically, um, than the larger organizations. And the larger organizations you know,

they've got their own innovation program, they've got their own innovation funding, , they should be able to respond to their shareholders and justify why they need to spend money on innovation and not have to dip into the pockets of taxpayers to do it.

Nate: That sounds really interesting. What's the most interesting company that you've heard lately you mentioned sort of salt mine storage?

Chris: Yeah. Oh my god.

Nate: Is there like a company you can't get out of your mind?

Chris: One of the first things that I was working on, when I joined Innovate UK was a program called transforming construction. I was there as the energy person within the team to look at things like active buildings, you know, how can, the built environment be a generator as well as an energy efficiency measure

Nate: These kind of like living buildings?

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Living in

Nate: That generate more power than they use.

Chris: Exactly. We wanted those net positive buildings. And then how they connect together to share energy in an intelligent way. I worked with an organization who basically did swarm robots – tiny little drone robots that would work in a swarm to essentially replace trade skills.

So they could tile walls, they could, you know, bricklay, they …

Nate: That’s really innovative.

Chris: So cool. Yeah. As I said, robots tend to be my go to – it's probably a childhood from sci-fi or something. That makes me gravitate towards it.

Nate: So you get this company, maybe they have swarm robots. Maybe they have whatever, a robot that climbs a power line and fixes it.

Chris: It's funny that you said about robots and power lines. You know, we have actually got a project where they are looking at using robots to assess the gas network to see whether or not it is of sufficient quality to be able to pipe hydrogen through it – using our current gas infrastructure running on hydrogen, whether that's a blended hydrogen or whatever. But yeah, using robots to scan and make 3D images to the point where it's of such quality that insurance companies are happy for, you know, the gas transmission.

That's a high threshold when you get insurance companies involved, it also, you know, happily picks up things like, oh, well, we've got a leak issue here at the moment. This is something from a maintenance point of view we need to go and sort out. 

So we run basically like a competition. Uh, people put their ideas in. We have a pool of expert assessors and they will come from all across various different sectors and industries we pick them for their specialisation in, you know, if it was a robotic project then it would be in robotics.

And they come along and then say, yep, we think this is a really good one. And then the ones that score the highest as in the highest quality and in that it's, it's looking at the impact and benefit of those projects.

Nate: Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. What are you looking at? What's a good project?

Chris: A good project is something that absolutely makes sense for that company. If somebody comes to us and they're an ice cream manufacturer, and they want to suddenly get into robotics, we get a lot of bonkers ideas to be honest, there has to be a reason for that company wanting to take it forward.

You know, there has to be a business case for them wanting to invest in it because we are not here to just dish out free money. That isn't the purpose. The purpose is to support them to try and deliver on their own business models. So the first thing is, does it make sense for that organization to be doing it? And have they got the right skills? It's making sure that they've got the right team around them. And if they haven't got the right team, then how are they bringing those skills and knowledge and behaviors in? And then it's what is the impact you know, going to be on them as a company? The reason why we need a business case is because we can pay them to do it and they go, Oh yeah, that was really interesting. And then it just goes flat.

Nate: Just money.

Chris: And it's just like well, I mean, if we wanted a nice report, there's cheaper ways to write nice reports. And we can just all put them on a shelf and look at them and go, oh, that was a nice report. Yeah, we really enjoyed that. So it needs to have longevity. I talk about narrative all the time with work. If there's a flaw in the narrative, that's my spidey senses going, they haven't really thought about this well. You know, they think that it's gonna be just … they're going to get to the end of this project and then magic is going to…

Nate: Step two power lines. Yeah, world domination. 

Chris: Profit, boom. So they really need to have thought all the way through and have the imagination of what they're going to do with it at the end and how they're going to carry that forward and you know, how that's all going to work. But what we look for is return on investment, for every pound that Innovate UK invest in a business, right? In the UK, we get seven pounds back in GDP, which is like gross domestic product. That's a

Nate: That’s a pretty good deal, right?

Chris: Exactly. Most of the money that we administer comes from UK taxpayers. So we have to be investing in the things that we believe and not just the companies believe, but our experts who assess them and us as an organization believe that we will actually get that money back sevenfold as a result of doing it. 

We want to see money returning to the country, but also we want to see, you know, carbon saving. Certainly with the Strategic Innovation Fund, it is all about carbon savings. Enabling our net zero energy market and energy system. It's about reducing cost to consumers. We very much want to see everyone's energy bill going in the right direction.

Nate: The right direction being lower.

Chris: Yes, absolutely. Cost of living is very, very important to us. The Isles of Scilly, which often gets wrapped into Cornwall as a county is like the most fuel poor place in the whole of the UK – mainly because they are an island an hour and a half away on a ferry off the coast of Cornwall.

Their only interconnect is a piece of cable that runs under the sea, and unhelpfully, every now and then, like a fishing trawler will just go straight through it and suddenly, whoop, no power. As a result, energy is ridiculously expensive on the island because everything has to be shipped in by boat

Nate: Or flown over

Chris: Over on a small plane or something like that. Whereas actually if they just had one massive offshore wind turbine, you know, several kilometers off their coastline, that would be able to power them. Probably without needing anything, and they wouldn't need backup diesel generators, and they wouldn't need this, that, and the other.

Nate: You mentioned there weren't offshore wind turbines in Cornwall?

Chris: No, we don't have them around our coast. 

Nate: Is there a reason for that? Like a good reason?

Chris: There has always been some extreme sensitivities around having anything that would distract from

Nate: The viewshed!

Chris: The heritage aspect of island life.

Nate: Similar to Martha's Vineyard in the U. S.

Chris: Oh, possibly. I don't know Martha's Vineyard. We've never really had generation down here, so we don't have the infrastructure to be able to get the energy, you know. If we can't even cope with onshore wind and solar farms, the idea of being able to cope with the amount of energy coming out of offshore wind is, yeah, it's just not going to happen without huge investment.

It's replacing the pylons and the cables that you see going over the countryside with things that are thicker, cables that are chunkier and can carry more power. I mean, that's kind of I'm saying it in very simple terms.

Nate: Well, I ask for that.

Chris: There's lots of other, you know, bits of technical kit, et cetera, transformers, um, that are needed, that needs to be beefed up. But yeah, basically, because we historically haven't needed to do it, there isn't, there's been no investment in the energy infrastructure down here.

—--- 

Nate: I think we might need to pull back a little bit. I want to ask about your career. You're changing jobs and you're also a woman working in the energy space?

Chris: Yeah, I'm a child of the 70s. I was always very much led down the path of ‘women aren't engineers.’ It's just not a job that women do. You know, we were kind of almost put off physics and sciences and maths because it was like, yeah, no, it's fine. , you go off and do art and drama and music and all of that kind of stuff.  At school I wanted to be an architect and then I was told literally after I'd done my GCSEs that if you wanted to be an architect, you probably should have done physics and you probably should have done better at math and all these sorts of things. Like, well, it's a bit late now. So, that was a bit harsh. But yeah, I didn't get into renewable energy till a lot later in life.

I had a rather interesting career in the finance industry. And then, uh, in the early millennium, when we had the financial crash, I took the opportunity to go travelling and decided that I was going to go and live off grid in the Pyrenees in the south of France for a couple of years.

We did the classic, buy a barn, you know, here in Provence, et cetera, um, did it up, a small child came along at that time and went, you know what, you got to stop pissing around and you need to get yourself a proper serious career.

So, in playing with energy and understanding actually how to become self-sufficient with energy, how to become self-sufficient with food – You know, I didn't even know what the word sustainable meant back then. It wasn't really a term and I was like, okay, this is what I want to do. How am I going to do this? We wanted to put up a wind turbine and we wanted to have solar panels in our little off-grid barn in the Pyrenees, but we were in the Pyrenees and the French were like, no. It's an area of natural beauty, or their equivalent of. You can't have that. You must have a diesel dirty generator and some lead acid batteries that can cause huge environmental issues. And at that point, I was just like, this is wrong. You guys are trying to protect the environment, protect everything, yet you're telling me the solution to my energy problem is the worst environmentally impacting? Just because you can't see the diesel generator chugging away, uh, but you can see a wind turbine spinning, you think that's a better solution? 

So, I then got on my high horse, went back to the UK, put myself through university, came out with an electrical engineering degree in renewable energy, and then went on to do a master's in sustainable energy in the built environment. So very much sort of picking up on my love for all things construction.

At that time the feeding tariff came in. Suddenly, anyone who was doing anything in energy and engineering set up a sideline of installing solar panels. I started designing solar power systems. Then I kind of evolved from that into designing hybrid systems. 

So when we were doing the solar power vaccine refrigerator, our main client was UNICEF. They were the people that bought most of them and shipped them around and, oh my god, if you think logistics in the UK is difficult, you try getting solar powered vaccine refrigerators to Eritrea and South Sudan – really difficult – mainly because they don't want you to have them, because they're quite happy with diesel generators – they can siphon diesel off and and use it for their own purposes. I got really into doing stuff for UN agencies, hybrid systems, helping the UN themselves with being more sustainable in their power.

Nate: What would you say to a young person, maybe they're going to enter college or leave college, or they want to do a career transition and they're really interested in net zero and they want to do what Chris is doing? What would you tell someone to do today?

Chris: So I have the same conversation with my daughter, who hasn't followed in my footsteps with renewable energy, but she's going to be a biochemist and that's pretty cool, too. And it's having the end in mind – figuring out what you want to do. And there are so many jobs out there, around all things energy, renewable, sustainability, et cetera. Have a really good look around the marketplace. and then have a look at, you know, what are the requirements for that job and work your way backwards.

If what gives you a buzz is climbing high heights, become a wind turbine technician. You know, go out onto the North Sea rigs and, and climb a wind turbine. I mean, quite frankly, I probably shouldn't have become a solar engineer because I really don't like heights. At one point I was standing on Marks & Spencer's East Midlands Easter Distribution Centre, whose roof is the size of six football pitches. I mean, it's phenomenally huge. It's covered in solar panels and I stood at the top of it and I went, okay, right, I don't like heights. What am I doing up here?

And at that point I knew, okay, I'm never going to be an O&M engineer because it needs me to be on top of very tall buildings and I don't like that. So, find out what it is that you would quite like to do, but also what fits with your character and how you like to do things. There's lots of great personality tests and things that really tell you about who you are and how you like to work. The other thing about being a wind turbine technician is actually it can be quite lonely, because generally they don't send a whole team of you out to go and fix problems, it might just be one of you.

And don't let anyone tell you that you can't be an engineer just because you're good at art or just ‘cause you can play a musical instrument or just because, you know, actually in the first couple of years, you weren't particularly interested in math.

A lot of that comes down to having the right teacher as well as having a natural ability for these things. And if you haven't got a natural ability, it just means you've got to work a bit harder, but it doesn't mean you can't do it and you shouldn't do it.

Nate: That's inspiring. I wish I'd heard that ten years ago.

Chris: And I think the other thing is, encourage others, you know? I'm a STEM ambassador, so I go into schools, I talk to girls on Women in Engineering Day and things like that and say, ‘you can do whatever you want’.

I really enjoy talking to young ladies who like watching makeup videos on TikTok and all these sorts of things. I go, what do you enjoy about it? Is it the creative side of it? Is it that you're creating something? Is it that you’re problem solving? When you start to dig into what is it that they really enjoy, you actually find – you know what – actually, you'd be an amazing material scientist because you are looking at all of these beauty products and you are deciding what is the best outcome for the input that you're giving and what is the best sort of surface and all that.

Nate: Tying this back to the work that you were doing or has been in your career, how then do you support these companies?

Chris: As part of the Strategic Innovation Fund, every year we do the Giant Leap Together, which sounds a bit cheesy, but starts with challenge setting. It starts with us getting all of the various different stakeholders in the energy sector community: our regulators, the networks as the key players, central government, but also finding out what's coming out with regards to research from our amazing universities and the academics, but also listening to the problems that are going on – people who are trying to engage with the energy system, what their problems are. 

We bring together all of these wonderful inputs, and we start refining a list of what those challenges are. We're just about to enter into the fourth version or the fourth year of running these challenge settings and it can be everything from how to maintain safely offshore wind turbines, how to safely disconnect them from the national grid system, for example, all the way down to, well, we want to start having hydrogen buses – what sort of infrastructure has a local authority that is trying to procure a hydrogen bus operator? How are they going to fuel the buses? How are they going to maintain them, etc?

Nate: Because hydrogen can blow up. 

Chris: Exactly. It's such a multifaceted system. We kind of looked at it in the first year, and then last year we generalized it as heat, zero emission transport, whole systems integration, which includes that renewable energy kind of connection point, and data and digitalization. So those were our four overarching themes, which we still have. I mean, those are the big things. You're not just gonna like, oh yeah, heat, we sorted that –

And then every year we get more and more specific into the bones of what those problems are. And so we go through this challenge setting process. Last year we had like 100-150 odd challenges that either the networks were having internally, or with suppliers, or stakeholders were having issues, from a policy perspective.

There's lots of different relationships and challenges that are going on. We take those and move into this ideation phase, which is where we start stimulating the ideas, okay, these are the challenges. How do we go about this? That's when we run those sort of pitching sessions with businesses.

And then that goes into the incubation, which is when the networks start working with the people who've made those ideas – formulating what a project might look like and then that goes into delivery, which is then when we fund them and they kind of off they go and start their amazing journey.

Nate: What's the most bizarre challenge that you've encountered? I mean, I think decommissioning wind turbines was something that didn't occur to me as an obvious challenge. I don't find them that dangerous, but I suppose they are.

Chris: Yeah, from my days when I was doing my masters in renewable energy, you know, the logistics of actually delivering parts of equipment, as we said here – Cornwall is a fantastic location for onshore wind, because of the resource, because of the land, blah, blah, blah, you try getting a 200-foot blade on the back of a lorry through the winding cobbled streets of Cornwall. The logistics of delivering bits of kit and replacement bits of kit. I used to do research for the government around the fire risk of solar panels, particularly the fire risk of solar panels on, like blocks of flats and public buildings, where it is really, really difficult to get fire crews. up onto roofs quickly enough in a safe way to then extinguish fires that involve electrical pieces of equipment that are always live when it's sunny.

Nate: That didn't occur to me.

Chris: There are some really interesting unintended consequences of, you know, renewable energy and people wanting to do the right thing, people wanting to make changes and invest in these things. But actually, if you haven't got a company hat thinks through the full lifetime of that that asset, that generation plant or whatever, you can get some very unusual, unintended consequences – it's thinking it all the way through to the end.

If you're thinking about installing solar, if you're thinking about wind, you think about, you know, any of the others, anaerobic digestion, etc.  It's gonna be there for 25 plus years. If you don't look at it from all sides and think about all of the risks associated with that, especially if you're doing something innovative and new…Nothing is ever a direct replacement. There is always nuances to it and how things integrate and how things fit together and oh, I didn't really think about all of the possible things that might happen in this situation that then that leads to this scenario. That really is, one of the pitfalls we need to not fall into is to try and sprint finish and take the easiest and quickest route, but not the most sustainable route.

Nate: It’s a balance. We only have a few years to stop climate change and save the world, but we've got to really think it through fully. And then we spent, you know, how many decades just trying to get people to even consider solar panels? And now that they're cheap enough, we might make fires –

Chris: Worse, you know,

Nate: You know?

Chris: They just need to be installed properly and that's fine. The technology is perfectly safe. I have these conversations with colleagues all the time, actually all of the technology and the stuff we need to kind of do the best we can with regards to climate change. It's already there. We don't have the time to make the new Stirling Engine or make the new this, that, or the other.

Like you said, we need to make the most of the technology we've got now and just roll it out at a quicker pace. Because, actually, we have troubleshooted most of the risks around that technology already. So introducing something completely different at this stage could potentially cause more issues than resolve in the longer term.

Nate: Let's dig into the challenges. What are, what are the challenges in the UK in terms of decarbonizing the grid? We talked a little bit about the transmission lines.

Chris: Specifically in Cornwall, if we bring it to a local example, Cornwall has got a huge amount of renewable energy generation. If you travel around the county, you will see solar farms, you will see wind farms, certainly per head of person who lives in Cornwall, we have the highest proportion of renewable energy installed, mainly because there's not a huge amount of people living in Cornwall.

We have a really good resource, we are on that little sort of southwesterly tip of the UK where we have the major southwesterlies coming in across the Atlantic, which is absolutely fantastic for wind. If we had offshore wind down here. That would be fantastic as well. But unfortunately, we don't. But we also have a really good solar resource because clouds get sucked up through the English channel on the way.

Nate: So it's normally sunny here?

Chris: Yeah, yeah. If you'd arrived yesterday, you would have seen blazing blue skies.

Nate: Oh, they knew, they knew.

Chris: We have one of the best solar resources in the whole of the UK. We're not a hugely urbanised area, so there is space, there is land. Wind turbines generate better in rural compared to urban situations. So, with regards to yes, brilliant resource, but also opportunity and availability of land, et cetera, is more doable here in Cornwall than it is perhaps in, in some of the other counties. 

But we also have a lot of cost constraints, so we are essentially at the end of a long piece of string that comes down through the UK and kind of wiggles its way out to the tip of Cornwall, because we don't have a huge amount of industry down here, we've got agriculture with like dairy and the fisheries but there isn't massive manufacturing. So when the sun is shining, when the wind is blowing, we actually generate more energy than is needed locally here, which the grid infrastructure can't cope with. It says, no, no, no.

Nate: That's bad.

Chris: It's really bad. So at the moment, each of the solar and wind farm operators, they all have these agreements with the grid providers to say, okay, well, you know, sorry, if we haven't got the demand in the local area and we can't shift it up country to where the demand is, we're gonna have to turn you down or even worse off.

Nate: You can be like, penalised for making too much energy?

Chris: Like not financially penalized, but it's more that they can't generate the energy to then sell the energy. It's more removing the opportunity for them to make an income out of what the potential is there to generate and the potential for the energy is there but they can't take up that opportunity because the grid is so constrained.

There is no way that they can actually get the energy onto the grid. You end up with beautiful sunny days and really windy days and you'll look and the wind turbines aren't spinning and you think, what's going on? What's wrong with this picture?

We're starting to get server houses built down here. So servers require a huge amount of energy. They need a lot of cooling. It doesn't really matter where they're positioned, so to speak. You know, they can be pretty much anywhere in the UK or in the world. It's all about having kind of a grid connection to be able to get that constant energy.

For example, if you look at the likes of Amazon and Google, when they build new server houses, etcetera, they're building the energy infrastructure as part of it, so they can be completely self-sufficient.

Nate: Is that an opportunity for Cornwall to be a clean energy hub? 

Chris: That is kind of where it sort of started in Cornwall. I mean we're home of the UK's first wind farm at Delabole. We've got The Telegraph Museum, we were the first landing point for telegrams coming from America. Historically we have been quite pioneering as a county. Cornwall Council were one of, if not the first council to start investing their own money in renewable energy. I mean, they went round and put solar panels on buildings, they own a number of wind turbines within the county themselves.

They sort of shifted themselves from just being local authority to actually being an owner of these sorts of assets. We have got quite a lot of pioneering agricultural organizations that have taken the opportunity as they see it as, having a solar farm is like, just another output of the land that they can have, they grow their own energy, and, those forward thinking attitudes, you see quite a lot of that in Cornwall.

Nate: That makes sense. We have Cornwall where we generate a lot of the power but we can't really send it back, you know, to the rest of the Isles. What are some other ones?

Chris: So there's a whole piece around how to engage those who quite frankly have got better things to worry about than saving money on their energy or being more energy efficient or how energy efficient their home or business is. When you've got somebody who's in a real vulnerable situation, they're just thinking on, how can they stay healthy and fit and, make ends meet,

So that is something that I've been working with my community energy hat on locally of like, it's not necessarily hard to treat when you talk about kind of retrofitting homes. It's usually the hard to reach. A

Another aspect of Cornwall is we have a lot of off gas grid homes. The gas network just hasn't been built out to small villages because there was only ever a handful of houses there originally. It started off as six homes in that village, you know, a hundred years ago. Now there could be 600 homes that have been built around there. And they're all off gas, which means typically they will be oil, hopefully not coal. I think we've done pretty good phasing that out. Or they might have like, Their own gas tanks themselves where they need to like LPG.

Nate: Is there wood burning out here?

Chris: Yeah, okay there's, there's some really heavy, heavy carbon. And I think that is when we talk about low hanging fruit of what can Cornwall do as a county to try and reduce its emissions, you know, quicker rather than anything, weaning people off oil and LPG and that kind of thing.

And that comes back again to the state of our infrastructure, for electricity. That is the obvious thing, that is what the UK government is encouraging with regards to heat pumps, etc. But if you're doing that, you need a really quite well equipped, insulated home. Otherwise, you are using a lot of electricity to create some heat that then just leaks out of your roof and your windows and all of the gaps around them.

Cornwall has a particularly low energy efficiency for its buildings because of the the materials they were built from, but we also don't necessarily have the supply chain and the trades, that are needed to do really good retrofits, and it costs money, and going back to the fuel poverty point, if you've got somebody who is worrying about how to make ends meet, they can't afford £12,000 to put a heat pump in and another £6,000 to insulate the walls and the roof.

There are grants available, but you need to have the supply chain there to be able to deliver the work that needs doing. There was a government grant that got axed which was all around green retrofits, and it was helping people either insulate or move over to low carbon heating or those sorts of things. And it was just impossible in Cornwall. 

We just didn't have…I mean, there was this lovely little website. You could go in, put in your address, blah, blah, blah. And it would suggest, oh, you've got an energy performance certificate, EPC rating of this. Therefore, we suggest you do have a look at these things. And these are the companies in your local area that can help you with making these informed decisions and when I did it, there were three companies in the whole of Cornwall that wanted to look at insulation Two of which you phoned up and had an automatic answer machine going we're too fully booked. We were not taking any more inquiries about the grants and the other one didn't even answer the phone. So it was like already, somebody who works in energy, so I know how these things work, I had hit a brick wall And that was it.

I was like, right, I'm done. I'm done. So you can imagine how frustrating it is. And that whole supply chain, you know, the government, it wants us to roll out heat pumps across the UK. I think we have to install something like 600,000 a year or something. We just don't have…If you think how many heat pumps have to be installed, we just don't have that number of installers, that are trained and are capable to do that kind of work, and we don't have the technology to go and buy them to actually get installed. So there's massive supply chain issues. You know, we've still got a whole host of gas engineers who…

Nate: Are probably resistant to this heat pump business?

Chris: Well, yeah, I mean, you imagine. It's probably very similar to the construction industry, where, you know, the majority of people who work in the construction industry are over the age of 55, and, are going to be retiring in the next 10 years.

It's a massive problem. I think it's fairly similar figures for the gas industry. These are people that have been working day in, day out for their whole lives in gas. They know exactly what they're doing. They don't want to turn around 10 years before they retire and suddenly move over to a completely different technology that isn't gas and is on electricity.

They've got to spend money on training. They've got to do this, that, and the other. They're just not going to do it. So we've got the problem that, you know, our higher education establishments, our colleges, our apprenticeship schemes aren't churning out the right skills that are needed for school leavers and sort of like young generation to come in and have the skills that they need to go and install heat pumps and fit really good installation and do all of that great stuff that we need. We just don't have the supply chain sorted. Unfortunately. 

Nate: I guess bringing it back to Cornwall, how's Cornwall doing? Is this a local authority that's taking action and kind of pushing things along?

Chris: They have got the ambition there. And I think they would, there's certainly individuals within the council and even, you know, within the local councils as well that can really do it.

There's just the joining up of dots, having sort of sporadic one off people that are trying to drive isn't very effective. You need to join up the dots. There's a really good example of how this has worked well in the Welsh government. They brought around this thing called, it's like the next generation policy or something like that. It basically says anything that goes through the Welsh government parliament, is what you're suggesting going to be a bad thing for the next generation?

Nate: Wow.

Chris: Is it going to cause them harm or, you know, cost them money or are we just deferring a problem until later on? And, and they have every single thing that goes through the Welsh government has to pass this kind of stage gate of like: What are we doing? And I think that just needs to be rolled out across the whole UK. 

Nate: It should be rolled across the world. Thanks for sitting down with us, Chris. You shared so much. The UK's grid, its challenges, decarbonization, the Isles of Scilly and their fuel poverty challenges, engineering, too much to list. So thank you so much for sitting down with us today.

And we hope to have you back soon.

Chris: Thanks for inviting me. Thank you.