No.75 January 2010
Weak signals from the future How smart thinkers see round corners
The rebirth of wind The end of the office The future of flight
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Contents
Contents
Number 75 January 2010
18 30 34 22 Features
Regulars
Partner viewpoints
18 Will the future take flight?
4
riefings – The cutting edge B of news and green innovation
34
24
22 Four trends that are reshaping America
thousand words – A In Scotland, darkness visible
green economic revival A for rural areas Commission for Rural Communities
35
he Knowledge – Anna Simpson talks T to John Griffin, CEO of Addison Lee
36
ixed messages on energy M efficiency Energy Saving Trust
26 The future’s not what it used to be
37
orum update – How to live F well off the fat of the land
42
ustainable entrepreneur – S Jonathan Robinson, The Hub
With the spotlight hovering over airline emissions, Roger East explores the possibilities of zero-emission aviation Photo: Nick Galante/PMRF; KFEM; Vincent Callebaut Architectures; Stichelton Dairy Ltd; www.johnsturrock.com; Patrick Gillooly
42
The Green Futures Interview: Lester Brown
uturists are reshaping the way leading F organisations plan for sustainability, says James Goodman
30 What’s a weak signal? And what do we do with it? Hugh Knowles tunes into subtle clues of what lies ahead
Front cover: Dragonfly by Vincent Callebaut Architectures
www.greenfutures.org.uk
41
44
46
oapbox – Andrew Simms S argues for ‘A Great Transition’
47
Letters – Readers respond to Green Futures online and in print
48
onathon Porritt – Decentralisation: J idealistic, but without sufficient funding, unrealistic?
he energy doctor is in T the house Groundwork he growing potential of biogas T Entec UK and Ecotricity
Briefings: Cities that float p9
Green Futures January 2010 1
Comment
About us Green Futures is the world’s leading magazine on environmental solutions and sustainable futures. Its aim is to demonstrate how a sustainable future is both practical and desirable – and can be profitable, too. Readership includes key decision-makers and opinion-formers in business, government, higher education, the media and NGOs. The flagship publication of Forum for the Future, Green Futures is financed by subscribers, advertisers and charitable foundations, and by contributions from members of its partnership programme.
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Deputy Editor ANNA SIMPSON Editorial and Marketing Coordinator KATIE SHAW Consulting Editor ROGER EAST Contributing Editor BEN TUXWORTH Magazine Design JENNY SEARLE ASSOCIATES/ ANDY BONE Founder JONATHON PORRITT
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Editorial
Contributors to this issue include:
W
Lester Brown has come a long way from his days as a New Jersey tomato-grower, to the point where he’s described by The Washington Post as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers”. Founder of both the Worldwatch and Earth Policy Institutes, he’s won plaudits for bringing to America’s attention both the scale of the environmental crisis – and the scope for solutions.
hat’s spectacularly wrong with this famous
prediction, said to have been made in the closing years of the century? If London traffic keeps on growing at present rates, the city will grind to a standstill within 60 years. On the surface, it sounds like a reasonable guess. It wasn’t predicting a gridlock of cars, and it wasn’t made last century, but in 1890. Our Victorian proto-futurist was convinced that, by 1950, the thoroughfares would be hopelessly clogged by an accumulation of horse manure six feet deep… History is littered with posthumous embarrassments such as these [see ‘Extrapolators beware’, p33]. Each of them serves as an object lesson in the dangers of projecting present trends into the future – just one of the pitfalls facing those foolish enough to make forecasts. On the surface, they make a mockery of ‘futurism’. But this has recently become a much subtler science. The cream of today’s futurists are not so concerned with guessing what might happen – entertaining though that is. Instead, as James Goodman explains [‘The future’s not what it used to be’, p27], their most exciting work is about preparing us for whatever the future might fling: to become more adaptable, more resilient – in effect, more sustainable… Depending what you read or watch, ‘the future’ can by turns sound scary, sexy or just plain mysterious. Yet its seeds are all around us in the here and now. There’s no shortage of clues as to how we’ll be living in five, 10, even 50 years time. ‘Weak signals’ abound – on the street and in the blogs, in academic journals and retail trends. But as Hugh Knowles points out [‘What’s a weak signal? And what do we do with it?’, p30], these are often drowned out by other noise. And nothing’s louder than the constant babble of reassurance that the future will be just like now – only more so. It’s not just Victorians fretting over streetfuls of manure who’ve been deafened by it. How many music or media moguls in the early 1980s imagined that those techy young men writing lines of code in some campus IT lab, were starting a revolution which would sweep rock-solid business models into the dungheap of history? That the geeks, in effect, would inherit the earth? Precious, precious few… It wasn’t so long ago that we imagined 21st century skies as alive with personal jets, carrying commuters on the skyways of the future. Now many are wondering if aviation itself is set to be the first great industry to be sacrificed on the altar of a stable climate. In ‘Will the future take flight?’ [p18], Roger East explores whether there is still room for a form of transport whose greenhouse effect is second to none. To date, technical fixes have proved elusive. So will one finally emerge – a long-haul airship, say, or a sleek ‘solar wing’ – in time to keep us flying in the low carbon skies? Or will we somehow learn to live without planes? Either way, it’s likely that the first hints of the eventual outcome are already here among us – if we could just tune into those weak, elusive signals, seeping in from the future to now…
Looking to the past to predict the future is an art that James Goodman has been busy practising ever since he studied history at university. As Forum’s Head of Futures, he’s applying that skill to help the likes of Unilever, the National Health Service, PepsiCo and TUI Travel rethink the way they plan ahead. He’s also the author of Making the Net Work – a manifesto for sustainability in a digital society.
Writer and journalist Trish Lorenz covers design, architecture and sustainability for The Guardian, the Telegraph and Monocle, among others. After 20 years living in London, she has decided to spend the winter in Berlin, where she is learning German and searching out the warmest long johns on the market.
Lester Brown photo: KFEM
Martin Wright Editor in Chief martin@greenfutures.org.uk
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Roger East has particular interests in energy and appropriate forms of transport, and uses both when pedalling his distinctive bike around town. Hugely experienced in both global politics and sustainability, he is a frequent contributor and consultant to Green Futures, where he was formerly editor.
Green Futures January 2010 3
Briefings
Briefings
12 We got ourselves a convoy…
Big, green and gorgeous Due to open this year, the Lighthouse Tower combines solar and wind power with super-efficient design – paving the way for a new generation of ultra-sustainable skyscrapers.
8
Wireless sensors which join up to eight vehicles in a tightpacked line could curb congestion, save fuel, speed journeys – and even allow drivers to take a nap.
$61bn
The sum allocated to stimulate the energy sector in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Worth a total of $787 billion, the Act makes Britain’s timid approach look like a wasted opportunity.
Revolution in the air Photos: VisionsofAmerica/Joe Shom/Getty Credit Atkins engineering design consultancy;
17 A wave of revolutionary new designs for wind turbines is promising to boost efficiency at low wind speeds, and cut noise levels, too. It could even spark a ‘micro wind’ revival in towns and cities.
4 Green Futures January 2010
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Briefings
Hot rock power
15 Future diets to cut more than pounds
10 As energy prices resume their rise, Britain and the US are poised to drill deep for their energy. Not in the search for oil, but to tap geothermal power: ‘deep heat’ from hot rocks.
Counting carbon rather than calories is giving Swedes an appetite for change.
All I want to do is to be able to feed my family and send my kids to school. If this means I have to cut trees, I will. If I can make more money by not doing so, then I won’t.
Photos: Freebird /Shutterstock Shutterstock; Jason Todd/Getty; Andrei-Dorian/istock; Delta Sync; Vincent Callebaut Architectures
Ardianto, farmer, Sumatra, Indonesia
Whatever floats your… city
9 Two of Europe’s leading architectural designers are responding to rising sea levels by fashioning cities that float…
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Green Futures January 2010 5
Briefings
Whipping up the wind New offshore power plant rides a wave of incentives
Medieval castle soaks up 21st century rays Welsh fortress gets into hot water with solar thermal Built for the medieval wars of King Edward I, one 14th century castle in north Wales is preparing for a different kind of battle – the fight against climate change. Chirk Castle, in north Wales, has installed a £23,500 solar thermal system that will provide hot water for the castle during the summer months. In one year it is expected to generate 8,000kW of energy, saving the castle £3,000. Keith Jones, Environmental Practices Advisor for the National Trust in Wales, believes that the eight roof-mounted solar panels will be inconspicuous, and won’t affect the appearance of the castle, which is Grade One listed: “We do our homework to ensure that appropriate technology is tailored to specific buildings. You’ve really got to go and look for these panels!” Funded by the National Trust’s Green Energy Fund, the system should reduce the carbon footprint of the castle by over 4,000kg of CO2 per year. “We’ve got a lot to learn from heritage buildings,” says Martin Hunt, Head of Built Environment at Forum for the Future. “They’re built to last, unlike many of our new buildings today, and can still be carefully adapted to help tackle climate change and reduce their running costs.” – Fiona King
Expanding horizons
30,000 tonnes The weight of batteries discarded as waste in the UK every year – of which less than 1,000 tonnes are recycled. New EU legislation requires that all supermarkets offer battery recycling services from January 2010. Sainsbury’s is taking a lead, becoming the first national UK retailer to offer a combined collection scheme for batteries and low-energy lightbulbs.
6 Green Futures January 2010
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Photos: NTPL/Matthew Antrobus, www.nationaltrust.org.uk; Holmes Garden Photos/Alamy; JacksonBone
Ancient futures
Increased financial support for offshore wind in the UK is helping to make borderline developments viable. Throughout 2010, each megawatt will earn two renewable energy certificates (ROCs) – instead of just one. The resulting boost in value has sparked new investment, with Centrica investing £725 million to build a 270MW farm off the Lincolnshire coast. The farm, to be called Lincs, will be financed in part by the sale of a stake in Centrica wind farms to asset management firm, TCW. Centrica plans to begin the construction of Lincs next year, installing 75 3.6MW Siemens AG turbines. Due for completion in 2012, the wind farm is expected to meet the needs of 200,000 households. Britain currently leads the world in both number and capacity of planned offshore projects, with a total of 8GW on the drawing board. But installed capacity totals just 600MW, according to the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA). “Centrica’s project definitely generates momentum for the industry,” said BWEA’s Charles Anglin. According to a review by the Carbon Trust, bold investment could see the UK account for 45% of the global offshore wind market by 2020. – April Streeter
Briefings
Routing for change Peter Madden scans the showrooms of the future In 20 years’ time, our city streets will no longer be dominated by the motor car. Vehicles of all shapes and sizes will be zooming silently around, with a variety of new technologies filling the space between the car and the bicycle. Cars are popular because they give drivers freedom and control. But the downsides, such as congestion, pollution, noise and road accidents, are well known. Public transport is, of course, a more sustainable alternative. But it, too, has its problems. It’s relatively unresponsive to personal needs and can’t provide universal coverage – particularly in low density areas. Bicycles are part of the answer, but not everyone wants, or is able, to bike. So, instead of driving around in cars that are threequarters empty and take up a huge amount of space, we’ll be moving about in a range of smaller electric vehicles – souped-
up bikes, covered scooters, pod-cars and so on – which better suit our personal needs and the purpose of our journey. We won’t own these vehicles; we’ll rent them on demand. You might simply stroll up to the nearest rack, swipe your card to grab a vehicle, then drop it off near your destination. People will switch from one mode of transport to the next with little hassle, perhaps taking an electric bike (e-bike) to the station, catching a train, then hopping into a personal rapid transit pod at the other end. We may even see an increased use of public transport as it becomes more joined up and accessible. These new personal vehicles will be efficient and smart. They’ll know the quickest route to take, and sophisticated pricing and logistics will balance out supply and demand. There are signs that these changes are happening. Last year, the Chinese bought 21 million e-bikes, compared with 9.4 million cars, and it now has four times as many e-bikes as cars on the road. Heathrow Airport is trialling a personal rapid transit system to take passengers from the car parks to the terminals. And across the world, on-demand transport systems like the Paris Vélib or city car clubs are proving increasingly popular. There could be some sustainability downsides to this more personalised mobility. It could encourage people to travel yet more. Pedestrians might face crowded and seemingly chaotic streets. And we certainly don’t want a generation of people who never walk anywhere. But, if handled well, there are huge potential benefits in cutting pollution, freeing up space and improving access. Maybe the Sinclair C5 was just 40 years ahead of its time? ¥ Peter Madden is CEO, Forum for the Future.
It’s a bike, apparently
Weak signals from the future
Photos: Benoit Doppagne/Staff/Getty; Mark Kuiper/shutterstock
Bionic bacteria
Instead of wrapping your tasty treats in plastic, why not wrap them in… bacteria? Design students think Acetobacter xylinum could replace plastic packaging. They are feeding it sugar and watching as the microscopic organism multiplies, wrapping itself around your favourite product to give a 100% biodegradable container. A couple of bioactives in the mix will knock out any E. coli or salmonella lurking on the supermarket shelf, too. And the waste wrapping? Use it to insulate your loft, or pop it in the water filter under the sink. – Giles Crosse
Home improvements
Your virtual home energy bill has shrunk to the size of a pixel. In the kitchen, your fridge slowly digests any food it identifies as leftover, using the energy to power your ultra-efficient washing machine. As the spin kicks in, it turns a tiny turbine, providing power to heat up some water for the dishwasher. As the dishes begin to sparkle, the steam drives another tiny turbine… and so on. With rising energy prices driving innovation, on-site recycling and micro-generation could see our homes minimise waste for us.
Turbulent top-up
You speed along in your opentop EV, the wind rushing through your hair – and through an array of microscopic generators embedded in the windscreen. Measuring no more than 200 microns across, the 40 volt devices use piezoelectric polymers to harness the turbulence of travel. Made with weather-resistant materials, they can power your GPS or charge your phone.
Forum for the Future’s new blog tracks weak signals from the future: www.forumforthefuture.org/futures/weak-signals
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Green Futures January 2010 7
Briefings
Big, green and gorgeous
Old, but not cold
Design for efficient, self-sufficient skyscrapers reaches new heights
Towering potential: the Pearl River (left) and the Lighthouse
Public buildings wrap up for winter Energy efficiency boosted by £50 million in interest-free loans A loan scheme to retrofit Britain’s public sector buildings could see the end of draughty, inefficient schools and hospitals. Salix Finance, the funding arm of the Carbon Trust, will offer £50 million in interest free loans to public sector bodies in England to catalyse investment in energy efficiency measures. The programme is designed to “drive energy efficiency savings through the public sector,” explains Paul Chisnell, Head of the Salix Energy Efficiency Loans Scheme, “and to take advantage of technologies that are relatively low-hanging fruit” – such as improved insulation and lowcarbon lighting. The loans can be paid back through savings made on energy bills. The Salix loan scheme is another piece in the increasingly detailed jigsaw of carbon financing aiming to transform homes and buildings into paragons of sustainability. Gemma Adams, Senior Sustainability Advisor at Forum for the Future, remarked that the success of Salix’s interest-free loans would be one to watch. “There’s nothing quite like it. In taking a lot of the risk out, it makes it easy for organisations to make savings where these are clear.” The £50 million is, for now, a one-off scheme. But with the loans likely to be snapped up by the end of the year, there’s going to be a high demand for continuing financial innovation to set carbon-cutting measures in motion. – Nick Chan
1,000 The number of New York building superintendents to be trained in energy efficiency practices over the next year. A programme will provide 40 hours of training to eligible members of New York’s largest property service workers union, 32BJ. Smarter management practices could cut energy use by up to 40%, saving $230 million a year.
8 Green Futures January 2010
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Photos: Andresr/Shutterstock; SOM/Crystal CG; Credit Atkins engineering design consultancy
Rising up through the thick Guangzhou smog is the Pearl River Tower. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the curvilinear edifice sets out to prove that one can be very big and very green – yet beautiful, too. Due for completion in 2010, the Tower is expected to be the world’s most efficient super-building, and hopes are high that it will lead the way for more ultra-sustainable skyscrapers. The Pearl River Tower boasts an array of green technology, including a greywater recycling system, and 3,000m2 of photovoltaic (PV) panels. Its concave façades increase the wind speed through four vertical axis turbines – each with a capacity of 10,000kWh per year on two of the building’s 71 floors. Combined, these micro-generation features will provide an estimated 3% of the building’s annual energy needs. But this is not the only green giant of the construction world. Rivals include Dubai’s Lighthouse Tower. In terms of energy generation, the Lighthouse will have 4,000 PV panels and three large 225kW wind turbines which, alongside other green features, will help it become a LEED platinum-rated building when opened in 2010. New build isn’t always necessary to take these concepts forward. In 2007, the 1960s CIS Tower in Manchester was brought up to date, with the installation of over 7,000 PV panels on the façade and 24 wind turbines on the roof. These features enable the tower to generate 180,000 kWh per year, or 10% of its energy needs. While these features undoubtedly make a difference to a building’s eco-credentials, says Martin Hunt, Head of Built Environment at Forum for the Future, “any designer or builder professing to be green needs to back up their claims with hard facts, or it’s only so much eco-bling”. And for any building, renewable energy generation is only part of the picture. Other considerations include the whole life of any construction, transport issues, and internal management. As Hunt puts it: “a green building is only as green as its users”. – George Wigmore
Briefings
Wind off the radar ‘Stealth turbines’ could cut planning objections over air traffic control The UK could add a further 5GW of wind power capacity if a new project succeeds in resolving one of the main objections to wind power: that turbines clutter up the radar. The project, which is joint funded to the tune of over £5 million by the industry, the Government and the Crown Estate (owner of all Britain’s offshore sites), is looking at both sides of the issue. On the one hand, it is considering ways to make the turbines invisible, perhaps with a coating like that used by stealth bombers. And on the other, it aims to sharpen up the radar software so that it’s no longer fazed by them.
Clean sweep
Significantly, it’s the National Air Traffic Services themselves who will be doing the research, alongside radar boffins Raytheon Canada. One way forward – inevitably dubbed the ‘stealth turbine’ by its developers – offers an innovative redesign of turbine blades with new composite materials, combined with a spray-on coating for the towers. The result of a five-year collaboration between defence technology specialists QinetiQ and turbine manufacturers Vestas Wind Systems, this new design has a reduced ‘radar signature’ – to the point where air traffic control and defence systems can factor it out. Announcing the success of its trials in Norfolk, Mark Roberts of QinetiQ said that the technology “could be a genuine game-changer for the renewable energy industry”. – Roger Eastxxxxxxx
A ‘dash for wind’ on a scale of the recent ‘dash for gas’ is needed to ensure our carbon targets are met and our nation’s energy security is protected. Tom Delay, Chief Executive Carbon Trust
Photos: Fippzor/Shutterstock; Shutterstock; Delta Sync; Vincent Callebaut Architectures
Whatever floats your… city
Two architectural companies are responding to the problem of rising sea levels, by fashioning cities that float. Rutger de Graaf, Founder of Dutch firm DeltaSync, describes how the “excellent” combination of polystyrene for buoyancy and concrete for strength could keep low-lying nations habitable in the future [above left]. Around 200 houses are already built on floating foundations in the Netherlands, with DeltaSync currently working on six more.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Meanwhile, Belgian firm Vincent Callebaut has designed the Lilypad [above right]: a half aquatic, half terrestrial urban prototype which could accommodate up to 50,000 inhabitants in a soft water lagoon. The Lilypad would be ‘carbon negative’, integrating wind and solar power to generate more energy than it consumes. – Katie Shaw
Green Futures January 2010 9
Briefings
Hot rock power Deep geothermal: time to splash out
UK, US invest in deep geothermal Time to tap into the legacy of buried energy? Not fossil fuels, but something much older, dating back to our planet’s violent birth – and trapped in hot and molten rocks deep beneath the earth’s surface. One UK city already makes use of this deep geothermal power. For 20 years, Southampton has been pumping up natural hot water and piping it round a district heating system. The technology should not be confused with the ground source heat pumps that the renewables industry is, rightly, excited about [see box]. Deep geothermal is also the focus of fresh interest, and now has the promise of UK Government support. The Department of Energy and Climate Change’s Low Carbon Transition Plan will devote £6 million to exploring likely sites for deep drilling. The south west could be best, as Southampton’s pioneer status implies. The region could build an industry on deep heat with the capacity to meet 2% of total UK electricity demand, the Government has suggested. If that sounds excitable, it’s nothing compared to the enthusiasm of US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu. He speaks of his country being “blessed with vast resources of geothermal energy, with enormous potential to heat our homes and power our economy”. Putting stimulus money into realising this potential, his department has recently announced $338 million in federal funding from the Recovery Act for a Geothermal Technologies Program. Confusingly, $61 million of this funding is actually for the “other geothermal”: ground source heat pumps. The bulk of it, though, is split between: finding new exploitable fields of hot rocks (in Nevada, California, Oregon and elsewhere); making a nationwide database of such resources; developing the search, drilling and energy conversion knowhow; demonstrating power production techniques at three known hot rock sites; and getting hot water up from existing gas and oil wells. – Roger East
Geothermal distinctions
Ground source heat pumps
Deep geothermal
Energy comes from: Technology: Tapped from: Used for: Usual scale:
Rays of the sun Heat exchanger captures the modest heat retention difference between the air and the (more constant) ground Coils laid in shallow trenches or boreholes, or ‘energy piles’ in building foundations Warming air or water for home heating Microgen for housing or commercial buildings
Radioactive decay Water (naturally occurring or injected) turns to steam through contact with hot rocks Drilling down into fissures District heating and power generation Municipal and industria
Dell joined a growing trend in October when it installed a Solar Grove in the car park of its headquarters in Round Rock, Texas. The structure comprises 516 photovoltaic (PV) panels with a combined capacity of 110kW, spread over 11 ‘Solar Trees’. As well as providing 131,000kWh per year of electricity to the building, the Grove offers shade for 56 parked vehicles, and powers two solar-to-electric
10 Green Futures January 2010
charging points for both all-electric and plug-in hybrid models. It’s positioned to display the PV panels to drivers on a nearby highway – so advertising solar’s potential to passers-by. It’s been developed by Envision Solar, which has led eight Solar Grove projects in America. These include a 279kW plant for Kyocera in San Diego, which features 25 solar trees. – Lottie Butler
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Photos: Jason Todd /Getty; Michelle Mosmeyer/Dell Inc
Pick of the parking lot
Briefings
9,600MW
20,000MW The predicted solar capacity of India in 2020. The Government will invest $19 billion over a 30-year period in the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission to make solar as cheap as power sourced from coal.
The projected capacity of geothermal energy in the US within “a few years”, according to the Geothermal Power Association. The Department of Energy has allocated $338 million to geothermal research and development. Experts predict that current capacity, 3,152MW, could swell by an impressive 304%.
US invests in bright green hopes
Photo: Nikitsin/Shutterstock
Federal funding seeks out tomorrow’s transformative energy technologies US commitment to carbon cap-and-trade may still hang in the balance, but the country’s bruising experience of recession could yet have a double silver lining. Firstly, we were told on the very eve of Copenhagen that its carbon emissions actually fell by 2% in 2008. And secondly, entrepreneurs with sustainable green ideas are getting some real encouragement to help them compete in a carbon constrained world. China may be doing it more dramatically, with its strong central powers for directing the economy [see ‘Crouching Tiger?’, GF73, p20]. But the scale of the US federal stimulus package, with last February’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act worth a nominal $787 billion, makes the timid approach of the likes of Britain look like a real wasted opportunity. Authorised to put $61 billion into the energy sector alone, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu has had some scope to stimulate. His recent eye-catching announcements include investments to develop geothermal technologies [see ‘Hot rock power’, p10], and $151 million put into the Advanced Research Projects Agency, to help its hunt for tomorrow’s potential green energy winners. Among the projects this will target: • the cheap all-liquid metal batteries under development at MIT • the University of Minnesota’s proposed bioreactor for getting bacteria to turn sunshine and CO2 into vehicle fuel • s ynthetic enzymes to replace expensive chemicals in carbon capture at power plants •n ew ways of growing crystals to cut the cost of LEDs. As Chu said when making the announcement, “this is high-risk, high-reward research: if even one or two of these ideas become transformative technologies, this will be among the best investments we’ve ever made”. And he signed off with an all-American mixed metaphor: “These ‘are out-of-the-box’ approaches, and we’re trying to hit home runs, not just base hits”. – Roger East
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Smarter Minnesota
Smart thinking America’s grid gets clever In the largest single application of the stimulus programme, President Obama has announced $3.4 billion in grants to build a ‘smart’ electric grid. Smart grids use digital technology to monitor and optimise energy consumption – for example, by communicating directly with electric appliances so that they run at times of reduced power demand. One hundred private companies, utilities, manufacturers, cities and others across the US will receive grants of between $400,000 and $200 million to set up the grid, including funds for smart meters for homes and factories, smart transformers and upgraded substations. Through automatic minute adjustments to power flows, a smart grid can make full use of intermittent renewable sources such as wind and solar. By smoothing out supply and demand curves, it uses power more efficiently, and is more reliable than conventional grids. New York City’s utilities giant, Con Edison, has been awarded two grants totalling $181 million to modernise the electric grid in “the most complex energy market in America”. Sarah Banda, a company spokeswoman, said that the plans will “make it easier for the system to carry power from alternative energy sources, and for New Yorkers using solar panels to integrate into the grid, and enable widespread adoption of electric vehicle charging”. The winning companies have secured an additional $4.7 billion in private investment to match the grants. – Rebecca Schischa
Green Futures January 2010 11
Briefings
We got ourselves a convoy… Road trains: the magic bullet to cut emissions and ease motorway congestion? Anyone who watched Britain’s four-man cycling team steam to Olympic gold in Beijing in 2008 will be familiar with the concept of slipstreaming: the chap at the front doing all the hard work, while the others behind him take advantage of the lack of wind resistance. It’s a model that the team behind an EU-financed research project called Safe Road Trains for the Environment (Sartre) is hoping will cut CO2 emissions by 20% while freeing up room on Europe’s motorways. The idea is to join up to eight vehicles by wireless sensors in so called road trains. Each train would be controlled by a professional, such as a long distance lorry driver, in the front vehicle. This would free up the seven drivers behind to have a nap or read, resuming control of their vehicle to leave the train wherever they wish. There could be a small charge for the service, but savings on fuel would make up for it. Trials of the system are scheduled to hit test tracks around Europe by 2011, with Ricardo UK, the engineering firm heading up the Sartre team, forecasting that the first road trains could take to the motorways “within a decade”. Ricardo UK’s Anthony Smith concedes that perhaps the greatest obstacle Sartre has to overcome is the public’s perception of what is safe. Most road users have a horror of tailgating, and getting them to trust their safety to another driver and some fancy electronics may not be easy.
Close up and doze off
Rupert Fausset, Forum for the Future’s transport expert, adds a cautious note with regard to CO2 emissions: “The bang-for-buck might be quite low on this compared with other options – for instance, you can save 20% in fuel consumption just by good driving”. There’s also the question of whether road trains, by freeing up space on motorways, will not merely encourage more people to drive. However, as Phil Pettitt of transport technology centre innovITS points out, “If we don’t do anything to solve congestion, we’ll need more roads – and the laying of concrete is a very large CO2 emitter”. And there’s the rub. Whether the coming of road trains delights or dismays us, there may come a day when we can’t do without them. – Dixe Wills
For the last 25 years, the motor of the world economy was consumption … We need a new motor, and we have a big problem: global warming. It requires investment [but the problem of global warming] could be the motor of the world economy in the years to come Legendary hedge fund manager George Soros, who recently announced a $1 billion investment in clean energy technology
12 Green Futures January 2010
Vegetex, made of waste vegetable oil, has been developed by PhD student Helen Bailey, Research Manager at Aggregates Industries, to replace 20% of bitumen, the material that binds asphalt road surfaces. According to Bailey, Vegetex ticks all the boxes for environmental gains. For a start, it will be crucial to replace the 1.25 million tonnes of bitumen – made from crude oil, which will “not last forever” – used on UK roads each year. Substituting waste vegetable oil will ease pressure on landfill, and, because Vegetex is handled at lower temperatures, less energy will be used. There are also financial gains to be had, with reduced dependence on expensive imports. Bradley Cordell, Environmental Consultant at the Transport Research Laboratory, said that “there is little in the ‘negatives’ column” for Vegetex, “providing that the recyclability and durability of road courses are not detrimentally affected, and that waste oil is not removed from established recycling streams which yield greater environmental benefits”. – Rebecca Schischa
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Photos: Satre; Swilmor/istock
A new oil on the road
Chip fat could be recycled to surface roads, following successful live trials in Bedfordshire.
Briefings
Copycat city cars A small, sustainable car – and another one – hit the road A lauded British race car designer and a UK-based car company are touting their design for a sustainable urban car which could revolutionise motor manufacturing. Using efficient materials, Gordon Murray Design and Zytek Automotive will produce a petite vehicle that takes up a fraction of a normal parking space. Sounds familiar? It should. In June 2009, UK-based RiverSimple unveiled a similar concept, the Mk 1 [see ‘Hydrogen city car hits 300mpg and 30g/km CO2’, GF73, p13]. It’s a low weight, two-seater prototype city car, powered by hydrogen fuel cells and made from carbon composite materials. Just a few months down the line, the Murray-Zytek partnership has taken the wraps off the T.27 – a low weight, three-seater, electric prototype city car. “Smaller than a Smart,” they claim, “but with more interior space.” Both RiverSimple and Gordon Murray emphasised their efforts to reduce the carbon embedded in auto manufacturing, and to produce a low impact vehicle suitable to city dwellers. But here, the twin concepts begin to differ. RiverSimple sees city transport as an excellent candidate for a product service approach. Drivers would lease the Mk 1, giving the car a longer, more productive lifetime, and affording RiverSimple a steady income stream not based on continuous mass sales. Gordon Murray and Zytek, on the other hand, want to streamline manufacturing, making car factories around a fifth the conventional size, and then lease the T.27 technology for local mass production. If investment is an indication of the concept’s marketplace success, Gordon Murray Design and Zytek Automotive are well-placed. They have received £4.5 million from the Technology Strategy Board to develop four prototypes over a 16-month period. Gordon Murray will supply the manufacturing process, dubbed iStream, and the chassis design, while Zytek contributes its electric drive train technology. But will the cars become commonplace? According to Forum for the Future’s Rupert Fausset, car owners aren’t yet convinced that alternative vehicles meet their transport, let alone aspirational, needs. It may take a mainstream electric version like the forthcoming Nissan Leaf to create an alternative city car category. – April Streeter
Just around the corner – a new wave of city cars is poised to hit the road
Second life for EV batteries
Photos: Riversimple; Nissan Leaf
EV economics strengthened by battery re-use deal
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After the prototypes and the pioneers, the practicalities of electric vehicles (EVs) are up for attention. Nissan has found a second life for their lithium-ion batteries, by selling them on to Japanese trading company Sumitomo for use in the renewable energy sector. With a near 100% performance needed for their in-car role, huge banks of batteries are discarded from EVs as they pass their prime. But their value can be exploited for a further ten or even 20 years, as load-levellers for the grid. They could store wind power at night, for instance, when less of it is needed, and release it at times of peak demand. The resale deal makes economic sense of the business model which Nissan plans to use, starting with its LEAF ZEV (zero-emission
vehicle). – left. The batteries are the most expensive element of the car, but purchasers would lease rather than buy. With the partnership in place, Nissan can afford to keep the monthly lease low in cost, knowing that they’ll get a high residual value for them from Sumitomo at the end of the road. For Nissan’s Chief Operating Officer, Toshiyuki Shiga, this is “the final piece of the jigsaw for viable mainstream EVs” – and, he claims, a world first. Nissan is even touting the batteries as “CO2 negative”, with their second life renewablessupport role helping to take carbon out of the system. And perhaps EV owners who go in for microgeneration can get this virtuous circuit going with the batteries still in their car. – Roger East
Green Futures January 2010 13
Briefings
Starry, starry nights
Heat-sensitive lampposts shine as and when needed Prototype street lighting technology which will both improve the quality of night skies in urban areas, and cut electricity use, is raising high hopes among campaigners against light pollution. The technology has been successfully tested in Toulouse, France, where the new lampposts have been installed over a 500 metre section of pavement. The ubiquitous computing (‘ubicomp’) lights are equipped with sensors that detect heat from human bodies. The heat causes the strength of the light to double for ten seconds –
returning to a standard ‘dim’ mode when nobody is around. As a result, the night sky will be darker, and the energy consumption of night lighting cut by around 50%. Alexandre Marciel, Deputy Mayor of Toulouse, is proud of the technology, developed by the Toulouse Highways Department. “Wherever there is a significant urban density, this could make a big difference,” he says. There is growing awareness that unrestricted street lighting is not only a drain on energy resources, but can interfere with the migration patterns of birds, insects and mammals. John Meacham, from the Campaign For Dark Skies, called the technology “a splendid improvement, and a positive contribution to reducing our carbon emissions”, adding that “all city council lighting engineers should know about this”. But street lighting is just a beginning for ubicomp solutions. Perhaps the nights are numbered for ever-bright shops and offices, too. – Lorna Howarth
Found forms
They used to be bottles
Designer Oscar Diaz has found something beautiful in the banal by transforming recycled plastic bottles into elegant cutlery. Working as “more of an editor than a designer”, Diaz used the bottles’ inherent curves to create naturally ergonomic utensils. Considering that 22 billion plastic bottles are thrown away each year, the environmental benefits of ‘found design’ could be huge. – George Wigmore
White in the light Colour-changing roof tile works with the weather A roof tile that turns white in the heat of the sun, reflecting its rays back into space, is the latest techno-fix solution for cooling the planet [see ‘Paint it white’, GF73, p7]. Developed by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the ‘thermeleon’ slate incorporates a polymer – similar in structure to hair gel – mixed with water and sandwiched between two layers of plastic. When the weather is cold the slate remains black, but when the sun shines, the polymer/water mix reacts and the slate turns white, reflecting heat and light back out to space. The MIT team is also working on a paint version of the invention that can be sprayed onto existing slate roofs to create the same effect. White roofs can cut indoor temperatures by up to 20°C, reducing the need for energy-intensive cooling systems. It’s a smart solution with high-profile advocates. In 2009, Al Gore joined New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a campaign to paint 100,000 square feet of rooftops – part of a plan to cut the city’s emissions by 30%. – Lorna Howarth
Designer toilet epitomises ecochic with built-in water recycling It is not often that a toilet can be described as sleek and stylish, yet Roca’s new all-in-one washbasin and toilet wouldn’t look out of place in a chic hotel. Designed by Gabriele and Oscar Buratti for Roca, the W+W (‘Washbasin and Watercloset’) filters water directly from the basin and uses it to fill the toilet cistern. An estimated two billion litres of fresh water are flushed down the toilet in UK homes every day. Previous water-efficient designs include the unappealing ‘Save a flush bag’ for the toilet cistern,
14 Green Futures January 2010
and the dual flush system, which uses four to six litres of water per flush. By contrast, the elegant, self-contained design of the W+W can cut household water use by up to 25%. Water management is no longer a stranger to cutting-edge design. Discussions of the emerging global water crisis at the 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos led to the launch of the Aspen Design Challenge, ‘Designing Water’s Future’. Among the 2009 finalists were a sonic sensor water meter which tracks use without touching the pipes, and an interactive water mapping platform for your local area. – Lottie Butler
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Photos: xc /shutterstock; Oscar Diaz; Patrick Gillooly; Roca
Eau de toilette
Briefings
Future diets to cut more than pounds Swedish government pushes carbon labels for food
Greenhouse effect: high carbon tomatoes could lose out to carrots
Calorie-counting could soon give way to carbon-counting, if Swedish trends catch on globally. Sweden’s National Food Administration has issued dietary guidelines that consider both the nutritional benefit of particular foods, and their environmental impact. A global first in consumer guidance has seen foods assessed according to their climate impact, pesticide use and biodiversity effect. The guidelines favour carrots over greenhouse-grown tomatoes, and rapeseed oil over palm, due to the latter’s impact on rainforest destruction. Dan Crossley, Principal Sustainability Advisor at Forum for the Future, calls the initiative “a good way to try to align the climate and health agendas”.
£19bn
Water worries Two thirds of the global population will live in water stressed areas within 20 years, according to a United Nations estimate. If ‘hidden’ water – for example, that needed to produce food and clothing – is taken into account, each person in the UK uses 4,645 litres a day, compared with 1,000 litres per person in poorer countries.
The guidance isn’t mandatory. But a hands-on response from retailers may make this more than just another government directive. Burger chain Max and farming group Lantmännen have taken the cue to carbonlabel popular products, with Max including a breakdown of the carbon impacts of transport and livestock. And a joint initiative between the Federation of Swedish Farmers, two foodlabelling organisations and various dairy and meat co-operatives is now developing a label to highlight products with a lower carbon impact. While the initiative encourages consumers to include carbon in their choices, the big impact will be for business. “Manufacturers will be under pressure from retailers [to edit out unsustainable choices]”, said Dr. Paul Upham of the University of Manchester. – Nick Chan
2/3
The estimated value over 20 years of the planned network of UK Marine Conservation Zones, according to a Natural England report. The zones, which will be chosen using a range of scientific and economic criteria unique to each location, will help to preserve local ecosystems and the industries dependent upon them.
Tesco ‘to go zero carbon’
Photos: Tree of Life/shutterstock; Julio Etchart/Alamy
Retail giant sets out 2050 target Tesco, the world’s third largest retailer, has committed to plans to be ‘zero carbon’ by 2050. Setting out a vision for the coming century, CEO Terry Leahy said: “We must decouple economic growth from emissions growth by creating a second consumer revolution: by building and fulfilling a desire to live a low carbon life”. The transition to a low carbon future, he said, “will be achieved not by some great invention, or a grand act of parliament, but through the millions of choices made by consumers, every day, all over the world”. Leahy’s announcement goes beyond Tesco’s existing commitment to halve building emissions by 2020. The new plans include: • a home energy service to advise on and install insulation and renewable sources of energy • carbon labelling to drive demand for greener products • a ‘buy one get one free – later’ strategy, to cut unnecessary consumption • a 30% cut in the carbon impact of its products by 2020.
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Interestingly, Leahy also ruled out offsets, and raised expectations that a windfarm is in the pipeline. Tesco’s move follows increasingly ambitious promises in the sector, including Waitrose’s 10:10 campaign pledge and Marks & Spencer’s ‘Plan A’ target to be carbon-neutral by 2012. “Retailers have done some fantastic stuff over the years,” said Dan Crossley, Principal Sustainability Advisor at Forum for the Future. But, he added, their approach has often been to do “what they’ve always done, but in a greener way – with a ‘pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap’ model. In a sustainable world, they’ll need to come up with a way of making money by selling less stuff.” – Nick Chan
Green Futures January 2010 15
Green_futures126_x_178_Nov_09t_09.qxp
17/11/2009
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Briefings
Revolution in the air New designs turn turbines on their head – literally… A wave of new turbine designs is brightening the prospects for small- and medium-scale wind power. After years of scepticism over rooftop turbines which cost far more than they will ever repay, there’s the prospect that some of the major obstacles to effective wind power could finally be overcome. At the crest of the wave is the vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT). While there are now many different versions, the basic idea is that the wind’s energy is used to blow a turbine’s blades about a central vertical axis – much like a child’s roundabout – as opposed to the more traditional horizontal design. One of the advantages of this is that the turbine can accept wind from any point on the compass without the need to yaw, or change direction, says Stephen Crosher, Commercial Director of London-based developers, QuietRevolution. His company makes a three-bladed helical turbine that is particularly suited to urban environments, both because it is quiet and can cope with low wind speeds. And since the generator and gear boxes are located at ground level, unlike horizontal turbines, maintenance is much easier – making the whole plant more reliable. Buying and installing this turbine would cost up to £40,000, with a payback period of 20 years. Reliability is key to an ambitious deal struck by US-based Helix Wind to supply power via its bizarre conch-like VAWT to cell phone towers in West Africa. If successful, it could see wind replace diesel as the power source of choice to keep crucial communications running in developing countries. Vertical axis turbines are not in fact that new an idea, says Crosher. But the drive to get windpower working in urban areas, where horizontal axis turbines traditionally struggle to cope with the turbulence, has led to a resurgence of interest. It’s been made more viable by “the availability of modern composite materials and manufacturing processes”, he says. Together, these have spawned a new generation of designs, like
This way up
QuietRevolution’s, which suffer reduced vibration, wear and fatigue, and so are quieter too. Beyond the VAWT is the somewhat more bizarre concept of the flapping wind turbine, currently being developed by Californian start-up Green Wavelength. Inspired by bumblebees, its xBEE turbine consists of two 5.7 metre long wings which swoop in a backwards and forwards pattern in response to the pressure of the wind passing over them. The company says it is now aiming to produce small 10kW models for home and small business use. But if you really can’t envisage having a giant bumblebee mounted on your home, then perhaps a Ridgeblade is more up your street. Developed by UK-based The Power Collective, this innovative wind turbine resembles a long water mill, and is designed to sit along the ridge of a roof, where it can collect and focus prevailing wind through the device. The first commercial versions are expected to hit the market in 2010. If they prove to be as quiet and efficient as promised, their unobtrusive design could be just what is needed to take wind power into the heart of the city. – Duncan Graham-Rowe
Bottled water on way out Photos: VisionsofAmerica/Joe Shom /Getty; Varina and Jay Patel/Shutterstock
Water refill stations follow ban on bottles The battle against bottled water is gathering pace with water refill stations to appear at Hammersmith Bus Station and Tower Bridge Museum in London. The stations will provide on-the-go access to fresh, chilled, mains-fed water, in a project sponsored by Thames Water as part of the 10:10 campaign. Passers-by will pay 20 pence to refill a 500ml bottle, funding research into the impact of the scheme by charity Waste Watch. There are plans to roll the stations out across London, if successful. The scheme comes shortly after a ban on the sale of bottled water in the Australian town of Bundanoon, a resident-led initiative thought to be a world first. Following plans
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Fill ’er up
by a water company to tap an underground reservoir, locals voted for refillable bottles to replace bottled water on shop shelves, and campaigned for public fountains supplying filtered water to be introduced.
Steps such as these suggest public awareness of the environmental impact of bottled water is on the rise. The UK industry, which imports over 25% of its water and contributes significantly to landfill waste, has experienced a decline in sales for the first time in at least five years. Bundanoon’s vote is reminiscent of the decision taken by residents of Modbury, Devon, to ban plastic bags in 2007. On a larger scale, the Welsh Government is proposing a nationwide charge for single-use plastic bags. Bans may seem draconian, but there’s no mistaking the cultural shift. “Increasingly, people are confident that tap water is fine to order when dining out – it’s no longer perceived as ‘cheap’,” says Jeanette Longfield of Sustain, the food and farming campaign group. – Lottie Butler and Nick Chan
Green Futures January 2010 17
Feature
B
ritain can meet its stretching
emissions reduction targets and still keep flying. That, at least, is the view of Ed Miliband, the UK’s Energy and Climate Change Secretary, echoed in a report by the Committee on Climate Change. How? By holding aviation emissions no higher than their current level – and cutting the carbon from everything else we do by 90%. It sounds ambitious. But such is our addiction to flight that many believe it’s more feasible – not least politically – to make deeper cuts in non-aviation sources than to accept being earthbound. The climate change committee has floated the idea of introducing flying allowances as one way of keeping aviation growth to an acceptable 60% by 2050 (as opposed to the Government’s estimate of 200%). Even so, just keeping emissions static will be a huge challenge to the airline industry. It has always reckoned on rising passenger numbers, and demand reduction isn’t really in its lexicon. Hit by a recessionary blip, airlines have been warning business customers off teleconferencing in favour of the virtues of face-to-face meetings. Yet at the same time, they have been trumpeting a commitment to the ten year goal of “carbon neutral growth” announced by the International Air Transport Association (IATA). On the surface, it’s a contradiction in terms. So how might aviation try to square the circle? The simplest way to cut carbon is to cut fuel use. US commercial airlines alone burn about 50 million gallons of kerosene (the main aviation fuel) every day. Any reduction, of course, kicks right through to the bottom line in cost savings. So the industry has a vested interest in finding ways to cut consumption – all the more so, as concerns over ‘peak oil’ loom. There’d be a further incentive if governments grasped the nettle and started taxing aviation fuel. It’s currently
18 Green Futures January 2010
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Emissions trading is now factored in to the industry’s expectations
Fuel of the future? Camolina
exempt, even for domestic flights. And that, argues the Campaign for Better Transport, gives airlines an unfair subsidy over rail. Clawing this back in Britain alone, they claim, would be enough to pay for a high speed rail line from London to Birmingham. And a fuel tax on domestic flights that increased the price of air travel by 50% could cut carbon emissions by one million tonnes a year. But there are few votes in taxes. And so it’s hardly surprising that the aviation lobby’s resistance to anything more than very modest passenger duties or departure taxes cuts more ice with politicians than the call of green groups for tougher action. However, one thing has changed for good, and that’s the assumption that aviation emissions cost nothing. In Europe at least, the industry is preparing itself for the prospect of a market price on its carbon via ‘cap and trade’. From 2012, the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) will for the first time include aviation. Lobbying continues on how tight the cap should be, and what proportion of permits should be doled out free rather than auctioned – but emissions trading in some form is now factored in to the industry’s expectations. In ten years’ time, says independent aviation policy analyst Chris Hewett, it might be operating under a single global cap, with operators required to buy their initial permits at auction, then trading between themselves and on the wider carbon market. Carbon offsets could play a role, he believes, so long as controls are strict and the overall global cap sufficiently tight. Indeed, he goes so far as to call them “desirable, likely and feasible” under this kind of system. “We’ll end up paying more for flying”, says Hewett, “but that investment will go into cutting emissions elsewhere in the economy”. Offsets won’t replace the need for emission cuts at source, however.
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Photos: Qba from Poland/shutterstock; WILDLIFE GmbH/Alamy
Will the future take flight?
Photo: alexeys/istock
There’s no getting away from it. Cutting emissions on the scale required to meet carbon targets means big changes in either how, or how much, we fly. Roger East sees an industry in need of radical innovation and asks, can it go fast – and far – enough?
So with kerosene looking like an increasingly expensive option, what alternatives are in the offing? Top of the list are ‘carbon neutral’ biofuels. Two years ago they were totally untried, but now, says Jonathon Counsell, Head of Environment at British Airways, they’ve “become a key part of BA’s future carbon strategy”. Virgin Atlantic scored the ‘industry first’ in 2008, flying a 747 to Amsterdam with one of its engines using a 20% biofuel mix made from coconut oil and babassu nuts [see GF68, p14]. Since then, Air New Zealand and Japan Airlines have used biofuels derived from jatropha oil and hardy oilseedbearing camelina plants as (higher percentages) of the overall fuel mix. And Continental has done an experimental flight around the Gulf of Mexico with one engine running entirely on fuel made from microscopic algae. Such ‘proof of concept’ work suggests that biofuels could offer a 60% carbon saving, and has dispelled fears that they were doomed by lack of energy density or a tendency to gel at low temperatures. Existing plane engines, it seems, can use them without modifications in 50/50 blends – a recipe which could secure the necessary US Federal Aviation Administration approvals within two years. So they work. But are supplies sufficient to meet demand? The big issue now, acknowledges Counsell, is taking biofuels to scale. IATA has set a goal of 10% of airline fuel to come from ‘alternative sources’ – which basically means biofuel – by 2017. The Sustainable Aviation Fuel Group, an industry consortium, wants planes to use 600 million gallons of biofuel a year by 2015. At this threshold, says Counsell, biofuels can be an economically sustainable part of the supply chain. It would still cost more than kerosene to buy, but that would be balanced by the expected financial value of the carbon saving it delivers.
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Fuel of the future? Algae
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An algal pond the size of Belgium could meet all aviation’s current fuel needs
If plant-based biofuels like jatropha really take off, though, they will create a massive demand for land on which to grow them. There is some prospect that significant supplies could be produced from degraded land unsuitable for other uses. But once a flourishing market is in place, it’s hard to imagine that we won’t see forests being cleared and food crops being displaced to make way for lucrative biofuels – which is hardly a sustainable option. Hence the excitement over algae. Algal (often called ‘third generation’ biofuels), although currently experimental and expensive, could really help on this score, since they have the potential to be grown in waste or even salty water [see GF74, p9] – and they produce a lot more fuel per hectare. “An algal pond the size of Belgium” could meet all of aviation’s current fuel needs, says Sian Foster, Head of Business Sustainability at Virgin Atlantic. By comparison, you’d need “a field the size of the EU” to grow that much from plant-based biofuels. So is that it – problem solved? Far from it, says Rupert Fausset, Forum for the Future’s sustainable transport expert. There’s still a big climate problem even if you use algal biofuel instead of kerosene to cut the CO2, he says. The ‘radiative forcing’ effect from emissions such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) and water vapour (contrails) at high altitudes causes at least half a plane’s climate change impact, and would remain largely unaffected by a move to biofuels. Even if these succeeded in cutting aviation’s climate impact by as much as 30%, as their proponents hope, he adds, “a return to aviation growth could negate that in just five years. Biofuels do not change the game”, he concludes. “The industry will have to make many more fundamental changes if it is to grow sustainably.”
Green Futures January 2010 19
Feature
So what other options are there? More efficient flying would help. In part, that means smarter, more integrated air traffic control systems – so planes flying over Europe wouldn’t have to follow fuel-sapping zig-zag routes designed to fit in with all the various national systems of the countries below. It would also reduce the amount of time they spend stacking in holding circuits waiting to land. This much is feasible, and could improve efficiency on some routes by 10-20%. Then there are improvements to engines and aircraft body design. A long series of gradual cuts in fuel use have been achieved by boosting engine efficiency and using lightweight materials for the body, such as in the current generation of 737s. In the next few years, Boeing and Airbus should bring into service new turbofan engines which promise 10-15% better performance. Overall, IATA is confident of meeting its targets for annual efficiency improvements of 1.5% across the world’s airline fleets. But there’s only so far that efficiency curve can rise, warns Keith Hayward, Head of Research at the UK’s Royal Aeronautical Society. We’re reaching the point where further gains in fuel burn economy in current gas turbine engines come up against the basic laws of
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Biofuels do not change the game
physics and chemistry, where they’re only achievable at the expense of increasing NOx emissions. The new open rotor technology, which could be eight years away, might deliver as much as a 30% step change, but there are big commercial risks with such new departures, and real worries too about how noisy they are – the issue which has always attracted by far the most public complaint. Nor is there much low-hanging fruit left for plucking in the field of aerodynamics and design. Again, says Hayward, we’d need something really radical to make much of a difference. The reconfiguring of plane body shapes, from the current ‘tubes with wings’ into so-called ‘flying wings’, comes into that category. Theoretically, says Jonathan Cullen at Cambridge University’s Department of Engineering, you could design an aircraft with a ‘laminar flying wing’ body shape, which, if you optimised everything else to the nth degree, would run on 46% less fuel than today’s average plane. Worth pursuing, perhaps: but what that 46% figure really tells us is that planes aren’t half bad at flying already, and the scope for improvement is relatively limited – certainly compared to houses and cars, where Cullen calculates that there’s room for up to 90% efficiency savings.
Flying high without the burn SOLAR POWERED FLIGHT
The Zeppelin flies again How it works: Rigid or semi-rigid compartment lifted and held aloft by lighter-than-air gas (hydrogen, helium, hot air), driven usually by gas-burning engine, steered by rudder State of play: Technology with a (mixed) history, once considered defunct, now enjoying major R&D revival, various prototypes in development, first actual passenger-carrying flights underway Latest action: Modern small airships developed by a German company (Zeppelin NT, no less) and others offer sightseeing tours for small groups in London, San Francisco, Switzerland and Tokyo – weather permitting Downsides: Image overshadowed by the Hindenburg fire and other 1930s disasters; relatively slow speed, especially into headwind; stability issues, unusable in bad weather; still burns fuel Likeliest prospects: Advertising and tourism (already demonstrated), observation, heavy lifting, eg for military equipment, short-haul travel competing with ferries Long-term vision? Big airships doing London-New York in 35 hours with lots of room to work, play and sleep What the advocates say: “It’s the game-changing technology”, Roger Monk, Developer of the SkyCat at Bedfordshire-based Hybrid Air Vehicles
20 Green Futures January 2010
Photo: luismmolina/istock; Nick Galante/PMRF
21st CENTURY AIRSHIPS
Sailplanes to the future How it works: Extensive arrays of photovoltaic cells mounted on large, light aircraft with massive wingspans, providing electric power to motors, with (limited) lithium battery storage State of play: Experimental research, development of demonstrators Latest action: Flights by ultra-light sailplanes, unveiling of Solar Impulse prototype aiming for a round-the-world bid [see GF74, p8]. Downsides: Insufficient power to carry weight; slow speed; needs power surge for take-off and power storage for night flying Likeliest prospects: As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for observation, high-altitude scientific research and communications relaying; as auxiliary power source for lighting, computers, etc on commercial aircraft Long-term vision? Limited: an inspirational exemplar rather than practical as primary power source What the advocates say: “A paradox, almost a provocation”, Bertrand Piccard, inventor of the Solar Impulse
www.greenfutures.org.uk
In any case, the aviation industry won’t want to rush into mass production of anything as way out as the flying wing. It’s a business that favours evolution rather than revolution. Planes are expected to last 25 years, and it’s hardly cost-effective to replace them sooner. Airports, too, won’t welcome all the reconfiguring they’d need to handle 850-seater flying wings as wide as a cinema – at least not until the business case is overwhelming. All of which means that even holding aviation emissions constant over the next few decades is going to be an extremely tough ask. This is perhaps the main industrial sector where it is hard to imagine real breakthrough technologies coming through in the time frame required for making drastic carbon cuts. So either other sectors will have to make even deeper cuts to compensate – deeper than Ed Miliband suggested – or we will have to place our faith in offsets on a huge scale. Or… we will somehow learn to live with less flying – travelling more slowly [see ‘At a leisurely lick’, GF74, pp3031], and enjoying digital, rather than face-to-face, contact. For some, though, the dream of zero-emission aviation should not be abandoned so easily. Burning
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Burning fuel is not the only way to fly
fuel, they argue, is far from the only conceivable way to fly [see panel]. Take Cranfield Professor Ian Poll, who gave an interview in 2008 propounding a nuclear powered airliner à la Thunderbirds. Was he just flying a kite, thinking the unthinkable? He is, after all, the chair of the research group Omega, whose recent competition at Sheffield University asked students to sketch out truly novel ideas for powering commercial passenger planes. Both solar power and hydrogen fuel cells have their devotees, and can certainly lift demonstrator aircraft off the ground – though in both cases the main application seems likely to be powering auxiliary systems rather than aircraft engines. Then there are lighter-than-air airships – at present only niche players, but in the eyes of some, aviation’s best longterm bet, capable of offering spacious facilities, comfort and train-like speeds for the leisure and business travel market of the future. Innovations in aviation have a mixed track record, to say the least, but confounding the sceptics has been part of it from the start. ¥ Roger East is Consulting Editor of Green Futures.
GOING NUCLEAR
Photo: DLR ; ON THE EDGE/Alamy
FUEL CELLS IN AVIATION Hydrogen takes to the sky How it works: Hydrogen is converted in a fuel cell stack into electric power; this drives the motor of a lightweight plane, as in stationary or land vehicle fuel cell engines, with only pure water as its ‘exhaust’ State of play: Experimental development, first test flights (UAVs and piloted planes) Latest action: Boeing’s two-seater demonstrator flew level over Spain for 20 minutes on fuel cell power in early 2008, having climbed to altitude on lithium-ion batteries; the German Aerospace Centre’s Antares DLR H2 motorised glider took off and flew over Hamburg in July 2009 on fuel cell power alone; and the US Navy’s Ion Tiger set a 23-hour endurance record for a fuel cell UAV in October 2009 Downsides: Weight of the fuel cell (and any backup battery); low power density; onboard hydrogen storage issues; greenhouse gas impact via water vapour at high altitudes Likeliest prospects: Stealthy long-flying surveillance UAVs; fuel cells for auxiliary on-board power The vision? A transatlantic UAV flight within five years, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology What the advocates say: “Still a long way from being the primary energy source for the propulsion of commercial aircraft”, DLR (the German Aerospace Centre)
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Thunderbirds are Go? How it works: Small onboard nuclear reactor delivers power to engines State of play: Provocative suggestion as post-2050 solution for powering commercial airliners Latest action: Idea floated by Cranfield Professor Ian Poll in October 2008; previously researched by US and Soviet sides during the Cold War in the hope of keeping bombers airborne without refuelling, and featured on fictional nuclear airliner in the cult 1965 TV animation Thunderbirds Downsides: Practicality, image, radioactive shielding, accident risk, vulnerability to terrorism, nuclear proliferation Likeliest prospects: Idea that refuses to die The vision? Nightmare What the advocates say: “We need to be looking for a solution to aviation emissions which will allow flying to continue in perpetuity with zero impact on the environment. I think nuclear-powered aeroplanes are the answer beyond 2050. The idea was proved 50 years ago, but I accept it would take about 30 years to persuade the public of the need to fly on them”, Professor Ian Poll
Green Futures January 2010 21
Comment
The Green Futures Interview
Four trends that are reshaping America
S
tate-by-state, renewables are taking over
Across America, coal plants are closing. They’re being replaced by natural gas and – increasingly – renewables. It’s all being driven by some demanding goals from state governments. New York is shooting for 24% renewables by 2020; California for 33%. Maine is the most ambitious, at no less than 40% – most of which will come from wind. Thirty-five states in all have now set these ‘renewable portfolio’ standards. Texas in particular is thinking really big. If you add up all the wind plants currently under construction or in development in the state, the total comes to around 50,000 MW. That’s equivalent to 50 coal-fired plants. It’s huge stuff – that’s more than the state’s 24 million people can consume! So Texas will actually become a net exporter of renewable power. [Republican Governor] Rick Perry’s really got behind it; he’s backing the creation of new transmission lines to help provide the capacity needed. It helps that Texas has its own grid. There are three in the country: eastern, western and Texas! So that makes it easy for them.
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Lester Brown
Lester Brown is Founder of the Worldwatch Institute and now President of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute. His latest book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, is published by WW Norton & Co. He has been described by The Washington Post as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers”.
If you look at the US as a whole, we brought 102 new wind farms online last year (2008), with a capacity of over 8,000 MW. OK, it’s dropped a little this year [as the recession takes its toll], but I think it should rise again next. New wind capacity far exceeds that in coal. And there are virtually no limiting factors. There’s a team at Stanford University who’ve modelled US wind resources and electricity consumption. They concluded that, because America’s so big, there’s really no major problem with intermittency. If the winds aren’t blowing on the east coast, they will be on the Great Plains, or the mountain passes, or offshore in the Great Lakes… It’s not just wind. Solar thermal [concentrating solar power – CSP] is taking off, too. One thing I’m really excited about is the new molten salt technology. This uses the sun’s heat to melt salt, and as it cools it continues to drive the turbines for another six hours, taking them through from sunset to midnight – a peak period of electricity demand. Then there’s geothermal energy, and biomass, fired by woodchips. All of this has continued through the recession. Investment levels have held up pretty well. The rate of growth slowed a bit, but the growth itself did not. They’re still surging ahead at a hefty rate.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photo: KFEM
For over 30 years, Lester Brown has been tracking emerging trends in energy and environment – and working out what they might mean for the future. Now he tells Martin Wright why coal is dying, wind is king – and America is falling out of love with the automobile.
Rite of passage no more
Meanwhile, 22 coal plants are slated for closure or conversion [to other fuel sources]. This is partly because they’ve come to the end of their life, and partly because they’re simply not meeting tough new pollution standards set by the states or by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). I doubt very much there will be any licenses issued for new ones.
Photos: PhotoAlto/Alamy; Kevin Schafer/Still Pictures
Government is getting tough All the attention at the moment is focused on the capand-trade debate – but there’s a lot of other things going on behind the scenes. For example – and this is not widely known – for many years now, the Department of Energy did not translate congressional legislation on industrial plant efficiency standards into actual regulations that industry can use. They were basically stonewalling with the implicit approval of the Bush Administration. So, within days of taking office, Obama sent a directive to the department saying, in effect: “You guys had better get cracking!” So now, every few weeks, there’s another standard released – on lightbulbs, on air conditioners, and so on. There’s a huge backlog there, and it’s all going to come at once… On top of that, Obama’s announced that the Federal Government is going to set its own carbon reduction goals. Now, the Government owns or leases half a million buildings and 600,000 vehicles – so it has huge purchasing power. The Administration’s asked each department, each agency, to come up with its own goals. And this sets up competition among the departments, because no one is going to want to be at the bottom of that list. This is going to have far more effect than most people realise. Then there’s [EPA Administrator] Lisa Jackson’s order that every US business above a certain size must calculate and publish its carbon footprint on an annual basis. (This followed the landmark Supreme Court decision which officially classed carbon dioxide as a pollutant.) This will do two things: first, it will focus attention on the company’s environmental performance; and second, it will provide ammunition for campaigners, both local and national. If you look at the policy pipeline, it’s surprising how much is there.
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It’s surprising how much is in the policy pipeline
For my generation, getting a driver’s licence and a car was a rite of passage: everyone did it. A car was a means of socialising: all those kids driving around, checking each other out. That’s changing. For kids today, socialising isn’t centered around cars – it’s around the internet, and that’s a very different world. Young people just aren’t aspiring to own a car in the same way my generation did. I first picked up this trend in Japan – now you’re seeing it in the US. Car sales are falling, but car clubs are becoming more common. People are realising that owning a car full time becomes a nuisance – finding parking, doing repairs, insurance, payments, gasoline price uncertainties… I think the automobile industry realise that they are in the early stages of a really major restructuring of the transport system.
Local food from local farms The number of farms in the US has been declining ever since the Civil War. At least, it had until very recently. However, between the censuses of 2002 and 2007, farm numbers started to rise. We’re seeing more small farms – of 20, 30 or 40 acres – producing food for local consumption. A disproportionate share of the new farmers are women. And these aren’t ‘hobby farmers’. They are making a living from it; it’s their prime source of income. This is part of a trend that will see food production become more localised. This will partly be driven by the high price of oil and agricultural imports, but also through a growing desire on the part of people to have fresh food – whether it’s from urban farming or farmers’ markets… The bottom line for me is that there are huge changes coming to America, and I don’t think we realise how substantial they are going to be – and how much the economy and society will be restructured as a result. ¥ Martin Wright is Editor in Chief of Green Futures.
America’s falling out of love with the car Car sales have slumped, from around 17 million annually in the mid-90s to about 10 million this year – when the total US automobile fleet is expected to shrink by about 2%. It’s not just the recession: I believe there’s a major rethinking under way, which is changing the place of the car in American culture.
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Western winds: new capacity far exceeds that of coal
Green Futures January 2010 23
A thousand words
Darkness visible The Milky Way spreads across the night above Europe’s first ‘dark sky park’, in the Galloway Forest in Scotland. Over 7,000 stars are visible to the naked eye here – a rare sight in a world whose skies are increasingly saturated with artificial light. It’s one of three such parks – the others are in Utah and Pennsylvania – whose aim is both to raise awareness of light pollution, and provide some respite from it. Over £110 million a year is thought to be wasted by light leaking needlessly into space… Photo: International Year of Astronomy courtesy of Forestry Commission Scotland/Keith Muir
Feature
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www.greenfutures.org.uk
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The future’s not what it used to be How we think about the future will dramatically affect our chances of living in a sustainable world, says James Goodman. Which is why futurists are starting to reshape the ways in which leading companies and organisations think and act today.
Photo: Yakobchuk Vasyl/Shutterstock
F
rom Revelations to Nostrodamus,
Malthus to Marx, we humans have always been fascinated by imagining what lies ahead. And, arguably, we’re more aware of the future today than we ever have been. We can’t escape it: with climate change dominating the media, there seem to be more headlines about the world of 2050 than there are about 2010. But how much effort do we make to consider the future and our relationship with it in a structured way? Typically, not much. We might plan a holiday, a career path or a pension. But we rarely think about the sort of world we might be living in decades down the line – or the sort we might want to live in. There is a growing band of futurists, armed with a box of tools and an optimistic disposition, that are out to change that. They believe that bringing the future into our lives, giving people the ability to deal with change
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Futures thinking helps make us resilient: it’s an immune system for civilisation
and uncertainty, is critical – even for the survival of our civilisation. One of them is Jamais Cascio, recently named as one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers. “Futures thinking can become a sort of immune system for civilisation”, he says, “with tiny tastes of the future acting like a harmless dose of pathogen that allows the immune system to develop the appropriate antibodies.” Considering what might happen in future helps us to prepare for it, to become ‘futures literate’ and habitually act in a way that is more likely to be robust in the long term. Futures work, in other words, helps us achieve that elusive goal of so much of public policy in uncertain times: resilience. For Cascio, this means its value can’t be underestimated. “Even though it might sometimes look like trainspotting, it has a real social and political purpose. It is important.”
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Feature
Coming up…
Jamais Cascio Open the Future; Founder, Worldchanging.com What comes after sustainability? I think it’s resilience. The idea of sustainability can imply there is one perfect, unchanging future, if only we could work out how to get there. Resilience might be more useful, in that it assumes a dynamic environment and that perfection is impossible. You need to design systems to accommodate failure rather than eliminate it. By trying to be perfect, many visions of sustainability are quite brittle.
F
utures as a discipline has a
surprisingly short history. It can be traced back to author HG Wells of The Time Machine fame, himself an instinctive futurist. In 1932, he called for the establishment of Professors of Foresight “who make a whole-time job of estimating the future consequences of new inventions and new devices… All these new things, these new inventions and new powers, come crowding along; every one is fraught with consequences, and yet it is only after something has hit us hard that we set about dealing with it”. Typically sage of him: there are plenty of Professors of Foresight now. In the following decade, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov started publishing his Foundation series, in which the mathematician Hari Seldon comes up with the science of psychohistory. This uses statistical analysis Coming up…
Pedro Riveira Venezuelan futurist The future will be all about resources and this could lead to conflict. For example, what happens if Latin American countries decide not to sell their resources to China? Does it lead to war? Will everyone invade? Could the developed world even survive?
of the behaviour of billions of people to predict the future of the galaxy. Shades of this approach persist in futures work to this day. It’s part of the toolkit at Forum for the Future too, which has recently used futures work as part of change programmes with PepsiCo, Finlays, the NHS, and the UK tourism industry, to name just a few. Futures projects are usually both collaborative and creative, and can create huge momentum within and across organisations. Why? Because when confronted with ideas about the future, and asked to think deeply about them, the normal response is to want to do something to prepare: either to mitigate risks, or to move quickly to develop opportunities. Out of this process can come not only new ideas about business models, products, services and wider strategies, but also changed mindsets: a willingness to think more broadly and more long-term, more consistently. Simon Large, then Commercial Director of tea company Finlays, who worked with Forum’s futures team on scenarios for their business in Kenya said: “There was a fundamental shift in our approach. [As a result], we
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have built a general acknowledgement that developing sustainably had to be central to the brand, the single thing that would hold the business together, and have acted accordingly”. In our experience at Forum, we’ve discovered time and again that the simple act of engaging with the future leads to much deeper engagement with sustainable development. Jamais Cascio says that in his work with business, he tries “to give people a greater sense of connection with their own future, a sense of intimacy”. This, he says, is essential to counter “a great sense of the future being out of our hands. We feel we are subject to huge unstoppable forces and massive unchangeable organisations. Helping people to engage with their own futures can be enormously empowering”. Coming up…
Wendy Schultz Infinite Futures The manufactured capital of our lives is going from passive to active. We are moving towards ubiquitous power generation, an intelligent built environment, similar in concept to ubiquitous computing power. One example: plans for a solar roadway that charges electric cars as they travel.
Disempowerment is not a surprising reaction to widespread pessimism about the future. There’s been a marked shift from the tech-fuelled optimism of the 1960s to today’s anticipation of climate chaos and ecosystem collapse. According to Wendy Schultz, a futurist who straddles the academic and consultancy worlds, “there’s been a change in the perception of the future. There is a palpable sense of hope for the future in China that does not exist in Europe. This is worrying, because optimistic societies succeed and pessimistic societies fail. The pessimism is in part due to the recession, but also because people only hear the bad news. They don’t hear about the good stuff being developed, the inspiring solutions and new ways of living or working that are popping up all over the world”. It’s perhaps reassuring, then, that futures thinking seems to be getting more and more common, connecting people with tomorrow’s possible solutions– even if this is in part a response to new economic Coming up…
Gereon Uerz Volkswagen The need to provide mobility, vehicles and services, for the unserved ‘base of the pyramid’ market remains widely unnoticed by most car manufacturers so far. The same holds true for vehicles for the elderly in the OECD countries, but also in China. [These two aspects] are not only huge market potentials, but will mean an improvement in quality of life and an increase in safety.
uncertainties and accelerating environmental change. As Venezuelan futurist Pedro Riveira told us, “there is a wider audience for futures now, with more people doing it casually or as amateurs. Up until last year the field was a bit cold, but now people are thinking far more about
www.greenfutures.org.uk
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Coming up…
Josephine Green Phillips Design There are signs that we are beginning to realise that efficiency and profit are dehumanising, and that localisation of production and consumption can reintroduce a human dimension into the economy. We will still maintain a global ethic – but globalisation does not equal globalism.
planning for uncertainty”. The tools and techniques that futurists use are changing too, increasing the capacity for engagement. In 2008, the California-based consultancy, Institute For The Future, launched Superstruct. It’s one of the most ambitious futures projects ever undertaken, “the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game”. It ran for six weeks and attracted over 8,600 players from across the globe. “Not only was there great engagement,” says Cascio, who helped set it up, “but I was struck by the novelty of what emerged. There was such an incredible diversity of ideas that would not have been possible to obtain with traditional approaches.” He describes Superstruct as a process of “collective storytelling”. Josephine Green, Director of Trends and Strategy at Phillips Design, says that this is absolutely where futures should be going: “Our role as futurists is to tell the stories that can help us to live better, and to do that in as Coming up…
Richard Banks Interaction Designer, Microsoft Research What could become important in the future is the possibility of losing useful information about the past which is stored in digital form. For example, where has George Bush’s website gone? Twitter is under no obligation to keep any data. How do we ensure content persists for the historians of the future?
meaningful and democratic way as possible. The future must become a co-creative act.” She points out a trend away from the more linear and predictive view of the future that still often predominates. “As the complexity of the world increases, predictions become even more precarious than they were before. Even using scenarios is more difficult. The future is ever more complex, emergent, fluid.” There are two responses to this increasing complexity. One is to try to monitor and manage it – to seek answers to the questions of the future. And the massive upscaling of information processing capacity allows just that. Mike Jackson works with the online futures portal Shaping Tomorrow, a giant resource of futures intelligence and trends for anyone interested in the future as it emerges. He points to an increase in demand from organisations wanting to know what is happening immediately and in the near future, rather than exploring longer term possibilities. The value of tools like Shaping Tomorrow is in their sheer breadth of scope. Gereon Uerz, who worked at the German futures consultancy Z-Punkt before joining Volkswagen, believes that “the use of ICT tools like data-mining,
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competitive intelligence, trend extrapolation based on statistical analysis and especially simulations, will increase”. And it will do so, he says, “despite the failure of the highly elaborated tools that have been used by analysts in the financial markets – and despite the mostly disappointing results of simulation and modelling in futurology”. The other response to an increasingly complex prospect is to try to steer a course through it, navigating with a vision of a desirable future – to tell more stories. Gereon Uerz again: “I think that foresight work has to move away from a purely descriptive approach towards a more normative one. We need images of desired futures rather than mere descriptions Coming up…
Mike Jackson Shaping Tomorrow Science is beginning to prove what we have had in our bodies in terms of pollution. The inevitable consequence in the future is that there will be class action suits. The Corby case on asbestos is a weak signal of this.
of possible ones”. People identify with a positive future: it gives them something concrete to work towards. Developing shared visions of a better – sustainable – future is particularly empowering as it cultivates an optimistic outlook; it tempts us with the possibility that the future is there to be shaped by the present. These two responses to a more complex, uncertain and in some ways threatening future need not be mutually exclusive. It is possible to know more about what is happening now, and then to use that as a basis for a mass conversation about the sort of future we want. All of which makes applied futures thinking absolutely critical for sustainable development. We need both answers and stories. ¥ James Goodman is Head of Futures at Forum for the Future.
Coming up…
Rosa Alegria Futures Group, São Paulo University, Brazil; Editor, Radar 21 A serious and critically overlooked trend is the impact that the media is having on new generations by continually portraying images of ecological collapse. We never see the flip side: where there is disaster, there is also compassion; where there is devastation, there is also restoration; where there is war, there is also peace… What happens when an eight-year-old child repeatedly sees the Greenland ice melting, piles of dead fishes, huge areas on fire…? This child will probably grow up imbued with scepticism and fear, rather than being inspired to create the future he or she desires.
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Feature
What’s a weak signal? And what do we do with it? The future’s already here, says Hugh Knowles – you just have to tune into the signals…
Y
ou might have requested a
vitamin supplement with your fruit juice to get you started in the morning, but how willing would you be to pop in for an antiageing cocktail delivered through an IV drip on the way into work? Sounds implausible? A step too far even for our health conscious times? Well, Tenteki10 in Japan has been offering that service since early 2008, and it could soon be coming to a high street near you. Welcome to the study of ‘weak signals’ where both the bizarre and the seemingly mundane are tracked The internet may be intimidatingly vast and to give a glimpse as to what changes complex, but there are clever shortcuts if might lie unseen around the corner. you know where to look. One method is to The author William Gibson combine the wisdom of crowds with more famously said: “The future is already prosaic technology filters. For example, here – it’s just not evenly distributed”. you can follow and quickly scan a huge In its simplest form, the study of number of blogs and newsfeeds by using weak signals is the search for those an aggregator like Netvibes or Google elements of the future that are Reader. Other websites do some of the indeed already with us – but have yet hard work for you by looking for interesting to be recognised as such, let alone trends in specific areas, such as PSFK and adopted by mainstream society. Springwise for consumer and business Weak signals can range culture. Then, of course, there’s Twitter. from small changes in behaviour This has its own aggregators, such as and technology, to signs that a trendsmap.com, which help spot and track significant shift in a system might emerging patterns. be imminent [see ‘Weak signals,
Weaving a future out of the web
30 Green Futures January 2010
strong undercurrents’, p32]. Often it can just involve a hunch that something different is underway, rather than a clear indication of predictable change. An individual signal might make little sense at the time; it might require a number of other similar signals, or a creative leap to realise just what it could be pointing to. It can be infuriatingly abstract. But you have to make a note just in case…
Why look for weak signals?
At Forum for the Future, searching for weak signals is one of the most important and enjoyable aspects of our work. For the vast majority of organisations, though, it can easily seem a waste of time. It is almost impossible to chart every new idea or behaviour that comes along, just in case it might be relevant. Precious few organisations can focus resources on events which, at first (and often only) glance, seem irrelevant to their core business. However, new behaviours and technologies can emerge and be adopted startlingly quickly. Take Facebook, which reached 150 million users almost 18 times faster than television did in its heyday. It’s part of a revolution which has rapidly disrupted longstanding business models – not least those of the music industry, which is being overturned by downloads. There were surely weak signals back in the 90s giving hints of the revolution to come, but most in the business failed to pick them up – or chose to ignore them. Despite what we like to believe, trends very rarely continue in a linear direction, and sudden shocks –
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Downtown dragonfly As fertile land succumbs to the stress of a fastchanging climate and burgeoning population, a new phenomenon is born: urban ‘agritecture’. The Dragonfly brings accommodation, commerce and food production into one bionic, river-borne tower, moored at the southern edge of New York’s Roosevelt Island. Each wall, ceiling and hydroponic balcony is part of an all-encompassing ecosystem, where cultures are layered floor by floor, passing nutrients down through the substrata. A vast mesh, strung across the structure like a sail, stores warm air through the sub-zero winter and offers natural ventilation in the hot summer months. Citizens of the Big Apple become urban cultivators, poultry farmers and apiarists, living off the fat of their home. This is far from today’s reality, yet urban agriculture is becoming an increasingly popular idea. Plans to incorporate food growing into architecture are mushrooming on drawing boards – weak signals of a future that may one day take this extraordinary form. – Anna Simpson
such as the recent financial crisis – can be immensely destabilising. Tracking weak signals is a key part of being prepared for the unexpected, and understanding that multiple futures are possible.
Where are weak signals – and how do you catch them?
Photo: Vincent Callebaut
The simple and rather unhelpful answer is anywhere. From observing behaviour whilst walking down the street, to reading technology magazines from other countries, there are numerous sources. The challenge is to sort the signals from the noise. And that noise has been massively amplified by the internet. The explosion of information on the web has been both a boon and a burden. But it has also provided us with some tools to sift the wheat from the chaff [see box]. Wherever you source your signals from, it’s important to stray outside your comfort zone. The really interesting ideas often come from way beyond your own ‘home sector’. A drop-in anti-ageing café might not on the surface seem a mainstream sustainability issue, but human beings living for longer certainly is.
So you’ve found a weak signal – what next?
At Forum, once we spot something that might be of interest we make a note of it on an internal blog and tag it according to predefined categories. Sometimes a number appear that defy categorisation – which suggests that we are looking at a previously unseen shift in behaviour or technology.
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“ ”
The challenge is to sort the signals from the noise
It all generates a massive amount of information, which needs further filtering and analysis, and it’s fair to say that we are still only beginning to realise the full potential of the data. Jody Turner, Founder of CultureofFuture.com, says creating credible future scenarios involves capturing and tracking vast reams of information. Although she doesn’t use the phrase ‘weak signals’, she expresses the concept nicely when she says: “It’s having a practiced eye to note the influential and forward leaning occurrences around us. As I lay out information, a directional flow begins to emerge, and I can see familiar patterns that overlap with other studies and outcomes.” Forum’s Head of Futures, James Goodman, calls it “well researched fiction backed up by plausible evidence”. That is why we use individual signals, or groups of signals, as part of our future scenarios work. They provide useful evidence of the plausibility of any given scenario – and show where elements of that possible future have already arrived. As well as such practical applications, though, perhaps the greatest benefit from tracking weak signals is the way it broadens your horizons and encourages creativity through exposure to a vast amount of stimulating ideas, trends and patterns. In uncertain times, being able to suggest ways forward that are a little out of the ordinary is a very valuable skill. And the more you do it, the more you see…¥ Hugh Knowles is Principal Sustainability Advisor at Forum for the Future.
Green Futures Jnuary 2010 31
Feature
Weak signals, strong undercurrents Some of these examples – identified by the Forum team over the last two years – may already have made their mark on the here and now.
The UK’s National Rail built a temporary station in Workington, Cumbria, to improve access for those cut off by floods. Almost immediately, the new station appeared on OpenStreetMap.org. Both the appearance of temporary infrastructure in response to extreme weather, and the real time updating of maps, are relatively new behaviour. Analysis: Are we going to start moving our infrastructure around in response to climate instability? Can open source maps help us cope with that?
Pulling power Half of Europe’s energy needs could soon be met by exploiting the old rule of love – that opposites attract. Wherever rivers surge into the sea, an artificial membrane can be used to harness the osmotic pull that causes freshwater molecules to go over to the salty side. A small plant in Norway is already generating 4kW for the grid from the significant pressure (equivalent to that of a waterfall) created in a saltwater chamber as the freshwater flows in. Analysis: As the ‘twin crunches’ of climate change and peak oil start to bite, a flurry of research is under way to coax power out of the most unlikely sources. It could transform tired debates of the ‘wind versus nuclear’ sort – and completely change the way we think about energy.
Leapfrog the laptop A study of ICT in the developing world found that as a family’s income grows – from $1 per day to $4, for example – their ICT spend increases faster than that in any other category, including health, education and housing (source: World Resources Institute). It also found that people are opting for mobiles rather than computers. Analysis: Combine this with the dawn of open source mobiles and the grey market in high spec phones, and it may be that many in developing countries will bypass the need for computers, just as many have leapfrogged landline infrastructure. Does this make the development of the $100 laptop slightly futile? Should it be the $10 mobile platform? Either way, it’s more evidence of the digital revolution taking hold where the industrial revolution has yet to really take off.
Forum for the Future’s new blog tracks weak signals from the future: www.forumforthefuture.org/futures/weak-signals
32 Green Futures January 2010
Rise of the citizen engineer The open source software movement and the hacker culture have driven huge changes in how we use technology. The Linux operating system, for example, demonstrated a whole new way of collaboration which in turn gave rise to the likes of Wikipedia. Now open source is embracing hardware, too – and not just in IT, either. Magazines such as Make (www.makezine.com) and video tutorials (www.citizenengineer.com) are leading the way. There are now home gene splicing kits and open source tractors and solar power plants. A gasification kit is available to buy or build from an open source platform. Any hobbyist can mix reactors, fuels and temperatures to see which suits their purpose best. Analysis: The open and collaborative model could yield surprising results in areas such as energy and biotechnology. Just as the internet boom came about through a community of hackers, will the green energy revolution be born from a co-operative of backyards?
Trickle up innovation GE is about to start marketing a new kind of electrocardiograph machine in the US. Despite being packed with the latest technology, it weighs half as much as most machines in the market and will sell for about $2,500, far less than comparable models. Interestingly, it is essentially the same field model as GE Healthcare developed for doctors in India and China in 2008. Analysis: Designing for the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ in developing countries is helping companies rethink how to sell in the recession-hit West. It’s a complete reversal of traditional practice. Rather than passing off last year’s model to poor countries at discount rates, they’re creating entry-level goods for emerging markets, and then repackaging them as low priced, robust models for bargain-conscious buyers in the developed world.
Gaming genes Scientists in Korea have programmed silicon gene simulations to evolve when prompted by external stimuli. The ‘genes’ consistently find the best mutation to ensure their survival – rather like a tough opponent in a computer game that grows body armour when you shoot at it. In the future, this artificial intelligence could be captured in a hand cream that would mutate to attack any trespassing bacteria, or a pH neutral solution programmed to cleanse the ocean of toxic waste. Analysis: Combining the creativity and complexity of computer games with the frontier science of bio- and nanotech could unleash benefits which few outside science fiction have imagined to date.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Benjamin Albiach Galan/shutterstock; hyman007/istock; Open Street Map
Temporary infrastructure – real time web
Extrapolators beware! “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” Niels Bohr’s words are a wise warning to reckless forecasters. Trish Lorenz and Martin Wright uncover some instructive howlers.
C
ombining a nuclear reactor with a home boiler is no longer a problem. It would heat and cool the house, provide unlimited hot water and melt the snow from sidewalks and driveways. All that could be done for six years on a single charge of fissionable material costing about $300.” – Robert Ferry, US Institute of Boiler and Radiator Manufacturers, 1955 “Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in ten years.” – Alex Lewyt, President of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp, also 1955
Don Farrall/Getty; FPG/Getty; Erik Dreyer/Getty
Lewyt and Ferry both stumbled into a risky habit of all amateur futurists: extrapolating from present trends. In this case, they were caught up in the surge of excitement over the rise of nuclear power. They were not alone. In the tech-fuelled optimism of the 50s, magazines, radio and the infant TV were buzzing with predictions of flying cars and lunar settlements. They had fallen victim to what later became known as the Gartner Hype Cycle. This maps the enthusiasm and subsequent disillusionment typical in the introduction of new technology – a useful reality check for those caught up in ‘irrational optimism’. By contrast, there are those whose feet are too firmly rooted in present realities, and fail to see how innovation can combine with social changes to speed the widespread adoption of new technology. “The Americans need the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” – Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, Royal Mail, 1878 “The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad.” – President of the Michigan Savings Bank, advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in Ford Motors, 1903 It is difficult to consider any factor that doesn’t apparently exist at the time of making a prediction, but that’s essentially what looking ahead requires. It wasn’t all that
www.greenfutures.org.uk
long ago when people were predicting a bright future for teletext and fax machines. Few would have anticipated that both would be made almost obsolete by the internet and email. And yet the weak signals were there for those who chose to hear them. A fax machine, after all, is simply a modem with a rather complex print interface attached. It only evolved as it did because people were unused to reading information solely on screen, and computers were too big to carry around with them. Once laptops took off in the early 90s, the fax was doomed. “There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home.” – Ken Olson, Chairman, Digital Equipment Corp, 1977 Australian Senator Dr Russell Trood sums it up neatly when he says: “‘Nowism’ is a serious occupational hazard for those in the prediction game”. Today’s futurologists no longer try to predict a single outcome for the future; instead they map a variety of scenarios. For Adam Gordon of Future Savvy, scenariobased thinking gives people “permission to think through alternative outcomes without necessarily predicting them”. Instead, of trying to forecast precisely what might happen, he says, “we can ask ‘what if it does?’, and then explore the outcomes and our responses”. Such thinking characterises much of the strategy adopted by forwardlooking governments on tackling climate change. James Goodman, Head of Futures at Forum for the Future, agrees. “People think it’s the output that’s important, but actually it’s the process.” And, he adds: “All future planning has uncertainty at its heart.” Or as Martin Raymond, Strategy and Insight Director at The Future Laboratory, says: “We always try to spot the dog poop in our forecast”. ¥
Green Futures January 2010 33
Partner viewpoint
Up country T
he Welbeck Estate in
Sherwood Forest can teach us a thing or two about rural development. Just three years ago it gave birth to Stichelton, a new blue cheese in the classic mould. Now, a whole School of Artisan Food has opened there. The first such place in the country, set up with an £890,000 grant from the East Midlands Development Agency (emda), it offers courses ranging from baking and brewing to butchery and cheesemaking. And as a seedbed of smallscale entrepreneurship, it promises a triple yield of benefits for rural Britain: job creation, economic vitality and local production. But public investment in rural projects like this is all too rare. So says Stuart Burgess, Chair of the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC). His 2008 report to Government argues that there’s an urban-rural imbalance in sustainable development funding, and it needs to be redressed. It’s partly a matter of social justice, the third (and sometimes missing) leg of sustainability’s three-legged stool, says Burgess – but it’s also good economic sense. CRC estimates the value of untapped potential output from UK rural areas at anything from £236 billion to £347 billion. And green considerations strengthen their case too, since their natural environment is often their biggest base asset.
Part of the problem is that standard models for investment don’t always work in smaller communities, says Roger Turner, Head of Rural Economies at CRC. “There’s a mismatch between [communities’] need for relatively small levels of investment over a period of years and the standard view of capital-driven, one-off payments for physical-type interventions.” An urban bias to investment strategy can even affect money which has been specifically earmarked for issues endemic in small communities. Take the Town Centre Management Fund, intended to help tackle the cascading negative impact of failures of local businesses. To target it, the Government relied partly on the indices of multiple deprivation (IMD). Unfortunately, this measure tends to discriminate against areas with sparser populations. The result: less money to rural areas, where the need for high street regeneration is every bit as acute. How to put this right? As a first step, Burgess calls for a shift from simply bolstering certain industrial sectors, to a more holistic view of sustainable places, building on their particular strengths and protecting their specific assets. “The answer,” he wrote, “lies in allowing local businesses in partnership with local government to better access government support, with a particular emphasis on benefiting from investment and innovation.”
A recent series of CRC workshops spawned by the Burgess report – on innovation, leadership, empowerment and investment – kept coming back to this underlying theme of sustainable, equitable development. For inspiration, they highlighted success stories like these: • Haslemere in Surrey. In this Transition Town, mayor Melanie Odell has provided vital leadership with initiatives to make the town more vibrant economically – such as a reward card giving shoppers points for making local purchases. Yet she credits the town’s volunteers as the success force. • Broughton Hall Estate in North Yorkshire. The Tempest family, its owner for 900 years, stumbled on a new vision almost by accident when a small business asked to rent a portion of a building. Now the estate, extensively restored, houses 40 families and 50 companies as diverse as a pram and carriage manufacturer, a lingerie designer and a radio station. Future plans include planting new woods for carbon sequestration. • Hethel Engineering Centre. Rural Norfolk’s seedbed for cleantech innovation: its proximity to Lotus Cars helps nurture a network of smaller engineering and manufacturing firms – working together locally, while successfully accessing international markets. A fifth CRC-sponsored workshop in January will pull together common threads and messages into clear agenda items for local planning and development agencies. Could embedding these in policies and programmes usher in a rural green new deal? ¥ – April Streeter and Roger East
Commission for Rural Communities Elegant harbinger of a rural revival: School of Artisan Food on the Welbeck Estate
34 Green Futures January 2010
is a Forum for the Future partner. www.ruralcommunities.gov.uk
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photo: School of Artisan Food; Stichelton Dairy Ltd
A new, holistic model of investment could help rural areas reap the fruits of a green economic revival
Comment
John Griffin CEO Addison Lee
“You have to get ordinary, dosh-driven business to make the change”
W
e don’t sit here worrying about the environment
For Addison Lee, it’s always been about the commercial benefits – more than the green agenda. We made the company more efficient, and as a result, its carbon footprint kept shrinking. It was a series of steps, starting with simple things like fitting windows with high insulation ratings. Our ‘green’ action plan said to put better windows on the first floor, but the cost benefits were so clear that we did the whole building.
Investment has already paid off
We have over 2,500 cars on the road, but we use very sophisticated GPS technology to plan their routes so that they never have to travel more than half a mile between jobs. It’s halved their average journey distance. There’s a ‘going home’ button that the drivers press, and the allocator pulls up a job along the way so that their car is never empty. It’s reduced dead (non-income-generating) mileage by 17.6%.
Efficiency has meant we laughed our way through the recession
We are up 9% on this week last year, which is a great position to be in when the industry as a whole is in recession. The average company in our sector is 20% down, so we must be doing something right. In just one year, we’ve saved £185,000 through energy efficiency measures. It pays.
…And I think companies ignore this at their peril. Our turnover is around £175 million a year, and as much as half of that is through contracts. There’s a lot of competition around, and businesses are more inclined to offer contracts to companies with a strong green agenda, a real plan.
We’re growing, but our footprint isn’t
We log our carbon for the whole company, and so if we double in size, we track our emissions as doubling in size. But in fact, we are growing as a company – more cars, more passengers, more turnover – and our emissions are still falling. We’ve cut our carbon emissions by 30% on our 2002 baseline, the year we began our green policies and practices, and we have a target to reach 60% by 2025.
Ordinary business has to wake up
You have to get people with ordinary businesses, not eco businesses, to understand their responsibility to the planet. And you do this by telling them that if you find the right balance between commerce and sustainability, it will pay! The balance we’ve found is a really good one. But we can’t green the cab industry on our own: everybody’s got to be on board. ¥ John Griffin was in conversation with Anna Simpson.
Taxi firm Addison Lee won the 2009 Green500 Diamond Award for being a clear leader in cutting carbon.
Photo: James Jenkins
“It’s about ordinary businesses, not just eco ones”
It’s no secret that contractors are looking for green credentials
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Green Futures January 2010 35
Partner viewpoint
Cosying up Mixed messages on energy efficiency are costing UK householders dear. Clear, consistent advice is called for. attractive about measures to save energy in the home. On the one hand, they play to our desire for warmth and comfort, and on the other, to our pride. Who wants to hang on to a poorly insulated home while the neighbours take advantage of the latest offer to give their home the duvet treatment. They invite you round for mulled wine when the work is over. She’s wearing a sleeveless dress and takes you aside to whisper, smugly, that the heating isn’t even on… And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s no shortage of people looking to make their home more snug, and save money, too. “Three million people contact us every year for advice on implementing simple domestic solutions,” says Marian Spain, Head of Strategy at the Energy Saving Trust (EST). “And about 20% of those people are talking radical change: microgeneration, solid wall insulation...” One of the main problems they face, says Spain, is knowing who to trust for advice. “It’s a crowded world, with guidance and implementation packages on offer from supermarkets, construction firms and utilities to local authorities and the third sector.” Limiting the sources of information would be counter-productive. There’s both room for – and the need for – all of these services, if the UK is to meet its Low Carbon Transition Plan target of reducing household emissions by 29% on 2008 levels by 2020 (see ‘Between four walls’). That’s why the EST is backing a UK partnership which, so far, has opened three Sainsbury’s Home Energy Centres, with staff from utility EDF on hand to offer advice on heating and insulation services to shoppers. Other schemes are bringing advice to your door, and tackling whole communities at a time (see ‘Groundwork partner page’, p41). But, Spain argues, unless there is a consistent message coming from all sources, homeowners risk going away thinking that it’s all more complicated than they’d hoped. For the EST, consistency goes beyond agreeing on facts and figures. At the moment, the accessibility of information varies from one local authority to the next, making real savings a sort of postcode lottery, and seasonal deals add confusion to the task of working out how much a job will cost. A first step would be for
36 Green Futures January 2010
And the heating isn’t even on...
Between four walls • The average UK household produces 5.5 tonnes of CO2 a year • Each household could save an average £300 a year – and 1.5 tonnes of CO2 – through improved insulation and heating • In poorly insulated housing, one pound out of every three spent on heating is wasted • 81% of homes could be lifted out of the lowest efficiency bands for a cost of just £3,000 each • £3.2 billion has been allocated to energy efficiency in homes as part of the Low Carbon Transition Plan
Government to work with energy companies to make information about the costs and services more transparent. It’s also vital that the consumer can be certain that they’re going to get what they pay for. This means ensuring new technologies are tried and tested before they are sold, and that the supply chain has the skills to install them. Ideally, any work done on a house would improve its efficiency rating, becoming part and parcel of what builders do – not an optional extra. Local authorities can lead on this by providing training programmes and forming partnerships to target specific communities. EST is already working with over 100 local authorities to get the basic tools and skills in place. And the ideal set-up? “When we talk about consumers, we’re talking about ourselves,” says Spain. “We get most of our advice from the people around us – our colleagues and friends. So, if those people, and the ones you meet on your daily rounds – the shop assistant, the heating engineer, the builder – are all giving you the same message, you’ll hear it.” ¥ – Anna Simpson
Energy Saving Trust is a Forum for the Future partner. www.energysavingtrust.org.uk
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photos: Yuri Arcurs/shutterstock; fotoIE/istock
T
here’s something curiously
Forum update
Fat of the land
Photo: Matthew Dixon/iStock
How farmers are facing up to the future From their Cheshire farm, Philip Pearson & Sons grow 3,000 tonnes of tomatoes a year for Tesco and other retailers in 12 acres of glasshouses. They feed any plant waste to their anaerobic digester (AD), which produces heat, CO2 and a fertiliser (digestate) in return. All of these byproducts go back into the glasshouses, improving the yield and making the tomatoes extra tasty. The other product, methane, feeds into a highly efficient combined heat and power (CHP) unit, generating electricity that is sold back to the grid. The payback on both the digester and the CHP plant was under 12 months, and now they’re making a profit. Pearson & Sons are among a growing number of farmers to have spotted that the road to sustainability is also a business opportunity. Small-scale energy generation – from wind to micro-hydro to AD – can reap new earnings from the land. And with a government promise of improved support for renewables, investment is an increasingly attractive option [see ‘AD as alchemy?’, p44]. For many members of the farming community, the UK’s Low Carbon Transition Plan (see ‘First cut’, GF74, p6) will mean a change of gear. The focus of previous goal-setting initiatives on carbon – at the expense of other greenhouse gases – had allowed the impact of agriculture to escape attention. But the transition plan has set UK farmers and land managers emissions reductions targets for the first time, aiming to cut 3 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent – or 11% off forecast levels – by 2020. Farming is responsible for 74% of all UK nitrous oxide emissions – a greenhouse gas 276 times more potent than CO2 – mainly from fertiliser. And then there’s methane (23 times as powerful as CO2), given off by ruminant livestock, particularly cattle and sheep, and organic waste. Add in the amount of energy involved in everything from fertiliser production to distribution, and it’s clear that agriculture has its work cut out. A new action plan to help the sector become part of the solution is to be launched in March 2010. Produced by the Climate Change Taskforce –
www.greenfutures.org.uk
a partnership involving the Agricultural Industries Confederation, National Farmers Union, and the Country Land and Business Association, the plan will promote measures to improve efficiency in the use of nutrients, water and energy. For many, this cocktail of opportunities, measures, risks and targets is a lot to take on board. But farmers are increasingly aware of the need for action: one in two say that climate change is already affecting their land. That is why the Taskforce bodies, along with the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, Forum for the Future and Defra, joined to create Farming Futures – the only communications project dedicated to climate change in the sector. Now in its third year, Farming Futures aims to inspire and inform farmers and land managers to respond to the challenge, through on-farm events, a dedicated website, and an array of factsheets and case studies. This combination of clear messages, commercial incentives and the first formal framework for action on emissions, could make UK farms a new focus for both food security and renewables. ¥ Madeleine Lewis is Farming Futures Project Officer. m.lewis@forumforthefuture.org
New partners Since the last issue of Green Futures, Advantage West Midlands, AXA Insurance, British Waterways, The Environment Agency, Heineken, Interserve, Morrison Construction, Natural England, NHS Bristol and Prudential have joined Forum for the Future as partners.
www.forumforthefuture.org
>
Green Futures January 2010 37
Greener goods: sound procurement cuts carbon
Porritt phlogged
Fife Council has won the Government Opportunities Sustainability Award for piloting a procurement tool that takes into account both the carbon cost of a product and the financial cost of its full life. The tool, dubbed Whole Life Costing + CO2 (WLC+CO2), was developed in partnership with Forum for the Future, and is now used by Fife’s central procurement team. Fife’s pilot confirms that the tool, in use since early 2009, is simple to operate and covers only verifiable information – making it acceptable under EU rules. It can play a key role in helping the council decide on competing tenders for products and services. In the words of Keith Grieve, Procurement and Supply Chain Management Team Leader at Fife, the tool “allows you to compare individual products in terms of carbon emissions, and then to apply a value to those emissions which can influence the award
Tomorrow’s leaders Since 1996, Forum For the Future’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development has been training the sustainability leaders of the future. Each issue, we track the career of a Forum alumnus.
of the contract”. He adds that it will be “of great assistance to all organisations trying to reduce their carbon footprint and to green their supply chain”. Meanwhile, the Forum won the prize for best performing small- and medium-sized enterprise in the Mayor of London’s Green Procurement Code Awards. According to Forum’s Sustainability Advisor, Anna Warrington, the award is “a great way of demonstrating to our partners that we share the challenges they face in sustainable procurement – and that they can be overcome. It makes it clear that the advice we offer is grounded in reality”. “It’s a simple concept – spending your money on goods which improve people’s quality of life and enhance the environment,” says John Bishop, IT and Administration Manager at the Forum. “But,” he adds, “putting it into practice has its challenges, even for an organisation like us.” ¥
Andy Wales
Class of: 1998-99 Currently: Global Head of Sustainable Development, SABMiller Why I chose the MProf? I had just graduated in Development Studies and English Literature and saw myself working for an international NGO like Oxfam. I did the Masters as a way to sound out how I could make a difference. But I found that, if you really want to change things, business offers one of the most dynamic, focused and practical institutions. What I learnt What makes the MProf a pinnacle of course design is the network you can build and access, both through your peers and through the six sectoral placements [in business, government, NGOs and so on]. For me, the placement at Interface Flor really stood out. They had a lot of vision, and were realistic about the challenge they’d set themselves: to be the leading example of industrial ecology. A lot of it was due to the tone set by [its founder] Ray Anderson. He was
38 Green Futures January 2010
never shy to ask himself questions that he couldn’t yet answer. Career to date If you prove yourself in business, you move quickly. I went to Interface Flor as Sustainability Manager, and then Director, and was there for four years. Then I worked for Severn Trent as Head of Corporate Responsibility, looking at opportunities for renewable energy from organic waste streams. Now, I’m Global Head of Sustainable Development at SABMiller, one of the world’s largest brewers (think Pilsner Urquell, Peroni, Grolsch…). One of the major challenges we face is water scarcity, with global demand expected to exceed supply by 40% in 2030. You can’t have good beer without good water, and so we’re working with WWF, with the German development agency GTZ, and with local governments, smallholder farmers and communities, to ensure the future of the watersheds which are so necessary to our crops. We’ve got programmes running in Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Tanzania, South Africa and the Ukraine.
My next steps I’ve joined up with two fellow alumni from the Masters course, Matthew Gorman, now Head of SD at BAA, and Dunstan Hope, a Director at Business for Social Responsibility, to write a book called Big Business, Big Responsibilities. It’s going to be published in June by Palgrave Macmillan. When we met on the course, ten years ago, we were all very hopeful about what we could achieve through business. The nice thing is, we still are. Advice for future leaders The most valuable thing I learnt from the MProf is that by working together we can do so much more than if anyone tried to do it on their own. One movement setting out to prove this is the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders. We’re a group of 600 from across the world, with influential roles in business, government and NGOs. The level of dialogue around common challenges is really exciting. Interview by Anna Simpson.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photo: Pangfolio forward/shutterstock
The right buys
Those of you who have enjoyed keeping in touch with Jonathon Porritt’s insights via his blog – www.jonathonporritt.com – may be interested to know that you can hear him in person via Forum’s first phlog (phone blog) at: www.ipadio.com/phlogs/ jonathonporritt ¥
Five essential criteria for leadership on climate change
Iain Watt sets a new challenge to business
C
limate change is now
clearly on the radar of most large companies – but only a minority have started to think through, and act upon, the full suite of risks and opportunities it presents. But, while individual companies may resist change, the competitive world they operate in won’t. Supply chains are increasingly judged – and indeed priced –
Forum is “market leader”
Photo: James Brey/iStock
A report by independent research firm Verdantix found that Forum for the Future leads the UK market among environmental NGOs – in joint first place with WWF. The Forum’s “consulting prowess” and “strong business alignment” prompted the verdict. The report will be used to help directors in business select suitable partners to support their transition to a sustainable future. ¥
on the basis of their carbon content. Products and services are evaluated not only on their performance, but on their ability to work in a low carbon world. While all organisations across the globe will have to make adjustments to keep afloat in the future, some will be better prepared than others – and a few leaders will be well placed to embrace all the opportunities that the transition to a low-carbon economy offers. But what does leadership on climate change look like? Forum for the Future has identified the five components which would place a company well ahead of the game: • a full understanding of the risks and opportunities posed by climate change • awareness of the climate impacts in your company’s value chain • products and/or services that are fit for purpose in a low-carbon economy • understanding your contribution to societal greenhouse gas targets • progressive engagement in the political debate around climate policy.
ion etit s p Cominner w
So where do you sit on the scale? Is your company a beginner? Or a pioneer? For a cost of £7,500, the Forum is offering to tell its partners just that, identifying areas of excellence and room for improvement, in a quick evaluation. Are you ready for the Climate Challenge? ¥ Iain Watt is Principal Sustainability Advisor at Forum for the Future. Eagle eye for opportunities: climate-savvy companies will soar above the competition
Who’s catalysing disruption? In the last edition of Green Futures we introduced our thinking and ambitions for ‘Catalysing disruption’ (GF74, p39). As part of this, we launched a competition for five winners to win sets of our Disruptive Innovation Cards by telling us how entrants would use them to disrupt for sustainability. We promised to announce the winners in the next issue of Green Futures. Entries came from as far afield as New Zealand, the US and Brazil. The winners are: • Ed Kellow, LEAD International who will use the cards to train 150 LEAD Associates on sustainability, who in turn train people in 33 countries • Ron Mader, Planeta.org who promised to translate the cards into Spanish and create an iPhone/online application for them • Michelle Thomasson who will use the cards with economic advisors, film the process in action, and disseminate it online •A ndré Winter, Brazil who is organising a series of events in parallel to the Copenhagen climate talks •S tuart Jones, PLATO: Sustain who will use the cards in work with 160 business leaders in South East England Watch this space for future tales of disruptive innovation… ¥ Chris Sherwin is Head of Innovation at Forum for the Future.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Green Futures January 2010 39
Forum for the Future works in partnership with over 100 leading organisations, mainly from the public and private sectors, to find practical ways to deliver a sustainable future. For more information, visit www.forumforthefuture.org
Advantage West Midlands www.advantagewm.co.uk
The Co-operative Group Chris Sherlock, www.co-operative.coop
John Lewis Partnership Gemma Lacey, 020 7592 4412
Royal Mail Group Martin Blake, 01252 528 681
AkzoNobel Elizabeth Stokes, 01928 511695
Cornwall County Council Anthony Weight, 01872 322633
Johnson Matthey Sean Axon, 020 7269 8400
RSA Paul Pritchard, 020 7337 5712
Alliance Boots Andrew Jenkins, 0115 968 6766
Corus Stephen Blaylock, 01244 89 2713
JT Group John Pontin, 01275 373393
RWE npower Anita Longley, 01793 892716
AOL Time Warner www.timewarner.com/corp
Duchy Originals Tim Appleton, 020 8831 6800
Kingfisher Christina Allen, 020 7644 1142
Arup Chris Trott, 020 7636 1531
Ecotricity Matt Thomas, 01453 756111
Kraft Foods Jonathan Horrell, 01242 236101
Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Jack Cunningham, Jack. Cunningham@sainsburys.co.uk
Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy Jane Howarth, 020 7410 7023
Ecover Belgium NV Mick Bremans, +32 3 309 2500
Leeds City Council Tom Knowland, 0113 395 0643
Atkins Helene Vergereau, 0113 205 1242
EDF Energy David Ferguson, 07875 119978
London Borough of Croydon Peter McDonald, 020 8760 5791
Aviva Investors Zoe Collier, 020 7809 6000
Energy Saving Trust Paula Owen, 020 7654 2411
London Borough of Newham Fiona Perry, fiona.perry@newham.gov.uk
AXA Insurance Truska Angel, 07974 833109
Entec UK Ltd Francesco Corsi, 0191 272 6128
London Borough of Waltham Forest www.walthamforest.gov.uk
BAA Matthew Gorman, 020 7243 1264
The Environment Agency Brian Francis, brian.francis@ environment-agency.gov.uk
Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) James Simpson, 020 7811 3315 www.msc.org
Eurostar Louisa Bell, 020 7922 2442
Marks & Spencer Rowland Hill, 020 8718 6885
The Tetley Group Sara Howe, 020 8338 4590
Fife Council Neil Gateley, 08451 555555
Middlesbrough Council Bob King, 01642 728233
Tetra Pak Richard Hands, 0870 442 6623
Finlays Michael Pennant-Jones, 020 7802 3239
Morrison Construction Guy Wilson, Guy.Wilson@ morrisonconstruction.co.uk
Thames Water Utilities Darren Towers, 0118 373 9063
Balfour Beatty Jonathan Garrett, 020 7216 6837 Bank of America: Merrill Lynch Matt Hale, 020 7996 2054 Benchmark Software Simon Harvey, 01458 444010 BCME Claire Levens, claire.levens@ gbcpublicaffairs.com
Firmenich SA Neil McFarlane, +41 227802435
Natural England Julian Lloyd, 0300 060 0243 www.naturalengland.org.uk
SC Johnson Chris Lambert, 01784 484100 Severn Trent Kathryn Barker, 0121 722 4314 Skanska Intergrated Projects Jennifer Clark, 01923 776666 Sony Ericsson www.sonyericsson.com South West Tourism Neil Warren, 01392 353234 Tesco Ruth Girardet, 01992 644 053
TJX Europe Jo Murphy, 01923 473089
Birmingham City Council Sandy Taylor, 0121 303 1111
FirstGroup Terri Vogt, 07799 885171
BP Naomi Korolew, 020 3057 2524
Food and Drink Federation Julian Hunt, 020 7420 7125
The Natural Step International Jimmy Sjöblom, +46 8 789 29 00 www.thenaturalstep.org
British Waterways Jim Stirling, Jim.Stirling@britishwaterways.co.uk
Friends Provident Sandra Prida, 08452 683135
Network Rail www.networkrail.co.uk
TUI Travel Jane Ashton, 01293 645911
BT Environment Unit, 0800 731 2403
Good Energy www.goodenergy.co.uk
NHS Bristol Angela Raffle, angela.raffle@bristolpct.nhs.uk
Unilever UK Helen Fenwick, 01372 945000
Bupa www.bupa.com
Groundwork Fiona Taylor, 0121 237 5815
O2 Simon Davis, Simon.Davis@O2.com
VisitEngland Jason Freezer, 0208 563 3180
Cadbury Alison Ward, 01895 615568
GSH Group Jane Reynolds 01782 200400
Panasonic Simon Eves, 01344 853325
Vodafone Group Chris Burgess, 01635 677932
Cafédirect Whitney Kakos, 020 7490 9540
Guardian News and Media Jo Confino, jo.confino@guardian.co.uk
PepsiCo UK & Ireland Andrew Smith, 0207 734 0582
Warburtons Sarah Miskell, 01204 556600
Capgemini James Robey, 0870 904 5761
Halcrow Group Nick Murry, MurryNJA@Halcrow.com
Powys County Council Heather Delonnette, 01597 827481
Welsh Assembly Government Simon Bilsborough, 029 2046 8669
Cargill Europe Fiona Cubitt, 01932 861916
Heineken UK Richard Heathcote, 01432 345277
Pret A Manger Nicki Fisher, 020 7827 8888
Wessex Water Dan Green, 01225 526000
Carillion Louise Rhydderch, 01902 316258
Highways Agency Lisa Scott, 020 7153 4749
Prudential Fay Hogg 020 7548 3581
Willmott Dixon George Martin, 01932 584700
Camarthenshire County Council www.carmarthenshire.gov.uk
IGD Dr James Northen, 01923 851919
Pureprint Group Richard Owers, 01825 768611
Wm Morrison Supermarkets Gillian Hall, gillian.hall@morrisonsplc.co.uk
City of London Emma Bara, 020 7332 1431
InterfaceFLOR Ramon Arratia, 020 7490 3960
Rail Safety and Standards Board Joanna Gilligan, 020 7904 7655
WWF-UK Dax Lovegrove, 01483 412395
Colors Fruit Craig Schaefer, 01354 691 340
Interserve www.interserveplc.co.uk
Royal Dutch Shell Elfrida Hughes, +31610974798
Yorkshire Forward Debbie Rosen, 0113 3949783
Commission for Rural Communities Graham Russell, 01242 534072
Jaguar Land Rover Julian Whitehead, 01926 649646
40 Green Futures January 2010
Transport for London Helen Woolston, 020 7126 3976 Triodos Bank William Ferguson, 0117 980 9770
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Partner viewpoint
The doctor will see you now…
With rising fuel costs, more UK households are struggling to pay their energy bills. Garry Campbell thinks Green Doctors are the answer.
Photo: Manor Photography/Alamy
I
f heating your home burns
up more than 10% of your income, then you are officially ‘fuel poor’ – along with an estimated four million households in the UK. Chances are, a number of alterations could be made to reduce the energy your home consumes, cutting costs at the same time. But, as you struggle to set aside the cash to pay your bills, the idea of forking out for loft insulation and draught excluders is a joke. It’s not something you’ve done before, you don’t know how much it would cost, and you’re dubious of the eventual cost savings. But what if someone – not a sales person, but an independent advisor or ‘doctor’ – were to come and see your home and prescribe the most effective way forward? If that service were free, would you take it up? And if the advisor were backed by the local authority and an independent environmental organisation, would you listen? That’s the solution that Groundwork is pioneering in collaboration with local authorities in Leeds, Leicester, north London and Slough. So far, its Green Doctor scheme has brought energy-saving specialists into over 1,200 households, offering free, personalised advice. As Claire Pratley, Climate Change Team Leader at Groundwork Leeds, explains, “the service targets the most vulnerable: the elderly, the disabled, those in low-income households…
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Keep the cold on the outside
people for whom saving money is a real imperative”. “For many of them,” she adds, “the value of saving carbon is hard to grasp. But when they see the money coming off their fuel bills, the benefit of energy efficiency is clear.” One of the areas most affected in England is the Yorkshire and Humber region, with 163,000 households in fuel poverty. In Leeds, West Yorkshire, demand for the Green Doctor has rocketed since the service began in 2007. Groundwork estimates that the scheme has helped vulnerable residents in Leeds save over £300,000 – an average of £110 per family. One of the householders involved, Nicky Ramsden, said: “Reflective radiator panels are now bouncing the heat back into our house when the radiators are on – and we’re also saving money on electricity”.
But, according to Emma Rooney, Green Doctor Project Coordinator in Leeds, raising energy efficiency standards is only one aspect of the scheme. “We don’t just visit homes to hand out light bulbs and loft insulation, although that’s obviously important. Like any other doctor, we offer the ‘patient’ advice on staying fit and healthy, and point them towards other local community support agencies.” While other organisations also offer advice, Rooney thinks that Groundwork’s personalised approach is more likely to encourage people to take the first steps. “There’s no substitute for somebody sitting down with you in your home,” she says. “When someone you feel safe with takes the time to listen to your concerns, and then explains what you can do to be more comfortable and save money – you listen.” Groundwork hopes to train more people to be Green Doctors, extending the service to other parts of the country. ¥ Garry Campbell works for Groundwork UK.
Groundwork UK is a Forum for the Future partner. www.groundwork.org.uk
Green Futures January 2010 41
Feature
The host, the hot desk and the Hub
f the likes of McKinsey have
built a global office infrastructure and talent pool of hundreds of thousands of people, why can’t those working at the edge of a new sustainable economy enjoy the same thing?” asks Jonathan Robinson. “Together, they would kick some arse.” Robinson made the first step towards proving this possible in 2005, when, along with three friends, he founded the Hub, an international network of spaces where social and environmental innovators can work, meet and share ideas.
42 Green Futures January 2010
What set the young anthropology graduate off on this mission was his disappointment at the university careers fair, where a rather “feckless” charity offering stood in complete contrast to the corporate milk round. Yet neither, he felt, seemed to offer anything for those who had enterprising ideas for change in the world, but who lacked the resources, guts or experience to start out on their own. iPhone in hand, MacBook in the other, Robinson himself is a perfect example of the motivated, mobile working entrepreneurs he hoped to interest in his idea.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photo: www.johnsturrock.com
I
“
From London to Brussels to Mumbai, people are paying for a place in a new kind of space. Jonathan Robinson tells Hannah Bullock why.
And he recognised the smart business move in inviting thousands of other talented individuals to join his ‘club’. As he puts it, the company “wouldn’t own or even pay for them; indeed, they would pay us”. Today 3,000 entrepreneurs, policy-makers, freelance professionals and corporate executives do indeed pay to be part of this growing network of Hubs. Their monthly membership fee of between £10 and £300 (or the equivalent in each local economy) buys them access to hot desks, wifi and expertise at one of 15 serviced business-cum-social innovation centres around the world. The Hubs’ USP (‘unique selling point’), says Robinson, is the way they use “the power of physical space to provoke and inspire”. In Islington, north London, the Hub is a refurbished warehouse with exposed brick and a woodchip boiler; in Brussels, it’s a converted chocolate factory; in Mumbai, a high-rise building overlooking the Arabian Sea. Inside, each is designed to encourage interaction, with open plan areas, curvaceous shared desks, cushionstrewn chill-out corners and a cosy kitchen. Even the communities that use Hubs are ‘designed’, giving the place a certain cachet. Robinson’s team ‘seeds’ these in each location by headhunting 30 or so founding members: professionals who can bring the unusual mix of skills that are needed to cross-fertilise ideas. Specially trained Hub ‘hosts’ act as catalysts, bringing members together for workshops on challenges, such as raising seed capital or entering a foreign market. Convening peers in a supportive network to critique ideas early on, is essential, says Robinson, when three out of five UK businesses fail within the first three years. So far, the Hub has fostered more than 1,500 ethical enterprises. Success stories include Lightweight Medical, a company which designs healthcare products that reduce waste, and Onzo, the smart metering outfit that started off as a “maverick one-and-a-half person venture”, and now employs 100 staff, with sales of £10 million. Robinson’s careful “condition-setting”, as he calls it, is not only good for start-ups; it’s also key to his own business model. The congenial atmosphere, the hot desking, the late-night opening hours are all special ingredients in driving value from Hub properties. “We pack people in with high density and use the space effectively at different times of the day,” he explains. A Hub’s layout accommodates one person every 50 square feet: three times the density of an average office. And, because its design cleverly “borrows from the best of an office, a café, a theatre, an events space”, local Hub hosts can hire them out for film screenings, talks or classes. The buildings “serve one function at breakfast, another function over lunch, or dinner…” On average, Hubs bring in three times more revenue per square foot than conventional rent-a-desk outfits (£100 per year in the UK). But are they actually making money? The most successful among them have 25% profit margins, but they do have higher base costs than ‘rent-a-desk’ competitors. Each Hub needs £200,000-£500,000 to get up and running – a sum which prospective local Hub operators must raise upfront. This covers training hosts and creating the founding membership community, initial rental deposits (all Hubs are rented properties), and a fee to the central company, known as Hub World. The business model might sound like a conventional franchise, with Hubs around the world paying a fee and a slice of their revenue to its founding fathers. But Robinson insists that, as fluffy as it may sound, the set up is more of a partnership. Those who operate individual Hubs
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“ ”
It borrows from the best of an office, a café, a theatre, an events space…
The Hub Founded: 2005 Turnover: Hub family of companies – £2.5 million; Hub World – £500,000 Employees: 49 Locations: Mumbai, San Francisco, London (2), São Paulo, Johannesburg, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels, Madrid, Milan, Berlin, Bristol, Porto and Stockholm Cost: £10-£300 monthly membership fee Members: 3,000
“ ”
If they were investing in anything, it was our determination
have voting rights in the way the company is run, rather than simply paying to use the company identity, and will eventually receive a share of the central profit – once this starts to materialise. Taken together, the global turnover of all 15 stands at £2.5 million, while Hub World itself has an annual revenue of £500,000. Overall, the business’s growth capital still relies heavily on small investments from over 100 individuals around the world. At least today’s potential backers can see living, breathing examples of the Hub concept – unlike when Robinson and his mates made the first sell back in 2002. “I’m not sure if they ever ‘got it’,” he says of the investors who put up the £200,000 needed to do up that first derelict building in Islington. The four did, however, manage to convince 12 “friends of friends”, along with social investment fund Venturesome to part with the cash. “If they were investing in anything”, says Robinson, “it was in our determination.” With a target of opening 200 Hubs in total, 68 of them by 2013, there’s some serious fundraising still to be done. Robinson thinks he may have found the answer in a multimillion pound green property fund that he’s scoping in partnership with a major ethical bank. It’s a prime example of ‘crowd-sourced investment’. The company is looking to its 3,000 ethically minded members, and the 40,000 guests who visit Hubs worldwide on a regular basis, to buy the first bonds, which start at a manageable £100. Administered by the bank but clearly earmarked as Hub bonds, the idea is that investors will receive interest on debt repayments. The money will go into the eco-refurbishment of future Hubs around the world. Robinson’s plans for expansion also include some risky-sounding locations, such as Kabul and Gaza. He believes the model could work there, after seeing an inspirational ‘peace hub’ in Mostar, at the height of the Bosnian civil war. There, a bakery brought together a refreshing mix of UN diplomats, activists, Serbs and Croats. “In war zones,” he says, “there’s no shortage of people who want to engage in rebuilding their countries. But there is a huge lack of infrastructure – and a tendency for large American companies to come in and mess it all up!” The ambition’s clearly there to take on the big guys. Robinson’s keen to develop Hubs beyond just cleverly designed spaces for innovation and enterprise, into a network that can draw on the expertise of its diverse, inter-disciplinary global membership to solve all sorts of problems. He talks of it as “a globally connected multi-local infrastructure for change”. Here, though, even fans sound a note of warning. “It’s definitely a compelling idea,” comments the Work Foundation’s Associate Director, Stephen Overell. “But whether you can have an ‘anti-organisation’ organisation is an interesting question. Can people coming together to run different projects work together in a cohesive way without a framework?” Fair comment, perhaps – but if Robinson had followed conventional thinking, he certainly wouldn’t be where he is today. “Our aspiration in the coming years,” he says with a flourish, “is that the Obama administration doesn’t phone McKinsey for help on solving climate change, it phones the Hub.” And perhaps his audacity will take him halfway there. ¥ Hannah Bullock is Campaigns and Communications Manager at the Eden Project.
Green Futures January 2010 43
Partner viewpoint
AD as alchemy?
After years in the wilderness, biogas is set to play a major role in powering the future. Director of Biogen, is looking bullish. His anaerobic digestion (AD) plants in Ludlow (Shropshire) and the Bedfordshire village of Milton Ernest are among only a handful in Britain, but he has plans for 100 more. When he first looked into AD, it was to turn nutrient-rich waste into good fertiliser. He wasn’t expecting to become a leading player in the UK’s infant – but rapidly growing – biogas industry. For farm-based businesses like Biogen, AD is a natural winner. Rather than being a problem to be disposed of, the slurry from cattle becomes a valuable ingredient. And the ‘digestate’ solids which are left over at the end of the process make good fertiliser for the fields. But it won’t just be farms getting in on the act, says Entec consultant Dave Orty. Thanks to a number of key policy shifts, he is expecting to see many more ambitious minds turn to AD. First, there’s the sheer amount of food which UK producers, retailers and households throw away each year. The food industry is under increasing pressure to meet waste reduction targets, and landfill tax – set to reach £72 per tonne by 2013 – should spur further cuts. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is keen to see AD become an established solution for municipal food waste, and local authorities also have recycling targets to meet. And with the rising cost of fuel and carbon, biogas could become an attractive alternative.
44 Green Futures January 2010
What Needham has also spotted is the potential for AD to tap various income streams. There’s the immediate gain of substantial ‘gate fees’ for every tonne of waste food taken out of the hands of local authorities. The digestate can be sold as fertiliser or for landscape restoration. And the methane produced by the AD has a number of buyers. It can be burned in domestic appliances, liquified to make vehicle fuel, or used in centralised heating and power (CHP) applications to generate ‘green’ electricity – as Ecotricity is doing [see right]. And power from AD wins double renewable energy certificates (ROCs) when sold on to providers to boost their portfolio. National Grid is also advocating investment in distribution infrastructure, and forthcoming incentives for heat from renewable sources can only make it more attractive. With such money-making potential, everyone’s looking to get involved. The water industry is already re-evaluating sewage sludge as a resource rather than a problem. More familiarity with the technology could make it a no-brainer for some large-scale food processors, who could recycle their organic waste and power the premises in a neat loop. Retail majors such as Sainsbury’s are sounding out possibilities, says Orty, and Marks and Spencer is offering to buy electricity from any farm-based AD plants. But the biggest opportunities depend on a good tie-in with appropriate council waste collection routines. Modern AD requires
significant capital, so investors will want secure waste contracts in place for the longer term. They’ll also want the right sort of organic waste. Experience argues for separating leftovers from kitchens and catering services, which are ideal for AD, from garden greenery, which is not. If Britain’s AD industry grows to £5 billion in the next ten years, as Entec’s Terry Brownhill believes it can, its new trade association and best practice website (www.adbiogas. co.uk) will be busy indeed. Expertise will be at a premium not only in waste logistics, but in planning and environmental assessment: a proposed digester in the neighbourhood is likely to arouse (largely unfounded) local concern over everything from bad smells and vermin to lorry traffic, explosive gases and air pollution. And there’ll be a need for training to ensure the process is managed safely and successfully. Timing and temperature are critical, and digestate quality needs to be up to scratch with new product protocols in place. Get all this right, Brownhill says, and you’ve got a winner. It’s really about “taking something bad and turning it into something good” – the perfect recipe for a green new deal. ¥ – Roger East
Entec UK is a Forum for the Future partner. www.entecuk.com
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photo: Images Etc Ltd/Getty
A
ndrew Needham, Managing
Partner viewpoint
Biogas basics Biogas is produced through anaerobic digestion (AD), a process where bacteria consume organic material in the absence of oxygen. This gives off methane, which can be used as a fuel for cooking, lighting or generating electricity. Using organic waste to create energy is not a new idea. The first AD plant was built in Bombay in 1859, and in 1895, the UK harnessed the technology for lighting in the city of Exeter. Today, there are several million biogas plants across the globe – most of them at a household scale. In countries like India and China, biogas from cow dung is turned into a clean, renewable cooking fuel in place of wood or coal. It can also be used for lighting, instead of smoky, unsafe kerosene lamps. – Tricia Holly-Davis
Green gas on the grid As excitement over AD’s potential gains pace, Ecotricity, one of the UK’s renewable electricity pioneers, is going into the gas game.
Photo: Media Union/shutterstock
T
he company best known
for wind power is hoping to use the enormous amount of food Britons throw away each year to create a low carbon ‘biogas’ to produce either heat or electricity. There are obvious financial incentives in doing so. Unlike the electricity generated from heat when solid waste is incinerated for landfill, every megawatt hour produced from AD can earn payment for its producer under the UK’s Renewables Obligation Certificate (ROC) scheme. There are also handsome ‘gate fees’ for removing food from the waste stream. Recently, a number of British businesses and local authorities have turned to AD in response to legislative pressure to reduce the amount of rubbish they tip into landfill each year. But so far, says Ecotricity Founder Dale Vince, no one has used the process to meet the demand of UK households for a renewable source of heat. So why wait until now? For Ecotricity, the main obstacle was how to make the sale of gas green.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
“We initially considered using the proceeds to build more windmills, creating a green outcome as opposed to a green product,” Vince explains. “But then we discovered there is a way to inject biogas into the grid.” To begin with, Ecotricity will purchase the gas from other providers and connect it to the mains, with the aim of developing its own projects in the future. With a little luck, the first green gas will be running through the grid in 2010. Fortunately, unlike electricity, there is no backlog of providers queuing to link up to the gas grid, because no one else has thought of it – yet. Vince thinks that many potential customers “would rather pay bills to us than to one of the ‘Big Six’ UK utilities”. And to make it more tempting, Ecotricity will match the price offered by British Gas. It would take an investment of about £35 billion to meet half the UK’s gas supply through AD, according to Ecotricity. This would help to decarbonise the nation’s energy mix, and make it more self-sufficient. The North Sea is currently Britain’s largest provider of gas, but there has been a sharp rise in imports from
Starts in a cow, ends in your kitchen
countries such as Norway, Qatar and Algeria, from 27% in 2007, to nearly 50% in 2009. And in the future, Russia could be an increasingly important supplier – raising additional fears around energy insecurity. The potential for ‘home-grown’ gas is, as Vince sees it, “fantastic… We can make green gas, and we can make it right here in the UK – just like we make electricity from wind.” ¥ – Tricia Holly Daviswww.ecotricity.co.uk
Ecotricity is a Forum for the Future partner. www.ecotricity.co.uk
Green Futures January 2010 45
Comment
“Shrink the economy to stabilise the climate – and have a better quality of life” Slavish devotion to growth is charting a course for catastrophe, says Andrew Simms.
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We can cut social and environmental costs, while improving quality of life
ncient mariners sailed in
fear of falling over the edge of the world. They needn’t have worried because, back then, there wasn’t one. By contrast, modern economists have confidently plotted the course that will take us there. If the best assessments of available biocapacity are correct, then the ship of the global economy is already nearly vertical, pointing down and sliding. We are overshooting natural limits; running up ever increasing amounts of ecological debt. Can we haul back the pendulous ship? Possibly. But, to do so we will have to disregard the compass normally relied upon by our captains of state. Their navigation has one True North: a dogmatic, unswerving devotion to orthodox economic growth. Ever since the publication nearly four decades ago of Limits To Growth, a report by scientists from MIT working for the Club of Rome, this slavish adherence has been called into question by environmentalists. For years, it was fashionable to dismiss it as an exercise in ‘crying wolf’. Now it seems it was right all along. A recent detailed academic study found a solid correlation between its projections and subsequent actual trends*. Today, senior figures in politics and economics, from Adair Turner to Nicholas Stern, are finally daring to question the growth imperative, at least where rich countries are concerned. Now new research from nef (the new economics foundation) suggests that a widespread, rapid economic transformation could bring huge benefits, even as the economy itself shrinks in overall size. We need to deliver ‘a great transition’, and to do it before we become locked in to irreversible climatic upheaval. History has precedents for such transitions. Consider Britain and others during the Second World War; or Cuba after the Cold War. Now the challenge is whether we can choose to make the change, even while the brutal reality of catastrophic global warming is still seen as a distant prospect. The nef plan for a great transition takes a twopronged approach: on one hand reducing inequality in the UK to levels found in Denmark, and on the other putting the economy onto a path of rapid decarbonisation. There is growing evidence that more equal societies deliver better outcomes across a whole range of indicators, including environmental ones. Overall, the plan would lead to huge cuts in social and environmental costs, at the same time as improving the
46 Green Futures January 2010
quality of life for the majority. The key elements of the Great Transition include: • A Great Revaluing – to make the building of social and environmental value the economy’s core objective, rather than the simple maximisation of GDP growth. • A Great Redistribution – to build a fairer economy that is more efficient at reducing social ills and improving wellbeing. Specifically, we need to redistribute a combination of ownership, in terms of corporate governance and the growth of mutuals (such as co-operatives and social enterprises); of wealth and income through taxation; and of time through the length of the working week. • A Great Rebalancing – to set the market within social and environmental parameters – using price mechanisms and a broader definition of ‘public goods’. • A Great Localisation – reducing ecologically wasteful trade, especially between rich countries, with more goods and services produced closer to their point of consumption. • A Great Reskilling – to support the new green economy. • A Great Economic Irrigation – tackling major distortions arising from land prices and the perverse flow of investment to climate-damaging industries like coal, oil and gas. • A Great Interdependence – re-aligning economic relationships between rich and poor countries to shift away from exploitative patterns of dependence, towards positive co-operation for a smooth transition to a low carbon global economy. Measured conservatively, the changes outlined in the Great Transition will avoid £0.4 trillion-£1.3 trillion in environmental costs between now and 2050, and could generate £7.35 trillion of social value. These gains more than compensate for an expected drop in GDP as overconsumption is reduced. This is a win-win that could not only mend so-called ‘broken Britain’, but help stabilise a chaotic climate system. Together, it offers a policy maker’s holy grail – or rather, perhaps, a golden compass. ¥ Andrew Simms is policy director of nef, and co-author with David Boyle of The New Economics: A Bigger Picture (Earthscan, 2009). *Turner, Graham M (2008), ‘A Comparison of The Limits to Growth with 30 years of Reality’, Global Environmental Change 18.
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Comment
Letters America’ next top s model?
Wood not so good
Whilst welcoming the actions being taken by some universities to generate their own electricity (‘Wind, woodchip and farm waste to power universities’, GF73, p14), may I sound a note of caution about the large-scale use of woodchip as an energy source. ‘Sustainable’ supplies [of wood] are obviously not infinite. If we exceed the capacity of UK forestry to meet demand, it will necessitate imports or expansion of UK forestry. Imports reduce the carbon savings of using woodchip, while expansion of UK forestry competes with food production and, if monoculture plantations are involved, has a negative impact on biodiversity. The expected fuel consumption of large [woodchip] power stations is 20-30 million tonnes per annum – that’s more than the UK’s entire annual wood production! This ‘rush to wood’ as a power source is stimulated by the levels of subsidy under the Renewable Obligations Order. Burning biomass receives 50% more subsidy than onshore wind and hydro-electric power, and the same as offshore wind. I believe UK energy policy must recognise that there should be a limit on the total amount of wood consumed by the energy sector. Otherwise, the generous subsidies currently on offer will lead to massive over-consumption and environmental damage, and our carbon emissions will not fall as much as they could. Building large woodchip power stations looks like another instance of lock-in, which will close the electricity market to truly clean technologies and starve them of public research funding. Robert Palgrave
The sky’s the limit for the green revolution Making a marke t in forest futures Tourism withou t the guilt and Jonathon Porritt on the
case for cuts
www.greenfuture
s.org.uk
Cities index “is partisan” I would like to welcome Forum for the Future’s Sustainable Cities Index. However, it is clearly a political document and lobbying tool, as is its effective use of league tables to influence policy decisions. So when reading it I was disappointed that it failed to mention the contribution made by the Liberal Democrats as a political party running Local Government, yet directly cited Labour, the Tories plus the Green Party… As a result, it reads as a partisan point. Newcastle, Bristol, Leeds, Edinburgh, Sheffield and Cardiff (all featured in the Index) are Liberal Democrat-led councils. This fact is not a coincidence. The environment and sustainability are central to our values and beliefs, and we put these into action as a long-standing strategic and political objective of the party to influence outcomes at all levels of power. Simon Hughes, MP, Liberal Democrat spokesman on energy and climate change
Bus stops and squanders
The Greener Journeys project (‘All aboard’, GF74, p37) would be far more effective if bus drivers switched off the engine when they are stationary in the terminal. I estimate that this bad habit means that using the bus instead of your car is only a carbon saving for one journey out of every 100. Of course, that’s better than none at all – but not as good as it could be. Peter Lanado
Join the debate at www.greenfutures.org.uk Don’t keep your thoughts to yourself! Our website receives hundreds of thousands of hits from visitors around the world. Reach them by posting a comment on any article in Green Futures, or respond to points others have made. Or just email us at letters@greenfutures.org.uk (Letters may be edited for publication.)
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letters@greenfutures.org.uk
No.74 October 2009
Scenarios informing strategy
It’s great that Pepsico is “feeding the results [of its work with Forum for the Future] into its new environmental sustainability and health and wellness strategies” (‘Fizzy, flat, fit or fat?’, GF74, p39). I’d be surprised if the scenarios [developed with the Forum to identify major sustainability risks and opportunities that the company will face in 2030] didn’t also inform their core business strategy. How’s that conversation going? Penny Walker
Forum for the Future’s Dan Crossley responds: PepsiCo’s corporate strategy team has been involved throughout the process. We will be working with them to incorporate the findings into core strategy.
Fair trade article fair?
The feature ‘Ten green bottles and a wall’ (GF74, p42) omitted to mention Saha, which produces fairly good extra virgin olive oil in partnership with a farmers’ co-operative in the Palestinian villages of Mass’ha, Bidiya and Ya’asuf. Saha promotes awareness of environmental and social solidarity issues, and shows how they relate to the peace process. On another point, how fair is it to ship olive oil to Europe in a year with so few olives? What impact does it have on barriers to trade within Israel? And what does it do to the environment? Lovely story, though. ‘HebrewMan’
Green Futures January 2010 47
Comment
JonathonPorritt “Decentralisation is a wonderful idea. But without proper financing it’s a dead duck”
L
ocalism is suddenly all the rage
amongst political hacks. After decades of no-holds-barred centralisation, accompanied by utterly cynical decentralisation rhetoric, the latest answer to almost every domestic problem you care to mention is to pass responsibility down to the local level. This is very familiar territory for anyone involved in green politics over the years. Bathed in the powerful eloquence of Fritz Schumacher, it was once an article of faith amongst green activists that small was not only beautiful but fundamental. I was always somewhat bemused at the evangelical fervour with which this debate was pursued. The touchingly naïve assumption that decentralised communities would automatically fashion themselves in the Greens’ own image (inclusive, progressive, and seriously into tree-hugging and being nice) was rarely questioned. Even the occasional infiltration of footloose fascists into green groups did little to dent people’s enthusiasm for advocating as much local autonomy as possible. It’s a fair bet that today’s mainstream politicians are not remotely interested in such full-on decentralisation. Prattling on about “restoring the vitality of local democracy” is par for the course in any pre-election period. But it doesn’t take long for those warm words to evaporate as the visceral clutch of raw political power takes hold. So will the balance of power between national and local here in the UK look any different two years on from next year’s general election? If the Tories form the next Government, there’s no doubt there will be some big changes. The regional tier may well have ceased to exist within a couple of years. But apart from consigning Regional Spatial Strategies to the scrap heap, Tory leader Cameron’s team haven’t sorted this out yet. Just look at their ups and downs on Regional Development Agencies – one day they’re gone, the next they’ve been reprieved. But the Tories are keen on cities. And on directly elected mayors. Just imagine a battery of Boris lookalikes in Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle, Bristol, and so on. Personally, I’ve always liked the idea of powerful, elected mayors, even if their politics are very different to mine. It offers at least one small contribution towards narrowing today’s democratic deficit. As for local authorities themselves, I think David Cameron has got a real problem on his hands. He himself may have ‘got’ climate change, but most of his local parties haven’t. Wind turbines are still seen by many of
48 Green Futures January 2010
them as weapons of mass destruction; Jeremy Clarkson isn’t just a legend in his own gas-guzzling right, but apparently a far better authority on climate change than the President of the Royal Society. There will be rows. And if a Tory Government imposes big wind farms (above 50MW) on local communities, there will be big rows. The limits of localisation will be stretched to breaking point, and it won’t be pretty. But what if Labour wins ‘an historic fourth term’? They would have to completely re-think their current devolution position. The controlling, centralising tendencies in the party (reinforced by the eternally controlling tendencies in the Treasury) have had a hugely damaging impact. Many of the prosustainability initiatives that they have introduced at the regional and local level have been insidiously undermined. And if it’s a hung parliament, involving the Lib Dems in one way or another, then the appetite for genuine devolution would be greatly strengthened. But there’s a great big fat fly in this devolved, sustainability-enhancing ointment – and that’s local finances. The room for manoeuvre on the part of most local authorities is very constrained – not just in terms of the total pot of money available to them, but in terms of what they can spend it on. With a few notable exceptions (including Woking, Kirklees and Braintree), there’s been very little innovation in bringing forward Municipal Bonds and other local financing mechanisms. Many now believe that we cannot possibly restore vitality to our democracy until we get our sad and supplicant local authorities up off their knees, equipped with serious resources and appropriate powers to start getting things sorted out at the local level. ¥ Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future. His new report, The Standing of Sustainable Development in Government, reflecting on his nine years as Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, is available to download now: www.forumforthefuture.org/ files/standing-of-sustainabledevelopment-in-government.pdf Jonathon’s blog is now available as a podcast at: www.jonathonporritt.com Jonathon’s thoughts are now available as a phlog (phone blog): www.ipadio.com/ phlogs/JonathonPorritt
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