greenfutures No.81 July 2011
Treehuggers? When security and sustainability meet
Profits on the far horizon: when business learns to think long-term Magic numbers: cracking the codes that turn data to action Cosying up: can Britain’s green deal deliver snug homes?
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@GreenFutures It’s been nearly ten years since Al Qaeda’s hijackers shook America – and the West – to the core. As the anniversary approaches, expect the media to gorge itself on retrospectives. You can see it now: ghoulishly endless reruns of the planes crashing into the towers, followed by the inevitable panel discussions. What does 9/11 mean today? ...Has Al Qaeda won or lost? …What would the world have looked like if it had never happened? Pertinent questions, particularly the last one. Because back in those shell-shocked days of September 2001, there was much heady talk of how nothing would ever be the same. Some saw the attack as the first shot in a ‘war of civilisations’ which would define the coming decade and beyond. Other more sober heads pointed to its roots in the geopolitics of energy, and saw an opportunity for weaning the West off its addiction to oil. Jonathon Porritt and I even dared to hope that it might open eyes to a realisation that security and sustainability are two sides of the same coin. “The trick is to start with what we have in common, rather than with the opinions – even the religions – which divide us. And what we have in common are, quite simply, the resources on which all human life depends. We find a way to share those equitably, or we will surely go to war over them.” [‘A river runs through it’, GF31, p4]. At the end of a decade “bookended by shocks”, as Alex Evans puts it [p21], it’s tempting to conclude, dispiritingly, that nothing has changed. We’re still addicted to oil, still mired in conflict, still facing growing competition for resources. As Porritt points out in this issue [‘Of Land, Water and War’, p16], such competition has lain at the heart of conflict since the dawn of civilisation – and it lies there still. Technological revolution – in the form of mobile phones and social media – might have powered the Arab Spring, but it was triggered by anger over rising food costs, themselves partly driven by a surge in the oil price. So have we learnt nothing since 9/11? I’m not so sure. At the very least, issues like food and energy security no longer have to fight their way to the top of the agenda. Geopolitics has elbowed its way out of the think tanks and onto the Cabinet table. And as Paul Gilding reveals in ‘Unlikely allies’ [p22], the stark implications of resource scarcity and climate change are leading that most conservative of institutions, the military, to push politicians to take action – on the simple grounds that, unless they do so, arms alone will never make the nation secure. More positive, perhaps, is a dawning awareness that the “resources on which we all depend” can be the focus of co-operation, not just competition. In ‘Security forces’ [p18], Anna Simpson recounts ways in which, from Palestine to Peru, implacable enemies can make surprising common cause over everything from water to forests. To quote ‘A river runs through it’ again: “It’s easy to regard the pursuit of sustainability as a luxury of the good times – [to be] eclipsed by the hard stuff of human conflict. But … the truth is that it’s a fundamental prerequisite for that most desperately elusive of shared human desires – peace.” Something to bear in mind when those grisly re-runs hit the screen.
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Green Futures July 2011
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Contents 22
Number 81 July 2011
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32
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Briefings
Regulars
Partner viewpoints
4 The future in context Peter Madden looks to the sky
40 Hearth and home From Gujarat to Gloucestershire, clean energy, cleans up The Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy
16 O f land water and war A decade after 9/11 unleashed debate over resource security, Jonathon Porritt offers some lessons from history.
30 Domestic goddess? Will the Green Deal pull homeowners off the fence and into action? Anna Simpson asks the experts.
The latest in green innovation, including:
18 S ecurity forces Anna Simpson asks whether sustainability can lead us into a more secure future.
32 Where the quick buck stops Our addiction to short-term gain means we don’t invest in the future. Roger Cowe looks for a cure.
7 A wave to the future Green light for the world’s largest tidal power project
26 M aking meaning How can we translate vast quantities of data into positive action? Adam Oxford investigates.
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24
Features
22 U nlikely allies? Can green activists learn to love the military? Paul Gilding explains why they should.
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6 A leaf to light a home Artificial photosynthesis goes from lab to life
24 A thousand words Paying homage to the sun, source of most energy on earth
42 Common Grounds Community ownership gathers momentum Triodos Bank
8 Rain dance Philadelphia revolutionises urban water management
35 Forum update The future of the dairy industry; Sally Uren on why we must make sustainability ‘normal’; and Forum’s new-look network
10 Grid solution EVs could provide power balancing services
46 Feedback Readers respond online and in print
43 What price values? Quality, cost and… ethics? What do consumers want from a brand? Ecover
12 Chips for life Consumer electronics built to last
48 Jonathon Porritt Is the Big Society just a cynical ploy by the “greenest Government ever”...?
45 Tide turns for marine planning Strategic planning takes to the seas AMEC
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Green Futures July 2011
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Peter Madden
Briefings
The future in context
Heirs to the air? Investment in ‘hybrid air vehicles’ takes off A new wave of investment into ‘hybrid air vehicles’ is reviving airship technology. Conventional airships rely almost entirely on helium’s ‘lighter-than-air’ buoyancy, making them fairly unstable, weathersensitive and slow-moving [see ‘Transport of Delight’, online]. Hybrids mix this with ‘heavier-than-air’ aircraft technology – including powergenerated aerodynamic lift and thrust vectoring. This means they can carry heavier loads and travel faster than an airship, but use less fuel than conventional jets. The concept dates back several decades, but is only now scaling-up after experimental phases in the last ten years. An important feature for current investors is a hovercraft landing system instead of wheels, which means the hybrids can be anchored through suction on land or water, without the need for airport infrastructure. The benefits of this for use in remote and austere locations have attracted the attention of mining and military investors.
Up in the sky We’ll keep flying – but at what cost?
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Green Futures July 2011
The seeds of these changes are already here. Outbound Chinese tourism is booming – increasing by a fifth in 2010. Big investments in biofuels are being made, with Virgin Atlantic and Air New Zealand already doing test flights. Meanwhile, companies such as HP are limiting flying and replacing it with video conferencing. But whatever the efficiency gains, flying will continue to place enormous pressures on the environment. Things will only turnaround if humankind passes a cultural tipping point where we don’t want to travel so far afield, where visiting the exotic is no longer seen as desirable.
Private power
Peter Madden is Chief Executive, Forum for the Future.
Sky Tugs: like airships, but not
Beyond niche advantages, Forum for the Future’s transport expert Rupert Fausset is cautious: “90% of international trade is by relatively energy efficient shipping, difficult to trump by air. This means that encouraging further air freight, even by airship, isn’t desirable.” The greatest opportunity, Fausset argues, lies with passenger transport. And in this, too, designers are upping the game. Jean-Marie Massaud’s luxurious Manned Cloud sky-hotel – complete with restaurant, library and gym – is set to offer round-theworld trips by 2020. Equally forward-thinking, US manufacturer Millennium Airships Inc, has bought rights to the certified-carrier company, American Airship Airlines. While current investment costs are daunting, these ventures suggest it’s a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’ the business case matures. – Irma Allen
Energy on tap, even in hostile surroundings
Urine proves a silent source of clean fuel
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Photos: Lockhead Martin; DOUGBERRY / istock
New trade patterns, same contrails
Photos: archives / istock
In a couple of decades’ time, despite climate change, there is likely to be more flying than there is now. On current trends, while the global economy is predicted to grow by 3.3% between 2010 and 2030, the number of aviation passengers looks set to grow by 4.2%. What will change, however, is who flies – and how. New patterns of trade and migration between the powerful nations of China, India and Brazil will create many more routes and generate hundreds of millions of new outbound tourists. As these countries develop stronger business ties, they will see face-toface contact as crucial. The combination of rising oil prices and carbon costs means that the conversion to low-carbon transport is no longer an environmental issue: it’s an economic imperative. And there are likely to be multiple responses to these pressures. Airline margins will be tighter than ever, and we may well see mass industry consolidation. European and North American operators could be subsumed in mega-alliances controlled by the major Chinese and Indian airlines. Flying will have to become much more efficient. Advances in technology – including algae and jatropha biofuels – will be crucial. Gains will also be made by new navigation systems designed to eliminate inefficiencies in air traffic control. Of course, some people will avoid flying altogether. Telepresence services offer an attractive alternative to businesses keen to cut travel costs. Users will sit in front of a crystal-clear screen and converse with a three-dimensional image of a colleague, as if in the same room. China will follow the earlier example set by Europe, replacing pretty much all internal flights with high-speed train journeys. We may also see the return of older technologies such as airships for some journeys [see ‘Heirs to the air?’, p5]. But in many cities in the newly developed world, personal flying could take off. Personal helicopters and helipads already dot the skyline in places like São Paulo and Mumbai.
In March 2011, US defence giant Lockheed Martin was contracted to design and deliver three SkyTugs, capable of hauling 20-1,000 tonnes, by Canadian investors Aviation Capital Enterprises. Based on Lockheed’s P-791 2006 prototype, the first ‘SkyTug’ will be delivered by 2012. Oil and gas will be the initial clients, including Canadian oil sand extractors. In June 2010, a partnership involving Britishbased Hybrid Air Vehicles and global security company Northrop Grumman won a $517 million US-military contract to deploy a SkyCat in Afghanistan next year. This vehicle, larger in size than a football pitch, will act as an all-seeing eye. It can fly at 20,000ft for three weeks straight, still burning 70% less fuel per tonne-kilometre than conventional aircraft. While ‘environmentally-friendly oil sand exploitation’ sits uncomfortably, perhaps hybrids’ heavy lifting, low-carbon, low fuel cost credentials are also promising elsewhere. Might these investments lead to alternatives for freight transportation?
In 2009, Professor Geraldine Botte and her team at Ohio University made a splash. They showed that, using an inexpensive nickel based electrode, urine was far better than water at producing hydrogen by electrolysis. The ammonia and urea in the waste water were broken down, and the only by-products were water and nitrogen. As expected, the process attracted the attention of municipalities and big animal farms. What wasn’t expected was the immediate interest of the US Army. Naturally, where there are many soldiers there’s a lot of urine and it needs to be treated. But what really attracted the US Army was a way to generate electricity silently: a significant advantage in conflict zones. “We are currently developing a prototype under a grant from the military for their ‘Silent Camp’ project”, says Botte. “The project aims to reduce camp noise by
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using fuel cells instead of diesel generators to produce power. Our technology produces high-grade hydrogen, provides clean water and treats camp waste in a single process.” Since 2009, Botte has been awarded over $5.2 million in government and private grants to commercialise the technology. With associates, she set up the company E3 Clean Technologies, which markets her system under the product name Ammonia GreenBox. This can be integrated with existing wastewater treatment plants. Urine has several major advantages over water. For one, it takes less than a third as much electricity to free its hydrogen atoms. It’s also a plentiful and free waste product, which means one less demand on valuable fresh water. Integrated into a sewage works or dairy farm, a urine electrolysis system produces high-grade hydrogen, which can be used by the plant or sold. GreenBox can be used wherever
there is a need to break down ammonia, so landfill sites and pharmaceuticals are among potential markets. “The fact that the GreenBox is basically a scalable, low temperature, electrical appliance gives us a great deal of flexibility”, E3 Chief Executive Kent Shields explains. – John Fencer
Green Futures July 2011
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Shared space
A wave to the future
Peer to peer accommodation on the rise
World’s largest tidal power project gets the go-ahead
Behind closed doors in cities around the world lies a great untapped resource: unused space. But not, perhaps, for long. Every day, thousands of spare rooms, flats and even entire houses are put online for travellers and tourists to rent on an informal, short-term basis. Airbnb, the behemoth of this burgeoning industry, now has listings in 14,457 cities. Dubbed the ‘eBay for space’, it has enabled 1.6 million stays since it was founded in 2008. Alongside competitors such as Crashpadder and the high-end portal Onefinestay, it’s part of a wider trend of renting, swapping, sharing and trading things with each other when we’re not using them. This peer to peer consumption has “immense potential” to reduce our environmental impact, according to Prashant Vaze, author of The Economical Environmentalist, because often it means we use existing resources more efficiently. Crashpadder says that the carbon footprint of the average stay through its site is 80% smaller than a night at a three to five star hotel, because very little extra energy is used for a guest in a spare room. And it’s not just homes. Car owners, too,
are saving energy and lining their pockets, with lending schemes like WhipCar [see GF79, p18]. Given that an average car requires around four tonnes of CO2 to make, says Vaze, this shift has the potential to cut road-related emissions considerably. Although peer to peer consumption is expanding at a storming pace (Airbnb
grew at a rate of 800% last year, with half of guests travelling on business) it remains relatively niche. In London, for example, there are 1,423 rooms on Airbnb, but nearly 750,000 in hotels. A spokesman for the British Hospitality Association said he does not see it as a serious threat to the hotel industry. – Sylvia Rowley
An array of underwater turbines will harness energy from one of the UK’s most reliable and strongest tidal streams, following approval by the Scottish Government. The 10MW installation in the Sound of Islay will be the largest scheme of its kind in the world. It will generate approximately 30GW per year, enough to power all the homes on Islay and Jura – and, crucially, their whisky distilleries. The cost will top £50 million, which Project Manager Andrew Macdonald of the Islay Energy Trust admits is “very high”. He hopes to see costs “come down as more tidal is developed”. Scotland has been described as “the Saudi Arabia” of offshore renewables by First Minister Alex Salmond. The Scottish Government offers higher subsidies for wave and tidal energy through Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROCs) than the rest of the UK. (That’s five ROCs for wave and three for tidal in Scotland, compared to two ROCs for both in the UK.) The ten turbines will sit 50m deep on the seabed in a 1km-wide underwater canyon where the peak tidal flow is a (more than sufficient) 3m per second. Each turbine will have an installed effect in excess of 1MW, and the first will be in place in 2013, with the full project running from 2015. Unlike their wind-powered cousins, tidal turbines can’t be accused of any visible or audible pollution. Vessels will be able to
Less room, more board
A leaf to light a home
Small feet, big potential
operate on the surface without restrictions, and marine life will not be at risk from the turbines’ slow-turning arms. The tripod design also means the turbines will have a minimal ‘footprint’ on the ocean floor. For Macdonald, the “real significance of this site” will be the lessons learnt for future developments – including the massive 400MW farm proposed for the Pentland Firth. “It gives us a chance to show the systematic interaction between the turbines before hundreds are placed in the Pentland Firth.” Another learning curve will be the maintenance of turbines in such a high
pressure and hard-to-reach environment. The project is being built by ScottishPower Renewables using turbines developed by Hammerfest Strøm, and local contractors, ornithologists and divers. The Islay Energy Trust will get a (yet to be decided) cut of the profits to fund community projects in Islay, Jura and Colonsay, which all share the same grid. Other significant tidal projects in the pipeline include South Korea’s Incheon Bay power station which, with a capacity of 1,320MW, will be the largest in the world when it opens in 2017. – Laura Dixon
Artificial photosynthesis goes to market
Just add water: artificial ‘leaves’ could power homes like these
presentation to the American Chemical Society, Nocera also claimed that his system can convert water into energy with ten times the efficiency of a natural leaf. And he’s confident he can improve on this. So what does it look like, if not a leaf? It’s a floating silicon cell, about the size of an ultra-thin playing card, combining electronics and powerful – but, crucially, inexpensive – catalysts made from nickel and cobalt. When placed in water, it produces hydrogen and oxygen, which are syphoned off for use in a fuel cell. In the lab, it can do this for at least 45 hours without a drop in activity. Out of the lab, Nocera says his leaf shows “particular promise” as a cheap source of electricity for domestic use in low-income countries. Placed in a single gallon of water in a bright sunlight, he claims the device could produce enough energy to supply a house in a developing country with electricity for a day. Indian conglomerate Tata is the lead investor in an initial funding round worth $9.5 million. Other investors include the US firm Polaris Venture Partners. – Tom Young
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Wind under water Scotland pilots clean energy storage
Photos: Hammerfest_Strom; Keith Thomson / Thin Red Line Aerospace
plant, the size of a refrigerator, capable of powering a home using only a bottle of water – which doesn’t even need to be clean. A prototype is expected within 18 months. The technology was first developed by John Turner of the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, over a decade ago. But Nocera claims to have overcome the problems of cost and stability encountered by earlier versions, which relied on rare and expensive metals. In a
Photos: urbancow / istock; prill / istock
The world’s first practical artificial leaf could soon be powering homes. This ‘leaf’, deveoped by Professor Daniel Nocera of the Masschusetts Institute of Technology, bears little resemblance to natural greenery, sharing only its function: photosynthesis, or the use of sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and hydrogen. Nocera has set up the company Sun Catalytix to commercialise the technology. The result, he hopes, will be a small power
An underwater device to store energy from offshore wind turbines is being tested off of the Scottish coastline. The so-called ‘energy bag’ will store the turbines’ output as compressed air, which can later be released to provide electricity. If all goes to plan and the device is rolled out, the result will be wind power whatever the weather. The development is part of a £1.1 million research programme at Nottingham University to develop a new generation of super batteries and energy storage systems, funded by E.ON. The bag will be anchored to the sea bed at a depth of 600m, where the surrounding water pressure can help to contain the compressed air, limiting the costs normally attached to high pressure storage. Measuring 20m in diameter, it will be able to store 70MWh – the equivalent of 14 hours of wind turbine production. It was
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developed by Thin Red Line Aerospace, which also designs stress-resistant inflatable structures for NASA. “If for every 3MW of wind energy generated you have 1MW of compressed air storage, then offshore wind starts to look like a very versatile power-generating system which can adjust its output to match demand”, says Seamus Garvey, the University of Nottingham professor leading the project. By 2025, Garvey estimates, at least 25% of offshore wind power in the UK could be combined with a compressed air storage system. The installation could allow energy to be stored at under £10,000/MWh, according to Garvey. That’s less than 20% of the cost of the cheapest alternative, pumped hydro, where energy is stored by pumping water up to high reservoirs when demand for electricity is low, and releasing
it through turbines at peak times. The fact that many sources of clean energy are intermittent is often cited as an obstacle to taking renewables to scale. But there are many ways of dealing with this problem, says Jim Skea, Research Director at the UK Energy Research Centre: “This [energy bag] is obviously still a bit experimental, but it could form a good part of that portfolio of options.” Nottingham has also been investigating the possibility of using pre-existing geological formations, such as salt domes, as high pressure containers. – Ian Randall
Green Futures July 2011
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Rain dance
Eau de toilette
Philadelphia’s revolutionary approach to stormwater
Paris captures the warmth of its sewers A pioneering project to deal with excess water in Philadelphia has been given the green light, bucking the trend for urban water management. ‘Green City, Clean Waters’ will not only reduce water pollution but transform much of the city’s infrastructure, making it something of a sustainable idyll. The $2 billion, 25-year project was agreed by the Philadelphia Water Department and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection in June. The current water system combines stormwater storage and sewerage. During periods of heavy rainfall it overflows, causing sewerage to flow through streets and into the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. The project will replace as much as onethird of the city’s existing impervious cover – about 4,000 acres – with natural or porous surfaces that can intercept stormwater, store it, and then release it at a controlled rate. Proposals include natural water storage and filtering solutions such as rain gardens (native vegetation planted near waterways), kerbside planters and green rooftops. Porous asphalt, concrete and paving slabs will also be installed in car parks and on streets. Taken together, these technologies
should prevent between 5 and 8 billion gallons of wastewater from overflowing each year – that’s up to 50% of the total for the area. Other benefits would include the creation of 250 green jobs each year, increased carbon sequestration from the vegetation, and a boost in recreational space. The project will be funded through a combination of state and federal grants and loans, city water fees (adding $8 to a resident’s typical monthly bill), support from foundations and private investment. Just over half of the surfaces in need of replacement lie on private (non-residential) land, and so the city needs companies to invest in these changes. A number of incentives are being considered, such as on-bill financing (where the utility pays the upfront cost of the changes and the company pays it back on their bill over time), insurance discounts for those with green infrastructure in place, and tax levies. Philadelphia is not alone in rethinking water management – although the scale of this project is unprecedented. “There’s increasing acceptance by politicians that water cannot be taken for granted”, says Nick Meeten, a specialist in urban water management at Huber Technologies.
The famous sewers of Paris, masterminded in the 1850s and described by Victor Hugo as a whole other city with its own streets and squares, have been awarded a new function: heating buildings. A school in Paris has been fitted with a heat pump and 60m of heat exchangers to draw heat from the underground streams. Commercial and domestic wastewater, from washing machines and dishwashers, raises the sewage temperature up to 20°C – heat that largely goes to waste. Exchanger plates in the sewers now draw this heat into a transfer fluid running through a steel loop and to a heat pump in the cellar of Wattignies School. The pump concentrates the heat, raising the
Fewer puddles, more parks
In Europe, the city of Malmö in Sweden was one of the first to pioneer the use of green spaces to reduce sewerage overflow, and hosts the world’s first rooftop botanical gardens. Singapore has taken the use of rainwater runoff one step further, treating it for use as drinking water. For Meeten, the treatment and reuse of water is the thing to watch. He highlights membrane technology (low-energy filtration to give high quality water) as one solution “which really enable[s] a big step forward in urban water management”. – Catherine de Lange
temperature to 60°C, and distributes it around the building. The €400,000 installation – funded by Paris’ public heating organisation CPCU and water company Lyonnaise des Eaux – is part of the city’s goal of generating 30% of its power from renewable sources by 2020, and will provide 70% of the school’s heating needs. The technology can only be used within 200m of the sewer source, but the council estimates 10% of Paris could be heated this way. Mayor Bertrand Delanoë called the project “a hallmark of the dynamism of Paris”. The Élysee Palace, residence of President Nicholas Sarkozy, is next up for the treatment. The development will be receive grant funding from the French
Environment and Energy Management Agency, and will reduce the Palace’s carbon emissions by around 206 tonnes a year. Similar systems have been trialled successfully in Norway and Japan, and the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics village also drew on waste sewage heat. Terry Seward, Secretary of the Heat Pump Association in the UK, where dozens of schools generate electricity from ground-source heat pumps, said the high initial cost of such systems can be a barrier but that they are a good way of teaching children about renewables. “It’s an innovative use of the technology in Paris and should be pursued.” – Isabella Kaminski
Paris in 2100
Red, white and green?
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Green Futures July 2011
architecture collective Et Alors. The French capital has committed to a widespread transformation from the most congested city in Europe to the first postoil capital of the 21st century. The Paris Climate Protection Plan, adopted in 2007, pledged to cut citywide greenhouse gases to 75% of 2004 levels by 2050. Since then the municipal bicycle sharing scheme Vélib has replaced 1,000 car trips a day, and an electric car hire project hopes to further curb emissions [see ‘La vie en bleu’, GF80 p15]. Wall gardens have bloomed in the city, with 174 planned and 90 more sites mooted. And, although airship commuting may be a long way off, the Ballon de Paris gives passengers an aerial view of the city while alerting residents below to real-time air pollution levels. Joe Ravetz, co-director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology at the University of Manchester, says that while
the exhibition images are entertaining and impressive, a thread of social realism could help to make them more powerful: “What’s happened to the massive flow of goods through the city? All the homeless people are out of sight.” The Climate Protection Plan goes some way to addressing this concern, drawing on lessons learnt from the 2003 heat wave which proved fatal for some of the city’s most vulnerable inhabitants. Measures include grants for the fuel poor, the drastic reduction of motor vehicles in the city during heat waves, shifting the burden of taxation to ‘eco’ taxes, and a register of the capital’s isolated and poorest residents to improve aid logistics. Agence Parisienne du Climat is also working with train company SNCF on an urban logistics programme to improve freight transport in the capital. – Sarah Lewis-Hammond
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Photos: xxxxx
The streets are paved with greenery. Chic folk glide by on gondolas, bicycles and airships. A vertical farm scales the Pompidou; solar panels gleam on every roof; and wind turbines turn more gracefully than even the Moulin Rouge… This could be Paris in the year 2100, according to an “exhibition of the imagination” by
Photos: travelif / istock; mr berry / istock; Karambole pour Lyonnaise des Eaux
Ambitious vision unveiled for the city of light
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Green Futures July 2011
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Grid solution
On the cheap
EVs act as energy storage – and earn money
Can a string of incentives mainstream EVs?
Electric vehicles (EVs) could provide power balancing services to grid operators and utilities on a commercial basis, according to a joint report by National Grid and consulting engineers Ricardo, reducing the
need to generate more electricity to meet peak demand. There are two ways of doing it. The cheaper option is demand-side management, which would simply delay
Balancing act: wind and wheels
Sand Bay: home to a driving wind
the car’s recharge until the grid’s demand peak had passed. This would be done automatically: the owner would just plug in as normal, and enjoy a modest return of £50 a year as a result. According to the report, Great Britain’s fleet of plug-in EVs could – by 2020 – provide up to 10% of the grid’s energy balancing requirements in the evenings and overnight, and 6% during the day. The other option, known as vehicleto-grid (V2G), feeds power from the car’s battery back into power lines at times of peak demand, reducing the need for conventional power generation. Developed by a team at the University of Delaware, the technology allows the battery’s charge to fluctuate in response to the needs of the grid operator. According to the National Grid report, V2G would generate significantly greater revenue per vehicle, ranging from approximately £600 a year for a system with a capacity of 3kW to £8,000 a year for a 50kW installation. The only downside is that the interface which allows the power to flow back and forth between car and grid would be very expensive. Ricardo reckons that this would only be economic for owners of large EV fleets. – Peter Henshaw
From India to the US to Europe, governments are introducing incentives to mainstream demand for electric vehicles. The Indian Government has set up the National Mission for EVs to promote their use, and a tax rebate of 20% was launched in November 2010, with some states adding incentives of their own. In India, the EV market is expanding. And, in a country where two wheels still dominate, electric bikes are leading the way. Nine million powered two-wheelers are bought each year, and 150,000 of these are now electric. That’s still only a tiny percentage of the total, but it goes to show that there’s huge potential for growth. “Consumer awareness for EVs is based on ecological concerns, rather than utility”, says Harish Hande of SELCO, a sustainable energy company based in Bangalore. EVs are still too costly for the vast majority, but Hande is hopeful that a wave of cheap vehicles could make a difference to the industry’s growth. Hero Electric, the Indian market leader for plug-in two-wheelers, has forecast a new
EVs may help expand the Falklands’ renewable grid
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generation of cheap electric vehicles, priced from just $400. Elsewhere, tax credits of up to $15,000 in the US may shift to grants at point of sale this year, with many states adding their own incentives on top. In Canada, the city of Quebec has announced generous
rebates from 2012 – $4,000 to $8,000, depending on battery size. In the European Community, 15 of the 27 member states offer EV subsidies. The UK’s Plug-In Car Grant, launched in January 2011, offers to take 25% off the price of electric cars, up to a £5,000 ceiling. – Peter Henshaw
“You don’t have to give a damn about the environment. Do it because you are a greedy bastard.”
Wind to boot
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Interviewee in Carbon Nation, a film exploring how conservative American climate sceptics are leading investment in renewable energy
150% Photos: Leongoedhart / istock; Schmidt-z / istock
is negligible. At present, there are other, more cost-effective methods of matching supply to demand. But islands like the Falklands, where a small fleet of EVs could make a big difference to the grid, could offer the perfect testing ground. Lancaster University’s Professor Roger Kemp, who sits on the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s Energy Policy Panel, confirms: “It does look like a quite sensible option for somewhere like the Falklands. It should be good for shortterm loads, short-term fluctuations and very short-term wind drops.” And in practice? Peak demand generally occurs in the early evening, Kemp explains, and so EVs would usually be called upon to release electricity just before the optimum charging period: overnight. The impact to drivers would be minimal. Glenn Ross, Manager of the Sand Bay Wind Farm near Port Stanley, says: “At times of high wind we could dial a number and get people to switch on their chargers.” – Adam Oxford
Photos: Vicky_bennett / istock; Glenn Ross, Sand Bay Wind Farm
Gale force winds blast the Falkland Islands so often that, while there are plenty of penguins on the Atlantic archipelago, there are no native trees. So it’s no surprise that a goal for 40% of the total electricity generated on the island to be wind power – displacing 40% of imported fuel – was met last year, with the construction of three new turbines near the capital, Port Stanley. With only three tar roads on the islands, what might come as more of a surprise are proposals to develop wind power further using electric cars as a storage network. The Government has given the nod to an investigation into how EVs could help, by storing electricity during hours of excess supply, and releasing it back into the grid at times of peak demand [see ‘Grid solution’, above]. The principle of using EVs as distributed storage is not new, but has not yet been put into effect on large grids where EV fleets remain small, and their current capacity to provide a useful service
Paid to plug in?
The rise of global installed PV capacity since 2008. Over 16GW were added in 2010, bringing the total up to 40GW. Germany and Italy led the way, contributing 7.4GW and 2.3GW, respectively. If the market rises to incentives, a further 21GW could be added this year, according to European Photovoltaic Industry Association.
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Germany: fields of sunlight
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This one’s for keeps
Chips for life
Bee line to recovery
Consumer electronics built to last
Wildflower-strewn ‘roads’ aim to bring insect back from the brink
Bertrand Russell
Remote control for the home
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A network of ‘bee-roads’ is to be planted across Yorkshire, in an effort to help tackle falling numbers of our most essential insect. The ‘roads’ take the form of narrow strips of land along field margins, sown with wild flowers such as clover, knapweed, bird’s foot trefoil and field scabious (also known as gypsy rose). The aim is to provide a friendly habitat for bees and other threatened insects. The initiative is part of ‘Plan Bee’, the Co-operative’s drive to tackle what scientists see as a worrying collapse in the bee population, which has fallen by half in the last 25 years. It’s not just a matter of conservationist sentiment: insect pollinators provide £440 million worth of ecosystem services to the UK economy every year, according to Co-op partner Buglife. Habitat loss is seen as part of the reason behind the bees’ plight, along with disease and impacts of pesticides and other chemicals.
True enough: others working towards similar goals, such as Xilinx and Altera, have billions to play with. Whoever wins the race, future-proof hardware could allow IT companies to move away from a disposable ‘upgrade and upgrade again’ culture, towards business models based on goods that last. – Jon Turney
It is not simply a problem for Britain. Bee numbers are falling across much of the world. In an effort to provide tools to reverse the decline, Pennsylvania State University has launched a five-year $5 million research programme, funded by the US Department of Agriculture, aimed at establishing a definitive ‘honeybee-health’ database. Yorkshire’s bee-roads will be rolled out over the next year, once agreement is secured from landowners. The aim is to have two spanning the county, north-south and east-west. The Co-op is meeting the £60,000 cost, as part of a £750,000 budget set aside from pre-tax profits under its Ethical Operating Plan. The Co-op isn’t the only UK retailer acting on the issue. Sainsbury’s ‘Operation Bee’, launched in 2009, has included the creation of 500 acres of wildflower meadows, as well as the construction of ‘bee hotels’ at 38 of its London stores.
Google reinvents the bulb
Body warmth
Search giant launches smart home energy platform
Waste heat harnessed from crematoriums
Google is putting its name to a light bulb as it vies for visibility in the increasingly crowded market for domestic and commercial energy management. The LED bulb will be the first product to showcase the information giant’s
android@home platform, which allows users to control domestic and commercial appliances from their phone, thanks to new wireless ‘mesh’ technology. The bulb, developed in partnership with US firm Lighting Science Group, will launch in December. It contains wireless components which communicate with the Android operating system, and has a potential life of 50,000 hours. According to Eric Holland of the Lighting Science Group, the wireless system will give consumers a greater level of flexibility and control over their energy use, “deciding which rooms or areas have priority, for example, once a set wattage has been reached”. As the $110 billion information giant tussles with $153 billion Apple to create the world’s most valuable information ecosystem, the opportunity to brand something as common as a light bulb must have turned Google’s marketing department on, at least. A bright idea, perhaps, but it’s only a small addition to Google’s recent interventions on energy. The company has also launched PowerMeter, a free online home energy monitoring tool, and set up the subsidiary Google Energy to buy and sell electricity on the wholesale market. – Alex Johnson
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Photos: Hanswithoos / istock; davidhills / istock
“The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
still if they can be made efficient enough to move from high cost, low volume machines to everyday domestic items like laptops, television and even phones. And this is what Tabula, a private company founded in 2003, hopes to do – with $108 million recently secured in a funding round led by Crosslink Capital and DAG Ventures. Its new design – touted as the industry’s first ‘3D’ chip – is cheaper, smaller and faster than its predecessors. But its real selling point is that it could be used to do multiple things in many different products – a one-size-fits-all for programming. Wim Vanderbauwhede, lecturer in computing science at the University of Glasgow, calls the architecture “very clever”, noting that it “allows much higher memory density”. But, he adds, Tabula will have to compete against giants.
Photos: Tabula; Eric Vega / istock
If the software on your PC is a bit tired, you simply download an upgrade online. You can’t do that for the hardware, yet. And so we manufacture over ten billion microprocessors, or chips, a year. But this looks set to change. A new design means chips could be reprogrammed on demand, giving them a new lease of life. The existing alternative to mass-produced, hard-wired chips is a device with multiple logic gates, whose connections can be reconfigured by the designer or consumer after the manufacturing process. Complex circuits like this need more wiring, and so are bigger and less efficient that their less flexible competitors. They are used in big science facilities like particle accelerators, and expensive kit like MRI scanners and wireless base stations for mobile phones. That adds up to a big market. Bigger
An emerging trend for recycling the excess energy generated by crematoriums is taking hold in the UK. At least 15 British councils are in the planning stages of projects that will re-use the energy from cremations to heat new buildings, according to Richard Powell, Secretary of the Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities. A typical cremation takes 80 minutes and generates between 200 and 400kW of waste heat. The exhaust gases have to be cooled very rapidly, from around 800°C to 150°C, and cleaned to rid them of mercury, before they can be released into the atmosphere. Redditch Council in Worcestershire is the first British organisation to implement the idea. The energy from one crematorium will provide 42% of the heating demand for the new Abbey Stadium leisure centre, reducing gas fuel charges by an estimated £14,000 a year. Installation costs are expected to be no more than £40,000, with payback in fewer than six years. A simple heat exchange system installed alongside the flue gas cleaning process will capture the excess warmth, which will then be transported to the nearby stadium in a heat transfer fluid via a water circuit and pump. “This is a logical step in developing
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sustainable energy sources”, said Powell. “It’s much better for the environment, and cheaper, to use the energy for heating than to release it into the atmosphere.” An Austrian crematorium also recently unveiled a similar scheme, to provide 20%
Sweet temptation
Dr Mark Everard, Visiting Research Fellow at the University of the West of England, applauds the Co-operative’s pollinator conservation efforts: “It’s great to use a charismatic creature like the bee to make some really big points [to consumers] and create real changes on the ground.” – Kaleigh Jones
of the heating for the headquarters for Vienna’s Bestattung Wien undertakers. “This technology is used in most of the modern crematoriums in Germany and also in Taiwan”, said Helga Bock of the project. – Sophie Morris
Energy-saving grace
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Japan’s solar sunrise
Top of the world
Technology to cut the cost of PV
PV complements hydro power on Tibetan plateau
Just as market analysts were starting to worry that feed-in tariffs (FiTs) could kill the global boom in solar, events in Japan have reignited prospects for growth. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, Japan is backing off from nuclear as its major source of low-carbon power. It is not alone. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel suddenly promised to phase out nukes so fast that her country will need to ramp up its world-leading renewables programme. And in Italy, a referendum put a stop to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s plans for new reactors there. These were the two countries that had led the field with FiTs weighty enough to make photovoltaics (PV) an attractive proposition, and between them accounted for the lion’s share of the
solar upsurge in Europe in 2010. However, FiTs have their downsides – not least affordability. So Prime Minister Naoto Kan has taken a somewhat different slant with Japan’s ‘Sunrise Plan’. Although the country does have feed-in tariffs, the new plan puts less emphasis on market subsidy, and more on research and development to drive down the price of PV. Kan’s challenge to the technologists is forthright: to cut the cost of PV power threefold by 2020, and then halve it again in the next decade. That would make it 7 yen per kWh: a truly competitive price. Nuclear would still come in cheaper – official figures for 2009 were just 5-6 yen per kWh, but that scarcely takes account of either waste disposal or precautionary costs.
A 10MW solar centre is planned for a village 4,000m above sea level in Tibet’s Sangri County, just north of the Himalayas. It will convert the intense sunlight there into more reliable electricity supplies for thousands of local people. The plant, funded by Suntech Power Holdings, will be connected to the central Tibet power grid, and generate more than 20,000MWh of electricity a year. It’s some compensation for the growing unreliability of local hydroelectric power, due to changing weather patterns, frequent droughts and reduced river flow.
Renewables are now intended to provide 20% of Japanese electricity by 2020. Solar is only a small part of that, but the Sunrise Plan entails a remarkable 27-fold increase in Japan’s solar power capacity by 2020. Kan wants solar panels on ten million homes by then, and for them to be compulsory on all new homes and public buildings by 2030. Large-scale PV figures too: the internet and telecoms tycoon Masayoshi Son, Chief Executive of Softbank, is heading (and helping to fund) a special project to get local authorities to agree to build massive solar farms on unused agricultural land. At around 20MW capacity, these would count as serious power stations by anyone’s standards. – Roger East
Floating solar offers a cool solution
Green Futures July 2011
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Photos: terraxplorer / istock; SPG Solar
Photos: Chrisp0 / istock; BP Solar Pty Ltd
Big beasts enter PV jungle Masayoshi Son isn’t the only new player wanting to make PV panels. The French oil and gas giant Total recently sparked off a flurry of comment with its acquisition of a majority share in SunPower, one of the largest US-based solar manufacturers (second only to thin film specialists First Solar). Industry analyst Eric Bloom believes this “marks a shift in thinking in the oil industry towards the economic viability of solar and distributed energy systems”. BP Solar and Chevron Energy Solutions are already players in this field, while late last year the Japanese oil company Showa Shell bought into the Tokyo-based panel makers Solar Frontier. – RE
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It’s a climate issue in more ways than one. The cool high-altitude air will improve the efficiency of energy conversion in the PV cells [see ‘Sun over the water’, below]. This isn’t the highest solar power installation that Chinese giant Suntech Power Holdings has ever tackled. Its ‘outreach’ work with Tibetan villagers has put in a number of school and community systems in the region, and even one for climbers at the Everest base camp. – Roger East
Sun over the water
Tokyo wakes up to the sun
New-look oil field: the BP-funded solar farm in Moree, Australia
Looking up: Tibet can count on the sun
It may seem paradoxical, but the enemy of efficiency for PV cells comes from the sun itself: heat. That’s one reason for looking into ways of putting the process on water. Another is saving valuable land space – both locally and globally. David Mackay’s influential book Renewable Energy Without the Hot Air made the land-saving point forcefully, calculating that generating all the power we use in the UK from solar PV would mean using 200 square metres for each individual. Some of that space could have multiple uses – as when panels are mounted on roofs, or integrated into roads [see ‘Walking on sunshine’, GF79, p8]. Another solution is to put your solar farm on water rather than land. The pioneering ‘floatovoltaics’ installation at the Far Niente winery in California was designed specially by SPG Solar to avoid displacing valuable vines. Two years on, the company’s CEO Tom Rooney noted that floating the panels on the winery’s irrigation pond had brought some other unexpected benefits. Because they stay cooler than the same panels mounted on land, they’ve generated more electricity. The pond has also lost less precious water to evaporation, and keeping the light off it has stopped the growth of algae – without the use of chemicals. Another inspiring scheme involves rafts of solar cells shaped into giant lily pads floating in Glasgow’s River Clyde. Cute it may be, but this piece of biomimicry has won an international design award for ZM Architecture, and further praise at New York’s Design Triennial – without actually
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becoming a source of power in practice. But where some see a pretty picture, others see serious potential. Israel-based Solaris Synergy is using its patented concentrated photovoltaic technology (CPV) in a floating farm. The design incorporates a patented evaporation cooling technology that keeps the silicon elements at a low and stable temperature (30ºC) however hot the rays. Known as Aquasun, it is being built in the reservoir of a hydro power plant at Caderache in southern France, in partnership with utility company EDF. Rival claimant to PV’s watery throne is Australian start-up Sunengy. It too is working in partnership with a giant utility: Tata Power of India. And, similarly again, it is using the reservoir of a hydro power
plant, in this case near Mumbai. Sunengy has patented a liquid solar CPV array that will float cunningly around on the reservoir, tracking the sun to maximise energy input while using the water to keep its silicon cool. It keeps installation costs down by sharing transmission lines with the hydro plant, which is only actively generating for about a third of the time due to limited water availability. Power from the solar array, produced in the daytime, can be dovetailed nicely with hydro power from water released in the evening. Or the PV power can even be stored (the holy grail for intermittent renewables) by using it to pump the water back up. – Roger East
California: where the wine flows and the panels float
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Of land, water and war
Photo: Cpl Barry Lloyd RLC; ∏ UK MoD Crown © 2011
A decade after 9/11 unleashed debate over resource security, Jonathon Porritt offers some lessons from history. Let’s go back to basics – historically and conceptually. The cornerstone of security for all civilisations before the Industrial Age was land and water: without secure tenure of the land underpinning the lives of one’s citizens, any ruler’s tenure was short-lived. Without water, farming and productive enterprise was impossible. Armies were conscripted either to protect one’s own land and water, or to take possession of somebody else’s. It wasn’t all that different through the Age of Empires, up to the conclusion of the Second World War. It was still about territory, resources, and lebensraum, as well as geopolitical influence. It’s only in the last few decades that military security has become somewhat decoupled from this, and geared more to conflicts such as the Cold War, and the ongoing ‘Wars’ on ‘terror’ and drugs. Now there are all sorts of signals that security concerns are beginning to focus once more on land and water – most tellingly in the growing furore about food security, and the so-called ‘land grabs’ going on around the world. It’s been nearly a decade since the CIA first drew people’s attention to China’s enthusiasm for acquiring land (by direct purchase or long-lease agreement) in Africa and other countries. Since then, many more countries (especially from the Middle East) have joined the party – explicitly to help meet their own food needs. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, nearly 20 million hectares of farmland – almost half the size of all the arable land in Europe – were sold or had been negotiated for sale or lease in 2010. Ever since the publication of the controversial Limits to Growth in 1972, it’s been de rigueur for conventional economists to dismiss people’s concerns about food and water security as ‘neo-Malthusian scare-mongering’. Just look at the record, they say: year-on-year increases in agricultural productivity; new land brought into production; astonishing innovation in plant breeding and agronomics; increased competitiveness in global supply chains; considerable improvements in water efficiency in both agriculture and industry… But for how much longer will those factors obtain? Improvements in yields have slowed and even plateaued in some parts of the world. Most of the ‘new land’ available is in fact degraded or marginal acreage taken out of production because of earlier mismanagement. And all the incremental efficiency gains in the world will not offset the growth of human numbers from 7 billion today to 9 billion by 2020. As more people switch to Western style, meat-intensive diets, so pressure on land builds inextricably. China’s view of this is simple: food security means controlling access to land and water. It knows it hasn’t got enough of its own, and remains uncomfortable having to rely on the food it needs on globally-traded markets. Land-grabbing in other countries is the obvious answer.
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And then there’s water security. One of the more startling reports that I’ve read recently is The Blue Peace, from the Strategic Foresight Group. It focuses on the Middle East, a region where the population is going to double to around 600 million people by 2050, and where many countries already face very severe water shortages. Take Yemen. Of the country’s 21 main aquifers, 19 are no longer being replenished, and the capital city of Sana’a could run out of water within six years. Yemen imports more than 80% of the food it needs, and there is already evidence that all this is combining to drive violent conflict. Yemen is not alone. When wheat prices soared back in 2008, costing the region an additional $30 billion in imports, food riots erupted. Many see a connection between the recent ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings and the region’s vulnerability to such price shocks. That vulnerability can only get worse as food prices spike again, and as the impact of accelerating climate change becomes more and more painful. Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute, has been pointing this out to world leaders for many years: “This is not merely a story about the booming demand for food. Everything from falling water tables to eroding soils…means that the world’s food supply is unlikely to keep up with our collectively growing appetites. Take climate change: the rule of thumb among crop ecologists is that for every one degree Celsius rise in temperature above the growing season optimum, farmers can expect a 10% decline in grain yields. This relationship was borne out all too dramatically during the 2010 heat wave in Russia, which reduced the country’s grain harvest by nearly 40%.” The same food-water-climate nexus emerges across the globe. Altogether, more than half of the world’s people live in countries where water tables are falling. And that hasn’t escaped the attention of military planners and security experts [see ‘Unlikey allies’, p22]. Meanwhile, all that over-excited rhetoric about ‘the peace dividend’ that followed the end of the Cold War has pretty much evaporated; expenditure on arms reached an astonishing $1.62 trillion in 2010. A significant percentage of that is related (directly or indirectly) to the Middle East. We still don’t join these things up. Poverty fuels violence, and defence spending has a tendency to rise during times of economic hardship, further undermining the real foundations of security. The UN’s entire budget (of around $30 billion a year) represents less than 2% of the world’s military expenditure. All of which prompts a simple conclusion: sustainability will remain a pipe dream until world leaders’ understanding of security is utterly transformed.
“It’s only recently that military security has been decoupled from territory and resources”
Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future.
Green Futures July 2011
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Security force?
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Of course, access to natural resources has always been both a cause of conflict and a weapon of war – arguably since the dawn of civilisation [see ‘Of land, water and war’, p16]. In the last 40 years, we’ve seen civil unrest motivated by struggles over everything from natural gas (Indonesia) and charcoal (Somalia), to gems, gold and diamonds (Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Colombia and Sierra Leone) and coffee and cocoa (Cote d’Ivoire and Liberia). We’ve seen an ‘Arab Spring’ whose immediate trigger was the sudden surge in food prices. And as John Beddington, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, warns, we seem sure to see more of the same. Beddington envisages a ‘perfect storm’ of food shortages, water scarcity and uncertain access to key energy resources – not to mention a growing population – threatening to unleash violence and unrest [see Jonathon Porritt’s column in GF80, p48]. But does resource scarcity have to be a call to arms? Can the urgent need to plan for the future of our supplies and our planet be a catalyst for collaboration – even, dare we hope, for peace? Alec Crawford, a researcher in climate change and security at the International Institute for
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Photo: Abenaa / istock
“Colonel Gaddafi may end up doing more for the planet than many a hardened climate activist.” As revolutionary unrest sweeps across the Middle East claiming thousands of lives, this editorial claim in the Financial Times sounds, at worst, flippant – and at best, naïve. Out with the tyrant and in with the treehugger? Surely not. The point, of course, was that radical uncertainty about oil prices could prompt nations dependent on supplies from unstable sources to take a long hard look at their energy strategy. It’s not a new idea. After the shockwaves of 9/11, which, lest we forget, was prompted above all by Muslim fundamentalist fury at the presence of heathen troops safeguarding America’s oil supply in the cradle of Islam, there was much talk of new beginnings. Tony Blair famously saw a kaleidoscope of opportunities, while George Bush sounded briefly like an eco-activist, warning of the consequences of America’s “addiction to oil”. Optimists who hoped it would trigger a game-changing shift to sustainability have been confounded. But at the very least, 9/11 and its aftermath put ‘resource security’ right at the heart of geopolitics.
Photo: yogli mogli / istock
Our dependence on reliable sources of energy and water is so great that we go to war over it. So can sustainability help lead us into a more secure future? Anna Simpson investigates.
Sustainable Development, sees the coming storm as an opportunity to bring authorities and local communities together for dialogue, technical cooperation and co-management of resources. “The good thing about the environment”, says Crawford, “is that it provides a less political entry point for collaboration than many things.” Initiatives to preserve ecosystems across political borders can go some way to establishing peaceful relations between rival communities. Take the Good Water Neighbours project. It was set up in 2001 by Friends of the Earth Middle East to raise awareness of shared water concerns between Israel, Palestine and Jordan, and promote collaboration on the ground [see box, ‘Wadi Fukin and the wells of peace’, p20]. Another example is the Cordillera del Cóndor conservation zone, founded on disputed land between Ecuador and Peru. This mountainous stretch is particularly rich in biodiversity: its cloud forests are home to endangered species such as the long-haired spider monkey and the spot-winged parrotlet, and play an essential role in the regional water cycle. But the region also has important gold and copper reserves, whose extraction has sparked three major conflicts between the two countries since 1940, and been consistently opposed by the indigenous Shuar people. As part of the 1998 Brasilia Accord between Ecuador and Peru, a series of protected ‘peace parks’ were established, alongside proposals for coordinated irrigation, agriculture, tourism and mining initiatives.
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Crawford is careful not to overestimate the ability of cooperation around a shared resource to lead to peace. “You can have collaboration and conflict at the same time”, he remarks. “Take the Indus River Treaty. It’s been in place for about 60 years now, and has somehow managed to survive despite the fact that India and Pakistan have been in conflict for much of that time.”
Above: Could shared resources like the River Jordan inspire collaboration, not conflict? Below: Sierra Leone: diamonds, but at what cost?
Green Futures July 2011
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Wadi Fukin and the wells of peace
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minimum. The potential for renewable sources of energy in this respect is considerable. Why depend on an expensive resource from a hostile region, when a combination of wind, solar, biomass, marine and geothermal – all sourced closer to home – could fit the bill? This was the thinking behind Mena Geothermal, a start-up company installing ground source heat pumps at hospitals and schools in the Palestinian territories. “The Ministry of Public Works estimates that we need 200,000 housing units in Palestine”, says founder Khaled Sabawi. “Well, how are they going to provide them with energy? How are these homes going to be heated and cooled? Right now the Palestinian economy imports 93% of its electricity from the Occupation.” According to Sabawi, heating and cooling account for the majority of energy consumption on Palestinian territory, and so geothermal makes for both a promising business proposition and a smart security solution. That’s not to say that renewable energy sources are risk-free when it comes to security of supply. China’s decision to limit export of its rare earth minerals reminded champions of everything from
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Photo: Pavel Bernshtam / shutterstock
Far right: Winds of change? Turbines in the disputed Golan Heights
However in many regions, the challenge of providing food, energy and water for growing populations in a volatile climate simply can’t be met without collaboration. And so recognising our dependence on shared resources not only offers a potential road to peace: it is a necessary means of avoiding conflict. As resource scarcity threatens more communities, industries and economies, a new approach to security will be needed. Concerns such as land and water management will increasingly be ‘elevated’ from environment to defence ministries. As Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of World on the Edge, argues: “We’ve inherited a definition where security is almost military by definition, because we came out of a century dominated by two world wars and a Cold War. But the threats to our security now are climate change, population growth, falling water tables, soil erosion, collapsing fisheries etc. And we can’t say that we don’t have the resources to save civilisation; we do. The question is how we use these resources.” A diverse supply of key resources is an obvious way to keep the risk of sudden shortages to a
less rainwater seeps through to the aquifer, and its quality has been affected by waste building materials, loose earth and sewage from an overflow outlet above the fields of Wadi Fukin. In 2006, the pollution wiped out a whole crop of wheat. It’s a well-rehearsed scenario: neighbouring communities fighting for access to a vital natural resource. But it’s also the site of an innovative ‘environmental peacebuilding’ project by Friends of the Earth Middle East. Through the project, young people and policy makers from Tzur Hadassah and Wadi Fukin have come together to learn about the watershed and plan for its future. With support from the Governor of the Bethlehem region, the Head of the Wadi Fukin village council and a member of the Tzur Hadassah regional council, this collaborative campaign has been able to influence development plans. It has averted deep trenching that would have disturbed the flow of groundwater, and set up an agreement to protect the hillside terraces. The overflow of sewage from Beitar Illit has also been “significantly reduced”. New economic opportunities have come out of it, too. Residents of Tzur Hadassah initiated a Community Supported Agriculture project, distributing produce from the village within the settlement. According to both communities, the activity of packing boxes of food has helped to build “a certain amount of trust”. That’s not to say that the settler and indigenous communities are living peacefully side by side. But, for now, collaboration over a common resource is going a long way to avoid conflict.
Photo: The Washington Post / Getty
Eleven wells line the narrow valley of Wadi Fukin, on the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank, seven miles west of Bethlehem. Their water, drawn from a shallow rain-fed aquifer, is channelled to terraced agricultural fields and olive groves – an irrigation system that has been practised in the area for millennia. Today, three communities have rival claims to this precious resource: the 1,200 residents of the Palestinian farming village; the 3,000 inhabitants of Tzur Hadassah, a suburb of Jerusalem; and a population of some 28,000 in Beitar Illit, an Israeli settlement perched on the hillside. The rapid expansion of the settlement – thought to be the largest in the West Bank – has put considerable pressure on the watershed. An increase in impermeable surfaces means
electric vehicles to solar power of their dependence on such resources [see GF79, p7]. Michael Bradshaw, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Leicester, calls for a thorough geopolitical analysis of renewable energy. “The world is going to be even more complicated”, he says. Alex Evans, Head of the Resource Scarcity Program at New York University’s Centre on International Cooperation, agrees, and warns that the “age of uncertainty” goes well beyond energy. “We’ve just come out of a decade bookended, and largely defined by, shocks: 9/11 at the beginning and then at the end the financial crisis and the combined oil and fuel spike. This year there has just been wallto-wall shocks from start to finish – the ongoing trials of the Eurozone, what’s happened in the Middle East, what’s happened in Japan, and we’re not even halfway down the list…” “The key point”, says Evans, “is that these aren’t all separate crises. It’s to do with the interconnectedness of globalisation, coupled with the fact that [our existing] institutions are struggling to deal with this degree of complexity. Policy makers often don’t know what to do, how to cope, or where to start. You have to see issues like land, food, energy, water and carbon space as an interconnected set. Once you forget to do that and separate them out – which is what governments in the multilateral system do the whole time – you create displacement risks. And that means it is very easy to cause problems by accident, ignorance or stupidity. Take biofuels. These look like a sensible energy security measure, but then we discover that they have accidentally created a massive food security problem.” Evans believes policymakers could do worse than look at the US National Intelligence Council. “This has a specific mandate to think long term, taking a very open source approach – drawing on covert intelligence, but also on think tanks and academic communities… It has a clear mandate to be a ‘red team’, licensed as an awkward squad, to ask hard questions. It’s all about the big picture, about issue synthesis, connecting dots between different issues.” When you hit an age of insecurity such as ours, he adds, “the prevailing mood among policy makers is to ask: ‘When are things going to get back to normal?’ Well, the counterpoint to that is: ‘This is the new normal!’ Until we scale-up our institutions this is what we can expect – this is not a blip.” And in that realisation may just lie an opportunity, he believes. “Most of the time, the political space doesn’t exist for really radical action on issues like climate change or scarcity. Then periodically you get shocks which give you a brief window when people are willing to think the unthinkable. I think that we need to use those shocks intelligently.” And amidst all this uncertainty, says Bradshaw, there’s one obvious message. “The low-hanging fruit, the real no-brainer, is that we absolutely have to reduce our consumption of fuel, of electricity, of water. That goes straight to the bottom line: that’s the way to minimise risk.” Anna Simpson is Managing Editor of Green Futures. Additional material by Editor in Chief, Martin Wright.
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Unlikely allies?
Above: Joining forces for sustainability: could Greenpeace and the Navy set sail together?
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Can sustainability activists learn to love the military? On the surface, they are worlds apart. But look closer, and their mutual interests appear surprisingly aligned. Take the potential of a global shift to renewables, particularly solar and wind. With zero fuel cost, and a power source available all over the planet, a whole range of geopolitical and military risks associated with securing energy supplies are eliminated – along with the enormous costs involved. A fascinating peer reviewed study, reported in the journal Foreign Policy, pointed out that keeping aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf from 1976 to 2007 cost over $7 trillion. This was a direct subsidy to fossil fuels by the tax payer, as the explicit mission was to secure oil shipments. Such missions will not be required to keep the sun shining or the wind blowing. The US Department of Defense is increasingly focused on this issue [see panel] – which makes sense when you realise its annual energy bill is a cool $20 billion. So it’s no surprise that it has a
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renewable energy target of 25% by 2020 – more stretching than most countries, including its own! Then there are the security implications of climate disruption. Military planners, whose job is to rationally assess current and future threats to national security, are acutely aware of the broader risks posed by climate change and resource constraint, and senior officers are now voicing those concerns in public. Among them is the former Commander in Chief of the US Central Command, retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni. We either address climate change today, he warns, or “we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll.” Zinni was part of a high-level Military Advisory Board review in 2007, which concluded that climate change would act as a ‘threat multiplier’ by exacerbating conflict over resources, especially because of declining food production, border and mass migration tensions, which could increase
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Photo: F. Baptista / Greenpeace
In the war against climate change, argues Paul Gilding, the military could be our best defence.
political instability and create failed states. Similar conclusions were reached by the National Intelligence Council, the coordinating body of America’s 16 intelligence agencies, whose chairman warned that, left unchecked, climate change has “wide-ranging implications for national security because it will aggravate existing problems”, especially in already vulnerable areas such as sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. The message was repeated by the Pentagon in 2010: its Quadrennial Defense Review described global warming as “an accelerant of instability or conflict”. The military, it seems, is ahead of its political masters. And it’s becoming increasingly frustrated at the lack of a political response. In April 2010, 33 retired Generals and Admirals wrote to the Senate majority and minority leaders stating baldly that “climate change is threatening America’s security … by decreasing stability, increasing conflict, and incubating the socio-economic conditions that foster terrorist recruitment”. Across the Atlantic, the respected British defence think tank, the Royal United Services Institute, has concluded that: “Climate change will drive as significant a change in the strategic security environment as the end of the Cold War. If uncontrolled, climate change will have security implications of similar magnitude to the World Wars, but which will last for centuries.” Take particular note of the last two words: “for centuries”. With this level of awareness, it cannot be long before the military and intelligence communities start to demand urgent and dramatic action. I don’t necessarily expect US bombing missions on rogue nations’ coal plants, or an axis of evil defined by Australia’s coal, Canada’s tar sands and Russia’s oil. But I do see as inevitable that the security apparatus will come down on the side of action on sustainability. I approach this issue with an unusual background. Indeed, at one point in my [Greenpeace] activist history, I was serving in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) while simultaneously engaged in waterborne protests confronting US and UK nuclear-armed warships sailing into Sydney harbour. The result was some very ‘interesting’ personal engagements with military intelligence, which led to my rapid departure from the RAAF. But despite our differences, I learnt during my years of service, and since, that the military is full of people with genuine concern for society. They have indeed chosen a career where some of them put their lives on the line for that commitment – a level of commitment that Western activists rarely have to face. I am not naïve about the historical role of the security apparatus in progressive issues, and I understand that many in the sector are about as progressive as Donald Rumsfeld. But it would be both naïve and bad strategy for the sustainability movement to let this stand in the way of a robust engagement with these people who have, like us, made it their lives’ work to make the future a better place.
“Why should a dried up little country with a crazy dictator like Libya play havoc with America’s energy future?” Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was on characteristically robust form, as he welcomed the news that the US Navy has set itself the ambitious goal of sourcing half its energy needs from non-fossil sources by 2020. A more measured assessment came from Tom Hicks, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Navy for energy. “[It’s] a recognition that as a nation and a Navy we rely too much on fossil fuel.” It’s part of a shift that is seeing the military become a growing focus for the country’s fledgling green tech sector – so attracting substantial investor interest. The Navy’s plan is already underway. California-based Solazyme Inc. is delivering just under 200,000 gallons of algaebased biofuel – a small fraction of the eight million barrels of alternative fuel which the service will need if it’s to hit its 2020 target. The Army, meanwhile is experimenting with hybrid vehicles, even to the extent of ‘hybridising’ the notorious Hummer. Under the 2020 plan, half of all US naval bases will be netzero energy consumers, thanks to a variety of onsite generation methods. Each base would produce enough energy to power itself, but wouldn’t meet its own demand for every second of every day. “At times you may be pulling [power] from the grid”, explains Hicks. “At other times, you may be pushing power into it.” Behaviour change, too, is playing a part. Under a programme being piloted at two bases in Hawaii and South Carolina, personnel are encouraged to cut electricity use through a simple incentive scheme. If they use less than the target amount, they get their money back; if they use
more, they pay a financial penalty. As a result, consumption has fallen by up to 20%. Solar is winning its spurs on the battlefield, as well, Hicks explains, with soldiers in Afghanistan able to use it to power communications and other equipment. “Instead of [having to come back to base to recharge batteries] every two to three days, they’re able to go out for three weeks without a battery refresh.” That gives solar a strategic importance, because it requires “less people at risk delivering things to conduct their operation”. All this interest in renewables, from one of the US’s biggest purchasers, is sending ripples through the green tech market. Solazyme’s shares rose 15% on the back of its latest contract. It’s encouraged the company to invest in R&D on industrialscale production of algae fuels, Solazyme told Green Futures, and helped establish it as an industry leader in the area. “There are many others out that are building the facilities to ample scale,” says Hicks, citing Amyris, Gevo and Honeywell International as biofuel companies keen to exploit a growing market. As Hicks puts it: “I think we’re sending a pretty powerful demand signal”. And investors are starting to respond. Chandler Van Voorhis, Managing Partner and Chief Development Officer at C2 Invest, is one financier who’s watching closely. “When you think about it, a lot of [new] technology comes out of the military”, he concludes. “Eventually, it gets commercialised.” John Eischeid is a New York-based journalist and regular contributor to Scientific American.
Paul Gilding is a writer and campaigner. His latest book is The Great Disruption.
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Light of light This glorious homage to the sun, source of most energy on earth, crowns the Chapel of Thanksgiving, Dallas – a multifaith space dedicated to gratitude. Its spiral form recalls many natural phenomena, from a mollusc’s shell, to the way in which a hawk encircles its prey, to the arms of galaxies. French artist Gabriel Loire used ever brighter colours towards the centre, drawing the gaze upwards – and inspiring, perhaps, a greater appreciation of our dependence on warmth and light. We explore the role of faith in our journey towards sustainability in the special edition Moving Mountains. The Glory Window by Gabriel Loire. Photo: William A. Bake/Corbis
Making meaning You’re in the local supermarket buying a box of breakfast cereal. You pick up a box, and before dropping it in the trolley, give it a quick swipe with your smartphone. The near field communications (NFC) transceiver in your phone wirelessly reads the box’s radio frequency identity (RFID) chip. Up pops an app which crossreferences the ID with an online database – and instantly relays the nutritional details of all those oats and nuts. Intrigued, you open your other shopping app. This time, instead of calorie counts, a first-
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hand account of where the cereal comes from appears on the screen, with the option to listen to comments from the farm workers who grew it. Anecdotes of long hours and unpaid wages accompany some shots of the rainforest that was cleared to make way for the plantation. Zoom in and there’s a list of species whose habitats were destroyed in the process, along with real-time reports of water levels in the river used for irrigation and the historical depth of topsoil in neighbouring fields. You put the box back on the shelf…
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Photo: Jaume Plensa, courtesy Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, Galerie Lelong, Paris and New-York
Data analysts are building the future, says Adam Oxford. And it’s not just a pretty façade.
It might seem far-fetched, but this is how ethical shopping could work within the next couple of years. Product tagging with RFID technology is fast becoming the norm, and the latest Android smartphones already come with NFC radios built in. The seemingly improbable part – an online database of production data matched to RFID codes and maintained not by communications specialists but by people on the ground – is about to be launched by a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, Mark Graham. It’s called Wikichains. “The goal of Wikichains is not to push any particular standpoint”, says Graham, “but rather to allow people to make more informed ethical choices.” For him, it’s “vitally important” that consumers can access information about the impact of their purchasing decisions. His ambition is to encourage a “new type of consumption based on knowledge [and] transparency” by attaching information to everyday objects – and that this transparency will drive better practice up the supply chain. Good old activist zeal might get Wikichains off the ground, but what will make it possible is
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a relatively new approach to data. More rapidly than ever before, we can gather, disseminate and access data from almost anything, and turn it into something useful, such as a statistic, graph or Google Map. And more of us are asking how we can harness these new skills for sustainability. The promise is great. If we can interpret and apply the information we have access to in an intelligent way, we could solve many issues – such as how to cut waste in our food supply chains, make it easy to move around our megacities, or turn our gas-guzzling homes into smart systems. But for some, it’s more than mere problemsolving: it’s a form of art. Take David McCandless, Founder of Information is Beautiful: a book, online platform and – arguably – an aesthetic movement. His aim is to create data visualisations which reveal the “hidden connections, patterns and stories” in the world. Recent examples, including one which charts the decline of North Atlantic fish stocks from 1900-2000, and another showing the risk to major cities of sea level rise, are worth a thousand words about climate change... For Hugh Knowles, Principal Sustainability Advisor for Forum of the Future, this issue of
“For some, it’s more than mere problemsolving: it’s a form of art”
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Photo: Mdeon / istock
“A lot of energy reporting tools are really hard to comprehend”, Foster says – citing measures like the kilowatt-hour, which remain unfamiliar to many. Foster’s team of computer scientists, psychologists and sustainability experts wants to use a mix of games, dashboards and social networking sites to help people understand their impacts. But for Foster, the big challenge isn’t so much making the data relevant to people, as getting hold of it in the first place: “You actually have to use a dial-up modem to dial into the meter, which is hideously slow, costly and unreliable. Then the software to read it is really expensive: you’re talking around a thousand pounds per licence per modem, plus some sort of corporate analytic software... and that’s tens of thousands of pounds, plus a yearly maintenance contract.” The problem of access is widespread, and most theorists believe the solution lies in the ‘semantic web’. The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee to describe what some think will be the next major stage of the internet. In the semantic web, a common set of languages and readable formats will be used for all machine-to-machine communications. If realised, the semantic web could look a lot like Pachube. Pronounced ‘Patch Bay’, this online service bridges the gap between collecting data and formatting it for general use. Anyone can plug a tool for collecting data (such as an environmental sensor) into Pachube, and its servers translate the output into a ‘language’ that open-source software, such as Google Maps, can use. One project which uses Pachube to compare data from multiple sources is Japan’s Geigermap. Real-time radiation-level readings are fed into Pachube from over 200 sensors scattered across the country, and plotted on a common Google Map. Any individual or institution is free to connect their meters to the network, and they do. At the time of writing, several sensors near to Fukushima were showing radiation levels 100 times that of the average public space in Japan. Other examples include six ‘weather tunnels’, which gather data about carbon dioxide and monoxide levels, humidity, light, noise and temperature – from Helsinki, London, New York, Berlin, Seoul and Arizona. Together they create a real-time air quality monitoring system that anyone can access. It all goes to show that, once data is published and accessible, it becomes a catalyst for creativity. Rewired State, an organisation based in London, is dedicated to unleashing that force, finding new ways to use the information we have. John Bevan is responsible for running ‘hack days’ on behalf of the organisation. At these, up to 100 developers get together on a voluntary basis, tapping into data streams to create application prototypes in as short a time as possible. “There is an energy that comes from doing things quickly”, says Bevan, “It’s something you can work on for a day or two and forget about. It’s an intellectual exercise, a test of your skills, an opportunity to learn a new language.”
Photo: Juanmonino / istock
He’s putting the world to rights
presentation is the question of the data age. Data by itself is overwhelming, he argues. But if your aim is to use the data to incite more sustainable patterns of behaviour, making it look pretty isn’t enough: “Even the most beautiful visualisation has to be given cultural relevance if it’s going to encourage sustainable change”, says Knowles. “If you can make data meaningful within the community, through comparison or by giving it a social context, then you have a chance to create behaviour change on a long-term basis.” To illustrate the point, Knowles turns to smart meters. Though it’s still early days to measure their impact precisely, evidence suggests that current domestic smart meters only have a temporary effect on energy consumption. After three to six months, the novelty of seeing real time usage figures wears off and householders revert back to their previous behaviour. It’s just numbers, which – taken out of context – are neither engaging nor significant. A more effective strategy for engaging consumers in the long term, says Knowles, is that used by Opower in the US. Opower takes the data from smart meters and compares it (without naming names) to that of your neighbours, using graphics, bar charts and SMS alerts. Suddenly you’re no longer looking at numbers: you’re looking at well-presented information about the behaviour of your neighbours – and, crucially, how you match up. This added dimension – peer pressure – is a real motivator. Derek Foster is trying to replicate this comparative approach at an institutional scale. A researcher at Lincoln University’s Social Computing Research Centre, Foster is part of the team working on Electro Magnates, investigating ways of encouraging staff and students in universities and other public buildings to meet goals for reducing consumption.
But the aim isn’t just to give geeks a fun day out. “Our motto is ‘Coding for a better country’”, Bevan explains. “[We use the] developers’ skills to make things better: save time, money, energy, reveal inefficiencies in supply chains and take cars off the streets.” One application to come out of these hack days helps people with electric vehicles work out how far they can go and where they can juice up. EVPointFinder, by Michael Dales, draws on data generated by charging point companies to offer drivers information on the location of charge points and their status (available, in use, offline). They can even see where coverage between different areas overlaps enough to make a longer journey possible. Another is PedalMania, which takes data about the status of bicycle sharing stations in London’s citywide cycle sharing scheme, and encourages users to ride bikes from full racks to empty ones. This way, fewer trucks have to be sent round in the evening to do the job. The potential of such creative energy is vast. And all that’s required in way of fuel is … data. Former journalist and internet entrepreneur Greg Hadfield is leading a campaign to turn his home town of Brighton and Hove into an “opendata city”. Based on the models of San Francisco, Washington, Edmonton and London, the Open Data Brighton and Hove group is pushing local authorities to open not just their books, but their servers too. Open data in this sense, says Hadfield, is about creating cities that “think like the web”.
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Developers draw on technologies which “grew up in the global village” to create cohesive, networked and sustainable communities. Locals can access applications which draw on public data to tell them things like where the buses are, which farmers’ markets are open, what the air quality is like, and how much power this street or that municipal building is consuming. “It’s about much more than transparency”, explains Hadfield. “It’s about co-production. We generate the data together; we clean it, curate it and add value to it. We all benefit from outcomes that are, quite literally, unimaginable.” No one really knows what the open data city will look like in the future. “Open data is the straw to build the bricks: the mansions are yet to be designed”, Hadfield enthuses. And that, for him, is what’s really exciting: “The architect is as likely to be the teenager in a backroom in Barnsley, Brighton, Boston or Bangalore, as a person sitting in bloated bureaucracy.” Some worry that this new age of omniscience could alienate the less data-literate among us – or that we could find ourselves too rich in knowledge and too poor in understanding. Hadfield is dismissive: “Information overload is nothing compared with ignorance overload. We didn’t build libraries because people were literate; we built them to help people to become literate.”
Pollution solution: real-time mapping should help cyclists steer clear of smog
Adam Oxford is a freelance writer specialising in technology and efficiency.
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Domestic goddess?
independent voice in the market place, someone who can say to a consumer: ‘This technology says it will save you so many pounds, and it will’.” The Energy Saving Trust has a clear role to play here. Soon to be recognised by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS), it will have the power to assess and vouch for individual implementation schemes.
The cost conundrum
Thirty-nine, thirty-eight… The countdown to the UK’s emission targets for 2050 has begun. By the time the final grain of sand slips through the slim neck of the glass, the UK’s homes must be pretty much zero carbon. The rate required to get there is hair-raising: we need to retrofit six homes a minute, reducing the emissions of each property by 60-100%. High hopes are pinned on the Government’s Green Deal – a scheme to help home-owners and tenants finance the changes, without racking up personal debt. It works by attaching the loan to the property, rather than the individual, with the cost paid back through the home’s energy bill. The one ‘golden rule’ is that the efficiency savings on the bill must exceed the value of the loan in any given year. “Potentially, it’s a huge market opportunity – there’s no question about that”, says Philip Sellwood, Chief Executive of the Energy Saving Trust. “Done properly”, concurs Simon McWhirter of the Great British Refurb Campaign, “it will reduce carbon emissions [and] could mean more money into the local economy as people spend less on fuel bills. It could even mean a jobs boon: hundreds of thousands of new jobs, both at low levels and professionally skilled. ” A solution to be seized with both hands, then. But will home owners and occupiers recognise it as such? Much of the legislative detail is yet to be written, and so far there’s little indication from Government as to how it will be communicated to the public. So what’s needed to get it right?
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First and foremost, consumers need clear indications that it’s a trustworthy scheme. “The level of trust from the customer is pretty low”, warns Sellwood. “Our research into pay as you save pilot schemes shows that, whether [or not] Government sees it as a loan, most people will still see it as a debt that needs to be repaid. Their willingness to take on debt is small, unless they can see that this debt is against the house, not against them as individuals.” And it’s not just a matter of money. We’re talking about changes to homes that may involve significant disruption to daily life over weeks and months – and with lasting consequences. No one takes such a decision lightly. Erica Jobson, an expert on consumer rights and expectations from Which? is concerned that, unless this issue is adequately addressed, the only take-up will be from the “converts – the people who’d have done it anyway”. “You have to think about the consumer journey”, she says. “What guarantees are there? How can consumers be sure they’re not being taken for a ride?” So advice from a trusted source is going to be crucial. The Government is beginning to respond to this need, with proposals for a dedicated telephone advice line. But who will be handing out the advice? Those selling the Deal to consumers will be familiar brands – the likes of Sainsburys, B&Q, British Gas or Npower. Clear government endorsement will be needed to establish them as trustworthy lenders, says Sellwood. But what’s also needed, he argues, is an
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Photo: Leontura / istock
Will a scheme to help consumers spruce up their homes be the UK’s saving grace? Anna Simpson asks the experts.
Once the issue of consumer confidence is sussed, there’s still the question of money. After all, people will only go for the Green Deal if it makes financial sense. And that alone won’t be enough: it also has to be an attractive proposition. “To get significant up-take, consumers need to be driven by the money-saving potential, not the environment”, says Jobson. “Otherwise, it’ll be a big expensive niche product.” But whether or not changes to your home turn out to be cost-effective can be complicated. The Bristol-based low energy refurbishment pilot project ‘Refit West’, led by Forum for the Future, found that a simple ‘pay as you save’ approach doesn’t always reflect the true costs of an intervention. According to its most recent report, ‘Update from the Front Line: real homeowner retrofit journeys and barriers the Green Deal must overcome’, hidden costs can occur along the way. These could be aesthetic ones, such as replacing cornicing, or structural ones where problems are uncovered. Such costs increase the challenge for an assessor of confirming that the interventions are covered under the Green Deal’s ‘golden rule’. Take the case of Chris Priest, owner of a Victorian semi recently refurbished with support from Refit West. Perhaps not your average consumer, the reader in sustainability and computer systems at Bristol University installed high efficiency double glazed sash windows at a cost of £15,000, despite the 44-year payback. This cost far exceeds the sums likely to be covered by the Green Deal. So why did he do it? Because a “friendly estate agent” advised him that the installation would “certainly increase” the value of the property, “possibly by almost as much as the installation”. The Update concludes that “there is a huge amount of work to do to ensure that estate agents [and] surveyors … consider and report on the effects that the measures [recommended under the Green Deal] would have on a property’s value”. The rate of interest on the loan is another question. Jobson is concerned that the Government will leave this question to the retailers: “If the interest is charged back at a high commercial rate, the Green Deal may not compare well to other loan schemes. It’s not rocket science – but it’s not guaranteed.” Green Party leader Caroline Lucas compared the interest rates of commercial loans in the UK (around 8%) with those offered by successful retrofit schemes in Germany – of just 2.65%. On this front, though, things are looking up. The UK Green Building Council has been campaigning for the Green Investment Bank to help finance the Deal, by reducing the interest rate to homeowners once it is set up. And the Government seems to be coming around to the idea.
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But the big elephant in the room is the fuel poor – those who find it difficult to get credit at all. “We’re talking about 20% of all UK households”, says Sellwood. In response to this problem, the Government has announced plans to oblige energy utilities to subsidise the Green Deal, focusing on the poorest and most vulnerable householders, and the hardest to treat properties. But it’s not yet clear how far the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) will stretch, and how the Government will ensure that those who need help most get it. Jenny Saunders, Chief Executive at National Energy Action, is concerned that ECO could end up subsidising home improvements for the wealthy, and would like to see it clearly targeted at certain income categories, with – perhaps – a maximum income level. “That will be one way to make it more equitable”, she says. “Arguably, it’s a much better route to go down than borrowing money from loan sharks! Or going without the improvements, and putting their health at risk.”
Fine in theory, but in practice? “I was vehemently against anything that would make our rooms any smaller”, said one Refit West homeowner: “200 year-old cottages are small and dark enough without shrinking them by three inches on each wall!” We shouldn’t underestimate the impact that consumers’ attitudes and behaviour will have on uptake. So many factors are at play here, from personal taste, to awareness of the energy efficiency agenda, to more practical barriers – such as readiness to endure the disruption. “We’re talking about interventions that are likely to be much more disruptive than energy saving measures that they’re already not doing”, says McWhirter. “There’s massive public apathy at the moment. Home energy efficiency isn’t high on people’s radar. It needs to be easy, affordable, attractive…” There’s clearly a big marketing issue here. Solutions could include web-based tools to help people understand what the options are and what impact they could have. Perhaps an augmented reality app could walk you through the stages of the process, in your own home – or some interior design software could show you how the outcome would look, and feel. Campaigns like Bristol Green Doors, which opens up refurbished properties to the public, will help too. Another way to sell it, says Sellwood, “is on the basis that your house is already a mess, you’re already spending cash”. He points out that 15-20% of households are engaged in some sort of intervention at any one time. “There are natural trigger points”, he argues. “From zero to 90, at every stage we tend to be doing something to our homes which doesn’t necessarily mean moving: there’s the first baby, the kids leaving home, building the granny annex…” Tapping into these opportunities will mean being at the ready with great communication, and across the board – from retailers, to utilities, to independent advisers, to local and central government. The Green Deal doesn’t actually kick in until autumn 2012. But look busy.
“Consumers need to be driven by the money-saving potential, not the environment”
Anna Simpson is Managing Editor, Green Futures.
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Where the quick buck stops
Vision for a sustainable economy Aviva sponsored a separate Forum project which asked what a sustainable economy would look like in 2040, and described the environmental limits and social conditions such an economy would meet. In the vision, the economy measures wealth by more than just GDP. The whole system is geared towards building resilience in natural and human systems. Headlinegrabbing investments are in biodiversity and solutions for greater resource efficiency. It goes without saying that the more transparent, the better. Fair terms for global trade are de rigueur, perverse subsidies are eliminated, and sustainable behaviour is incentivised. Aviva will be using the 2040 Framework to see if sector guidelines for investment are “stringent enough – and how we might need to change them”, according to Steve Waygood, Head of Sustainability. It will also help the group to pinpoint where external catalysts might be needed, such as tax changes and other government action.
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It used to be said that, in the City, ‘long term’ means after lunch. That was before the advent of high-frequency trading. Now, each millisecond counts so much that traders want their computers to be physically nearer to the stock exchange computers. In this case, ‘long term’ means the time it has taken to read this paragraph. Millisecond trading is the culmination of what is, ironically, a long-term trend to ever shorter investment time horizons. For decades, investors have been moving from a ‘buy and hold’ approach to increasingly rapid buying and selling. On average, shares now change hands after just eight months. That’s not even long enough for the company to tell investors how well it is doing in the annual report. Progress towards sustainability inevitably suffers. Take, for instance, private investment in unsustainable ‘drag’ fishing technology. This drove the Newfoundland cod population to near-extinction in the 1990s, when a longer-term perspective would have yielded greater returns for more investors over a longer period. Similarly, investors in fossil fuel companies can gain attractive short-term returns from high oil prices. The risks of carbon-intensive activities to the overall system (climate change, water depletion, forest degradation, conflict, financial crisis)
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Photo: digicamchic / istock
Hong Kong: blink and you’ll miss out
may ultimately reduce the financial returns from investments, but often only over a long period. In a sustainable world, investors would profit from patience. They would wait to reap the benefits of company spending on improved products, new ideas and leading technologies – because selling out early would mean losing out. The best way for companies to strengthen their business would be through investment in projects to cut emissions, support ecosystems and improve livelihoods. In fact, boards would be under pressure from investors if they failed to invest for the future... As it is, investors (or those who manage their assets) focus on what will make a quick buck now, rather than what will pay off in 10 or 20 years. Executives of leading public companies admit (in anonymous surveys) that they try to meet expectations for the next quarter’s earnings, even if the company will be worse off in the long run. There’s a problem here, and the UK Government recognises it. The Business Secretary, Vince Cable, has asked economist John Kay to head an enquiry into how the workings of the financial markets affect company performance. “It is especially urgent”, says Cable, “that we work out how the equity investment regime can be recalibrated to support the longterm interests of companies as well as underlying beneficiaries, such as pension fund members.” Urgency acknowledged. So how can it be done? A Forum for the Future project, ‘Overcoming the Barriers to Long-term Thinking in Financial Markets’, supported by the Friends Provident Foundation, has been looking into this whole issue of ‘how to think long term’. It proposes three essentials for a much healthier system. The first is that companies provide fund managers with much better strategic information on environmental, social and governance issues, and fund managers demand it. This goes hand-in-hand with companies placing a greater emphasis on the benefits of a longer-term strategy in communications with shareholders, mainstream investors and the media. The second is to do with incentives. Current incentives can serve a fund manager’s bonus, calculated on the last quarter’s performance, for instance – even at the expense of the asset owners’ interests. To move away from this, fund managers must provide evidence that all investment incentives
Photo: Samxmeg / istock
Our addiction to short-term gain means we don’t invest in the future. Roger Cowe looks for a cure.
But perhaps the largest barrier to long-term thinking is a cultural one, and this has to be part of the solution. The project report calls for a significant shift towards a culture which honours those who act in the company’s long-term interests – and vilifies those who are only concerned with this year’s earnings. Once upon a time, after all, the prevailing boardroom value was to leave the company stronger than you found it. The short-term culture is a phenomenon of the last 50 years, and is notably less pronounced elsewhere in Europe. Change is clearly possible: the challenge is to shift the direction of change towards, not away from, more sustainable business values. Already, prominent business leaders such as Paul Polman of Unilever and Ian Cheshire of Kingfisher have spoken out in favour. Earlier this year, Polman said: “We are moving our business
serve the long-term interests of asset owners. And the third is that companies also tackle this problem of misplaced incentives, through greater transparency in how they judge and reward the performance of their board, CEO and staff. Asset owners should also demand this transparency, alongside information from fund managers on environmental, social and governance issues. The Government has its role to play, intervening to correct the current market failures that encourage investors to seek short-term returns with long-term economic disadvantages. Part of that is creating incentives for investors to act for long-term gain, maybe through the tax system. The other is making sustainable business more attractive – by putting a proper price on carbon emissions, for example.
model to the longer term. I tell our investors, if you don’t like that, to be honest, then I fully respect you but look at other alternatives.” Similarly, Cheshire has called for new economic objectives: “Instead of the goal of maximum linear growth in GDP, we should be thinking of maximum wellbeing for minimal planetary input.”
Looking beyond the barriers
Better the devil you know?
Of course, it’s easier said than done. The Forum project was forthright about existing barriers to long-term thinking. Companies say investor pressure forces them to prioritise short-term returns. Investors say short-term returns are what matter – despite evidence, from catastrophes like Deepwater Horizon, of the dire consequences that can stem at least in part from cutting corners. And incentives on both sides of the fence tend to encourage people to look at the next few months rather than decades. “We’ve gone round the houses so many times” on this long-termism debate”, admits Alice Chapple, Forum’s Director of Sustainable Financial Markets. “Sometimes it seems it’s about the only thing around the City that is long term!” [See box, p34.]
There’s still the question of whether long-term considerations can really be compatible with investors’ financial concern for current share value. Even if companies and fund managers do understand about sustainability, and know what’s good for the company’s long-term business, there is a strong argument that investors benefit from short time horizons, from a purely financial point of view. If short-term performance is poor, there is after all no guarantee that things will get better, so it could be safer for an investor to sell in haste rather than regret at leisure. If this is the case, companies will only be able to take long-term decisions if there is less immediate pressure from the City. This takes us into deeper waters, raising all manner of corporate governance
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A tale of rust and resilience
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What will it take to increase investment in sustainable activities? Engagement, for one, says Alice Chapple. There’s no shortage of capital for innovative solutions and sustainable activities – if it can be shifted away from unsustainable ones. Global oil and gas
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Cream cracker
Roger Cowe is a consultant on corporate sustainability and an Associate Director of Context Group.
exploration attracts significantly more investment than the development of clean technologies. Obesity drugs get more than drugs to beat malaria – which kills a million people every year. At present, however, investors see no reason to make this shift. Why would they? Investors are paid to achieve high short-term returns, so it’s not surprising that they aim to do so. The resulting risks to the overall system (climate change, water depletion, forest degradation, conflict, financial crisis) may ultimately reduce the financial returns from investments, but often only over a long period and the impacts are uncertain. So how can we create the change that’s needed? At Forum for the Future, we’re asking just that. It’s all part of our five-year strategy to ramp up the pace of change towards sustainability by transforming some of the key systems that underpin our lives, including finance. We are engaging with companies, financial institutions, NGOs and government, and support them in seizing opportunities to do things differently. It’s a huge challenge, and so we’ve divided it into three themes. The first looks at incentives within the finance system. We want to unpick the reasons why investors account poorly for future risks, and why they fail to value the assets that matter to our long-term prosperity, such as a stable climate, biodiversity and strong communities. We’re working at a practical level both with companies and with investors, to highlight reasons for short-term thinking and pilot new approaches. The result, we hope, will be more economic activities designed to deliver lasting wealth rather than simply a short-term share price hike. The second theme looks at ways
to enable funds to flow to sustainable activities. This requires innovation, such as new types of financial mechanism. One example is our work on forestbacked bonds, which explores how ecosystems services – the largely unvalued benefits which we get from forests in terms of carbon sequestration, biodiversity, landscape value, social and cultural value, flood protection, subsistence livelihood support and so on – may be used to augment the value of a bond. Another important part of the picture will be innovation by companies to develop new business models to address sustainability challenges. GlaxoSmithKline’s adoption of tiered pricing on drugs is a case in point. The pharmaceutical company is selling life-saving medication at a much lower price in developing countries than in developed countries, while still meeting overall return targets for investors in the business. And finally, we want to inject some new thinking into the system. We’ll identify and support new players from others sectors, who are bringing in new technologies, such as mobile phone banking, or new financing approaches, like peer-to-peer lending and time banking. Existing businesses will be pushed towards better practice by this new pressure on their markets, and the range of financial service providers will increase, improving the resilience of the system. Alice Chapple is Director of Sustainable Financial Markets at Forum for the Future. To find out more and to be part of this work, contact: a.chapple@forumforthefuture.org
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Madeleine Lewis looks ahead to the future of the UK’s dairies.
Photo: Stuartbur / istock
On board for the better
Forumupdate
nor will they be quick to replace it. So we are forced to remember that financial markets, unlike ethical banks, are essentially amoral. Their job is to allocate capital where it can be used most efficiently. If they are doing that, and the outcome fails to match what society needs, it’s not a failure of the City. It’s a wider problem of market failure – and that’s a job for government to fix. Does that mean the City’s off the hook? No, says Steve Waygood, Head of Sustainability Research and Engagement at the insurance company Aviva: “If it’s in the interests of the economy to be longterm but investors are not appropriately incentivised, then investors should engage with government to correct that market failure.” Ultimately, investors need a sustainable economy, too.
Photo: alaincouillaud / istock
Forests: backing the bonds of the future?
concerns about shareholder rights. Indeed, to some, the conventional share ownership model is at the heart of the problem: “In my view”, says Bevis Watts, Head of Business Banking at Triodos Bank, “a more sustainable economy won’t happen with existing ownership structures that only value profits. We need ownership structures and new corporate bodies that value social cohesion and environmental impacts.” One encouraging sign, says Watts, is the emergence of new ownership forms such as community land trusts [see ‘Common grounds’, p42]. Watts also calls for more localism – and sees an opportunity in the current crunch. Local organisations can step in where the public sector is retreating, switching the focus to quality rather than profits and growth. But however successful new models may become, they won’t cure the current system – and
Whether you’re waking up to a cup of tea, enjoying a cheese and pickle sandwich for lunch, or even beefing up in the gym with the help of some protein powder – come 2020, the industry that supplies you with those products will have changed. Dairies in the UK are facing many sustainability challenges: from calls to cut carbon emissions and maximise production efficiencies, to meeting changing demands from both retailers and the end-consumer. Yet the industry provides products that promote health and wellbeing, helps sustain rural communities and plays a vital role in land stewardship. Which is why Forum for the Future has set up Dairy2020, bringing together key players in the UK dairy sector to develop a strategy for its future. In the last quarter of 2010 we spoke to various people in and close to the sector about the challenges it faces. We asked them how they felt the industry should respond, and what they thought the barriers to a sustainable dairy sector were. The responses confirmed what we suspected. Despite a recent wave of excellent environmental initiatives, there isn’t a shared understanding of sustainability within the dairy value chain. Nor is there a shared understanding of what a sustainable dairy sector would look like. Dairy2020 is a chance to change this. The working group includes farmers, milk processors, retailers, trade bodies, membership groups, Defra and an NGO. Many
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in the group haven’t collaborated before. By bringing them and their (sometimes very) different perspectives together, we aim to produce a strategy that is both robust and ambitious. We’ve already made a start, using a futures process to explore the key trends that are likely to impact on the industry over the next decade – and how they might influence one another. One trend that the group is taking into consideration is public perception of the industry: there may be increasing support for farmers from consumers, but at the same time there’s increasing concern over the climate change impacts of meat and dairy production. Another trend the group is looking at is climate change policy: how it will evolve and its likely impacts on the industry. The next step is to use these trends to build four possible future scenarios for the industry in 2020, and from these, a vision and a set of recommendations for how the industry should move forward. This will build on existing work to make the sector more resilient, notably the Milk Roadmap. And we hope it will give us a blue-print to help us deliver sustainable value chains for other key commodities: we’ve got grain and tea in our sights! Madeleine Lewis is part of the Dairy2020 team at Forum for the Future, where she specialises in communications. Dairy2020 will launch in November 2011. Find out more about its progress by visiting www.dairy2020.co.uk Twitter: @dairy_2020
Green Futures July 2011
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SallyUren
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.
Damian Tow Class of: 2008 – 09 Currently: Project Director, Brighton Energy Co-operative Why I chose the MProf I chose to do the Masters as a mature student at 38 – a bit different to most. I’d done a degree in Business Studies back in the ’90s, although I’ve always had an interest in environmental issues. I picked the Forum course due to its great reputation and the alumni network, but predominantly for the practical projects. Having worked for several years, a purely theoretical Masters didn’t appeal.
What I learnt That being ‘good enough’ is ok. Sustainability is about trying to fix everything that’s wrong with the world, and that’s a huge task – bigger than any of us are going to achieve. It’s important to recognise when you have enough information, or know enough people, to just act, give it a go. You can then reflect on that experience and move on. It’s important to have confidence in yourself and understand that you don’t need to have all the answers, because all the answers probably don’t exist. Career to date Since the Masters, I’ve been working on the Brighton Energy Co-operative. Our aim is to raise £1 million by selling shares in the co-op to fund solar PV installations around Brighton and Hove. We’ll then use the revenue to fund further low-carbon projects. Raising the funds is more challenging than it would have been 18 months ago, when there were grants around like the Low Carbon Communities Challenge – but we’re taking hope from other successful projects.
Forum’s sustainability guru sets her sights on the mainstream.
What I plan to do next My immediate focus is to make the Brighton Energy Co-operative successful by Christmas, as the legislation and incentives will change in March 2012. Beyond that, my ambition is to apply the lessons from this to other community energy projects around the country. I’m working alongside people in Carbon Leapfrog, DECC and The Low Carbon Hub in applying for European grants. We have a common agenda: to use our experience to create guides for energy resilience around the country.
Time to make sustainability normal. So says the latest research on how to take ‘green’ to the mainstream, unveiled at the Sustainable Brands conference in California in June. Mainstream Green, by communications agency Ogilvyearth, asks why the purchasing behaviours of the middle green haven’t shifted, despite massive growth in sustainable marketing. The discovery of the ‘middle green’ – the 60 to 70% of mainstream consumers who said that they would do sustainability if it was made easy for them – made the prospect of putting consumption on a sustainable path a real possibility. Four years on, and the consumption of everything has taken a very different path. Sustainability is still the preserve of the minority – those who didn’t need much convincing to embrace low-impact lifestyles in the first place. Green claims have simply failed to cut through into the public consciousness. Why? The Ogilvy study, based on interviews with over a thousand US consumers, cites a number of reasons. Among them: the premiums often dolloped on the price tag – think organic carrots versus non-organic. Then there’s the general confusion: “Is organic really sustainable? Or does it have to be local too?” And also the fear
Advice for future leaders Don’t leave it so long to act on your convictions. On the Masters, I was finally surrounded by people who share my values, and that was very stimulating. It may sound like a cliché, but doing something you’re passionate about attracts people to you, and makes you much more likely to be successful. Damian Tow was in conversation with Katie Shaw. www.brightonenergy.org.uk
A community of leaders Introducing a network that actually gets things done.
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Green Futures July 2011
to director-level sustainability professionals, future leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs. They don’t just come along to listen to another inspiring case study that for one reason or another doesn’t quite apply. They come to think, build skills and collaborate in a trusting atmosphere, with each organisation on an equal footing. It may all sound a bit warm and fluffy, but there’s no room for complacency. Forum is stepping up the pace to match the scale of the global challenges we face. And its Network is growing too: in size, reach and ambition, with events and projects in the US, UK and Europe, and plans to expand into India and beyond. It is bringing ambitious people and their organisations together to collaborate, explore new business models, and create the innovative solutions we need within critical systems like food, energy and finance.
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How to join
Photo: DrAfter123 / istock
Sustainability professionals love a good network. And rightly so: no one is going to rise to the challenge alone. But there’s a certain amount of network fatigue out there, too. Not another online forum to distract us, we moan, another glass of wine before we can call it a day… It’s time to sift the wheat from the chaff. So here’s a network with a difference. Forum for the Future has brought together a global community of organisations at the leading edge of sustainability, or with the ambition to get there fast. Like many networks it creates relationships and shares great ideas. But unlike most, it also develops the tangible outputs, cutting edge practice, and collaborative projects that we need to create a sustainable future. It’s a community of inspirational, influential and committed people, including senior
Membership of the Network gets you a direct line to Forum for the Future, invitations to exclusive events, tools, communications opportunities, and the chance to get involved in collaborative projects. If you join as a Partner, you’ll get all of these benefits, plus a tailored advisory programme for your organisation with director level support. If your organisation is a leading light which wants nothing but the highest level of engagement, join as a Pioneer. For more information on how to join us and details of our current members, visit: www.forumforthefuture. org/forum-network or contact Geraldine Gilbert: g.gilbert@forumforthefuture.org
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of being seen to be a bit weird (“Don’t folk that eat organic carrots wear funny sandals…?”). Not to mention that, for many of the men-folk questioned by the Ogilvy team, sustainability is most definitely a feminine issue. In their eyes, the jute bag handed out at supermarkets is no better than a ‘man purse’. Green is the new pink. Where next for mainstreaming sustainability? Again, the report makes some sensible suggestions. My top four, based on their survey and my own experiences, are: • Get the right products and services to market. This means innovating like crazy. I’m not talking incremental improvements – a bit of lightweight packaging here, a bit of ingredient substitution there. I mean replacing the glass jar with a paper-based pouch, or making the yoghurt carton edible. • Wave goodbye to the sustainability tax. Why is the ‘green’ washing up liquid often more expensive than its harmful cousin? Sustainable products, manufactured with super-efficient supply chains, should be cheaper to make than products made with energy-intensive processes. It’s time to pass that benefit to the consumer. • Put yourself into the head of someone who isn’t hardwired to be green. What is important to them? Slapping a green label on a product won’t be enough. It needs to read: good price – and green; cheaper to run – and green; looks good – and green… • Make the most of brands that people already recognise and trust. When asked from whom would they buy sustainable goods and services, 73% of the respondents in the Ogilvy study said they would opt for a mainstream brand – because they are familiar, and ‘normal’. One last word. The whole question of sustainability needs a new context. In it, we stop selling more and more stuff to more and more people. Above a certain income per capita, stuff doesn’t make us happier. How about leasing services that actually do us good – instead of selling tat that simply looks good? Market that! Sally Uren is Deputy Chief Executive at Forum for the Future. @sallyuren
Forum for the Future’s Network brings together business and government to create a sustainable future; inspiring new thinking, building creative partnerships and developing practical innovations to change our world. We aim to transform the critical systems that we all depend on, such as food, energy and finance, to make them fit for the challenges of the 21st century. For more information, visit www.forumforthefuture.org AkzoNobel Elizabeth Stokes, 01928 511695 www.aksonobel.com Alliance Boots Ltd Andrew Jenkins, 0115 968 6766 AMEC Francesco Corsi, 0191 272 6128 www.amec.com/ukenvironment Arjowiggins Graphic Shannan Hodgson, shannan.hodgson@arjowiggins.com Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy Jane Howarth, 020 7410 7023
David Lloyd Leisure www.davidlloyd.co.uk
John Lewis Partnership Moira Thomas, 0207 592 4413
Delhaize Group www.delhaizegroup.com
Johnson Matthey Sean Axon, 020 7269 8400
Delphis Eco Mark Jankovich, 020 3397 0096, www.delphisworld.com
JT Group John Pontin, 01275 373393
Ecotricity Helen Taylor, 01453 761316 www.ecotricity.co.uk Ecover Mick Bremans, +32 3 309 2500 www.ecover.com
Aviva Investors Steve Waygood, 020 7809 6000
EDF Energy Darren Towers, 07875 110 289, darren.towers@edfenergy.com
Balfour Beatty plc Jonathan Garrett, 020 7216 6837
Ella’s Kitchen Alison Lindley, alison@ellaskitchen.co.uk
Bank of America Merrill Lynch Matt Hale, 020 7996 2054
Energy Saving Trust 020 7227 0398 www.energysavingtrust.org.uk
Benchmark Software Simon Harvey, 01458 444010 Birmingham City Council Sandy Taylor, 0121 303 4026
The Environment Agency Brian Francis, brian.francis@environment-agency.gov.uk
Kingfisher Jamie Lawrence, 020 7372 8008 Jamie.Lawrence@kingfisher.com, Kraft Foods and Cadbury Jonathan Horrell, 01242 236101 Kyocera Mita UK Ltd Tracey Rawling Tracey.Rawling.Church@KyoceraMita. co.uk London Borough of Croydon Bob Fiddik, Bob.Fiddik@croydon.gov.uk
Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd Jack Cunningham, jack.cunningham@sainsburys.co.uk SC Johnson Ltd Chris Lambert, 01784 484100 Skanska Jennifer Clark, 01923 776666 www.skanska.com
Sony Ericsson Gustaf Brusewitz, gustaf.brusewitz@songericsson.com Sony Europe www.sony-europe.com Target (US) www.target.com Tata Global Beverages Sara Howe, 020 8338 4590
Marks & Spencer plc Rowland Hill, 020 8718 6885
Tesco Ltd Ruth Girardet, 01992 644053
Mars Drinks www.marsdrinks.co.uk
Tetra Pak international Rupert Maitland-Titterton, 0870 442 6000
Bottletop Cameron Saul, cameron@bottletop.org
Finlays Michael Pennant-Jones, 020 7802 3239
O2 plc Simon Davis, simon.davis@O2.com
Thames Water Utilities ltd Helen Newman, 0118 373 8343
British Council www.britishcouncil.org
Firmenich SA Neil McFarlane, +41 227802435
Panasonic UK Ltd Simon Eves, 01344 853325
Thomson Reuters Julia Fuller, julia.fuller@thomsonreuters.com
BT plc Richard Spencer, 0773 663 6882 Richard.a.spencer@bt.com
FirstGroup plc Terri Vogt, 07799 885171
PepsiCo UK & Ireland Andrew Slight, Andrew.Slight@pepsico.com Powys County Council Heather Delonnette, 01597 827481
Friends Life Sandra Latner, 08452 683135
Pret A Manger ltd Nicki Fisher, 020 7827 8888
Capgemini Ltd James Robey, 0870 904 5761
GSH Group Lee Price, 01782 200 497 www.gshgroup.com
Pureprint Group Richard Owers, 01825 768811 www.pureprint.com
Cargill Fiona Cubitt, 01932 861916
Heineken UK Richard Heathcote, 01432 345277
Quintain Estates and Development Plc Louise Ellison, 020 7478 3430 lellison@quintain.co.uk
Carillion plc Louise Perry, 01902 316258
Hewlett-Packard Scott Nyulassy, www.hp.com
Certis Europe www.certiseurope.co.uk
IGD Dr James Northen, 01923 851919
Chi Group www.chilondon.com
Ingersoll Rand www.ingersollrand.com
City of London Simon Mills, 020 7332 1431
Innovia Films Lucy Cowton, 01697 342281
The Co-operative Group Chris Shearlock, www.co-operative.coop
InterfaceFLOR Europe Ltd Ramon Arratia, 020 7490 3960
Bupa Andrew Smith, 020 7656 2343 www.bupa.com Cafédirect Whitney Kakos, 0207 033 6022
Danone www.danone.com
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Jaguar Land Rover Fran Leedham, fleedham@jaguarlandrover.com
Rail Safety and Standards Board Shamit Gaiger, 020 3142 5380
Triodos Bank William Ferguson, 0117 980 9770 www.triodos.co.uk TUI Travel plc Jane Ashton, 01293 645911 www.tuitravel.com/ sustainabledevelopment Unilever UK Helen Fenwick, 01372 945000 Vodafone Group Chris Burgess, 01635 677932 Volac Andy Richardson, 01223 208021 Warburtons Sarah Miskell, 01204 556600
Rexam Plc sustainability@rexam.com, www.rexam.com
Wessex Water plc Dan Green, 01225 526000
Royal Dutch Shell plc Elfrida Hughes, +31610974798
Willmott Dixon Ltd George Martin, 01932 584700
RSA Insurance plc Paul Pritchard, 020 7337 5712
Wm Morrison Supermarkets plc Steven Butts, Steven.Butts@morrisonsplc.co.uk
RWE npower Anita Longley, 01793 892716
Find out what on earth you should be investing in.
Small World Henry Rawson, +852 2799 3998 www.interiorsourcing.com
Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) James Simpson, 020 7811 3315 www.msc.org
Food and Drink Federation Nicki Hunt, 020 7420 7132 www.fdf.org.uk
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Green Futures July 2011
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Hearth and home
us what to plant and when; the weather doesn’t tell us anymore.” Business, too, is at the heart of an ambitious scheme which is powering up remote communities with a range of low-cost solar energy products. ToughStuff International, a social enterprise operating mainly in Kenya and Madagascar, sells kits costing less than $30 which include a mini PV panel and robust LED lamp. The panel can also charge a mobile phone and a radio. Over 140,000 of these have been sold, bringing power to 740,000 people. Village entrepreneurs like Mary Kaindi, are excited by the opportunities ToughStuff is bringing. “I’ll educate my children; I’ll buy food and clothing for them. I’ll make money from this product and my life will change.” Sustainable energy isn’t just about generating power: it’s about home comforts, too – a fact much appreciated by Bibi Safina and family. They live in a village nesting in the Hindu Kush mountains of northern Pakistan. In the harsh winters her house was cold and draughty, and she spent hours collecting wood to keep the house warm. Now she’s one of 100 local people working with an initiative set up by the Aga Khan Planning and Building Services (AKPBS), which promotes simple energy efficient products like floor insulation, a clean burning cookstove with water heater, and a roof hatch window that cuts out draughts. Bibi both helps promote the products, and benefits from them herself. “For a working woman like me, it’s great. I can go out in the morning and there’s hot water when I get back.” AKPBS has sold over 50,000 such products in the last 14 years, and they’re also helping take pressure off the region’s dwindling forests by saving 100,000 tonnes of wood a year.
From clean stoves to domestic refit, Juliet Heller profiles the winners of this year’s Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy.
Less coal, more coins: Toyola Energy’s clean burning stoves
only meets around 10% of demand. Even where there is power, it’s sporadic and unreliable. A group of Bihari friends working in the US decided to return home and address this problem. Discovering that rice husks could be gasified to produce electricity, they set up a business called Husk Power Systems that now has 65 plants across the region, providing reliable and cheap mains connections, with enough ‘juice’ to power machine tools. Around 180,000 people have a good supply of electricity for the first time, and feel they have finally entered the 21st century. “Now I have an elated feeling when I see my kids studying at night”, said one. Understandably, many more villages are clamouring for a connection and the business is expanding to try to meet the demand. The northwestern Indian state of Gujarat is home to an enterprise that is also harnessing waste for clean energy. Abellon Clean Energy is making biomass pellets from sawdust and crop residues like cotton and mustard seeds to replace the highly polluting lignite (or ‘brown coal’) used by local industries. With 65,000 tonnes of pellets produced a year, saving around 110,000 tonnes a year of CO2, the impact of the business is significant. Abellon has set up a not-for-profit, Poornakumba, which works with 8,500 farmers who supply the waste, training them in sustainable farming techniques and helping them adjust to climate change. Such advice is much appreciated in these times of rapid climate shifts. As one farmer commented: “We need someone to tell
A problem shared...
Photos: Ashden Awards
“Selling stoves has changed my life”
Four years ago, Gina Garbon was one of the first people to buy a clean stove from Toyola Energy in her neighbourhood in Accra. She was so happy with it that she borrowed money to buy more stoves to sell at her market stall. Now she’s sold no fewer than 6,000, and with the profits has bought land to build a new house. “Selling stoves has changed my life”, she says. She’s not the only one who is pleased. “My customers are happy because they spend much less on charcoal, the stoves burn cleanly, and cook quickly too.” Toyola Energy, this year’s Ashden Awards International Gold Award winner, was set up by Ghanaian entrepreneur Suraj Wahab to offer an affordable alternative to the widely used traditional stoves, which consume a lot of fuel and make the home smoky. Carbon finance enables the stoves to be sold for as little as US$7. That’s a hefty sum for many Ghanaian households, so Suraj came up with a simple ‘money box’ credit scheme: literally, a tin with a slot. He gives his customers the stoves on credit, and they pay him out of the savings they make from reduced charcoal consumption. It’s ludicrously simple, but highly effective. Three out of every four Toyola customers use the scheme, and it’s helped the company sell over 154,000 stoves in total – cooking meals for nearly one million people in Ghana, Togo and Burkina Faso. Another clever solution to pollution is found in Bihar, India’s poorest state, where the electricity grid
Thousands of miles away in the UK is a scheme that also retrofits homes to make them energy efficient and comfortable, and was proud recipient of this year’s overall UK Gold Award. Housing association Radian in Hampshire has reduced CO2 emissions across its social housing stock in south east England by 34%. As part of ongoing maintenance work, it installs insulation, double glazing, condensing boilers, solar water heating and solar PV. In some cases, it carries out a complete eco refurbishment, cutting carbon by as much as 90%. Mrs Hill, a resident in a newly retrofitted home, is thrilled with the results: “Our monthly fuel bills have come down from £125 a month to £75 a month. I used to have to pull on a jumper before I got out of bed, but now the house keeps the heat in really well.” Radian also builds new low-carbon homes, with a growing number meeting the highest efficiency rating – Level 6 – of the Code for Sustainable Homes. As a result of Radian’s work, nearly 44,000 people are living in better homes. Now Radian is sharing its techniques with other housing providers, and training contractors to roll it out further. Without such efforts to bridge the skills gap Britain faces, many of the solutions needed to build a low-carbon economy will never be scaled up. Two other UK winners this year are rising to this challenge. The pioneering Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, Wales, runs postgraduate and
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professional courses in renewable energy and sustainable building, training up to a thousand students a year. They boast on-site technologies including hydro, wind, solar and biomass, and inspire many graduates to pursue work in the green sector. A scheme that focuses on a younger age group, Young Energy People (YEP!), is training secondary school students to manage their schools’ energy, and in the process giving them vocational skills that could see them become the future leaders in this field. Schools can do a great deal to reduce their carbon footprint, but many are unequipped to go about it. The Severn Wye Energy Agency goes into schools to set up 25-strong teams of pupils, and helps them track and reduce energy use. The Agency is already working with 29 schools in Gloucestershire, and is attracting new partners eager to work with it in other regions. With around 30% of Britain’s CO2 emissions coming from space and water heating, Midlands Wood Fuel is showing other businesses that by providing a reliable, high quality supply of wood chips, wood fuel can return as a mainstream, sustainable option for heating our buildings. They supply over 100 corporate, public sector and domestic customers across the Midlands, and in 2010 sold 5,253 tonnes of wood fuel – saving around 3,700 tonnes of CO2 compared to oil-fired heating. Of course, carbon savings aren’t just to do with how we generate energy, but how we use it. It’s increasingly accepted that bringing people to work together is the best way to achieve real behaviour change on this front [see ‘The persuaders’, GF80, p26]. In one south Devon town, Transition Together is doing just that. Run by Transition Town Totnes, it’s brought together 1,100 local people, who are finding that it can be both fun and empowering to work alongside their neighbours to cut carbon, and in the process save money and grow closer as a community. As one participant says “We’re learning a lot from each other – and we’re having a lot of fun as well!”
Home improvements: Radian’s retrofit scheme takes gold
“Their ecorefurb cuts carbon by a whacking 90%”
Juliet Heller is a freelance writer specialising in energy and development. The Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy is a Forum for the Future partner. www.ashdenawards.org
Green Futures July 2011
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A Community Land Trust, says Bevis Watts, can make ownership mean more than profit maximisation.
Green brands must make their message count when the chips are down.
Land for grabs?
“We need Government to recognise the value of community involvement”
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Community ownership? It’s not a new concept. A century ago, everything from alms houses to the burgeoning cooperative movement in Britain put ownership, responsibility and rewards in the hands of the many. More recently, Scotland has blazed a trail. Its ‘Community Right To Buy’ means villages like Comrie in Perthshire can acquire and develop land for the use of local peoples, and renewables projects – like the one on Westray in the Orkney Islands – can bring sustainable long-term incomes to local initiatives. England, arguably, has been lagging behind. But here, too, an exciting movement is gathering momentum. Community Land Trusts (CLT) are non-profit organisations, run by volunteers, which develop housing or other assets at permanently affordable levels for long-term community benefit. CLTs are tried and tested. In the US, where they originated over 40 years ago, there are now more than 250 such communities. They are taking charge of their own destiny by creating companies to develop and manage assets, which will in turn generate income for future generations. Big or small, rural or urban – there’s one in New York’s Bronx – they provide a variety of housing tenures as well as workspaces, energy generation, community food and farming. In the North Devon village of High Bickington, meanwhile, one of the UK pioneers of this movement is developing the site of a council-owned tenant farm that was deemed surplus to requirements. The first phase will provide 16 affordable homes and six workshops, funded by the sale of 18 homes on the open market. Later phases include a new school and community buildings, and sporting and recreational facilities. There’s also community-managed woodland, with some 3,000 broadleaf trees planted this spring.
Green Futures July 2011
High Bickington Community Property Trust was originally formed in 2003, when the council gave it the chance to design a development on the site in line with the community’s needs. This was a shift away from the conventional approach of working with a private developer to build hundreds of homes that would appeal to North Devon’s second home and commuter market. As David Brown, the Trust’s chairman, says: “We wanted to make the village more sustainable by tackling a whole set of issues through a holistic approach.” It has taken time and perseverance from the Trust to get this far, including submitting revised plans after the initial planning application was turned down. “At times it felt like the Government was against us,” says Brown, “but there has been a change in climate. We illustrate what can be done. We need Government to be more able to recognise the value of community involvement; we need to be much more able to look at finance and to get the right packages together. It’s a two way process. It’s not just about what the banks require, it’s about the communities recognising what’s needed to be able to achieve financial backing.” If the success of commercial businesses is measured on their return to shareholders, then community-owned enterprises must be judged on the results they deliver to the community they serve. The wider benefits can range from reduced commuting, to locally generated renewable energy and the retention of investment in the local area. And for some residents, the impact is life-changing, enabling them to live and work in the place they call home. “It will mean a lot to me to stay in High Bickington, because both my partner and I have grown up here,” says Becky Hale. “And to be able to bring up my daughter Chloe in such a nice community will just mean the world to us.” To deliver a more sustainable society, we need a transition to ownership structures that value more than just profit maximisation. At a time of austerity, when the public sector doesn’t have funds to invest, community ownership offers one immediate alternative for infrastructure development. To date there are only 13 registered CLTs in England, but their potential is huge. There’s no reason why there can’t be 13,000, building and operating all sorts of public facilities, driven not by profit, but the benefit to the community. Bevis Watts is Head of Business Banking at Triodos Bank. Triodos Bank is a Forum for the Future partner. www.triodos.co.uk
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What price values?
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Common grounds
The doomsayers love those ‘death of the green consumer’ stories. Take the recent New York Times (NYT) splash about sharply falling sales for Green Works cleaning products. But sustainable business analyst Andrew Winston took the NYT to task (in the Harvard Business Review, no less) for drawing conclusions which the US data don’t justify. What about the recession-busting strength of farmers’ markets? The ‘pride of ownership’ Prius brand? What about the niche green cleaning brands actually winning market share? It’s no big news, says Winston, if the initial market excitement has cooled for Greenworks, a sub-brand launched three years ago by mainstream giant Chlorox. It’s still a successful product, but has found it harder to grow into a bigger brand, because the mass market consumer it targeted “never loved paying extra for green”. Winston rejects the notion that every green tag could charge a premium. Instead, he sees growing numbers of what he calls “the conflicted consumer” in the aisles of Wal-Mart, or wherever. She (it usually is a she) will respond to green as the third button, alongside price and quality – but she wants all her buttons pressed. “The real story”, Winston says, “is the pursuit of more sustainable products that … create no trade-offs for customers.” Ecover’s core customers, however, are rather different people. For them, says International Communications Manager Effi Vandevoorde, “our brand values mean more than price”. So, how to keep close enough to the customer base that its hard-won loyalty will hold good, even in tough times? Her answer? “By aligning the brand with what our customer is doing in her life, connecting with her concerns, making her feel good. She’ll buy our brand if she feels it cares about her, her family, her home – if it’s a brand she wants in her life.” The company has worked hard to win and keep credibility with ‘dark greens’, who buy in to Ecover’s environmental credentials, and its 30-year history of investing in making cleaning products more sustainable. It would be “brand suicide”, says Vandevoorde, to slip up on anything which compromised that. “When they love you, they really love you. But if they started to hate you, they’d really hate you.” Nowadays nothing goes viral faster than consumer hatred, as the scars on several prominent brands bear witness. Smaller producers can often score in terms of credibility on the green front, and Winston agrees there’s a market niche that accepts this as a tradeoff against price. Some are content, too, to stay small. But he’s confident they’d unleash a larger audience by pressing all three buttons.
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Here, Vandevoorde is sceptical. “You go to Wal-Mart because you’re looking for a good deal. You’re not really looking for added value”, she says. If a brand like Ecover is going to connect with these busy shoppers in their fast-moving world, it needs to “create desire” around sustainability [see ‘Fire brands’, GF78, p26]. Backed, of course, by assurances of the highest environmental standards. Great design is one trigger for desire. Even washing-up liquid, in a beautiful bottle, can tell you it ‘belongs’ in your lovely life. But above all, it’s through social media that today’s communities are talking to each other, informing themselves and each other about their lifestyles, brands and environment. Vandevoorde recognises that this makes for “a far bigger playground”, and there’s no doubt in her mind that Ecover must get out there more. Interacting with customers is familiar territory. Even in the days of post and phone, Ecover sent them scratch-and-sniff cards so they could choose the new fabric softener scent. But, tellingly, a recent social media campaign in the US wasn’t really about the products. Instead, a Facebook-based community of Ecover customers under 30 picked their 30 ‘most admired’ peers for an awards evening in a Manhattan loft. A classic case of what Forum for the Future Deputy Director Sally Uren has identified as the key to behaviour change [see ‘The Persuaders’, GF80, p26]: “associating greener lives with ones that are more pleasurable and satisfying, and which bring us closer to our neighbours and our friends, enjoying the fruits of a shared endeavour”. – Roger East
“When they love you, they really love you. But if they started to hate you, they’d really hate you”
Ecover is a Forum for the Future partner. www.ecover.com
Will she go back for more?
Tide turns for marine planning
A new name for a sustainable future Last year, Green Futures partner Entec joined AMEC, one of the world’s leading engineering, project management and consultancy companies. Having integrated Entec with AMEC’s existing UK environmental business, we’ve now changed our name and look forward to the future as AMEC Environment & Infrastructure UK, building on existing strengths while maximising the benefit of being part of a strong and vibrant worldwide business.
A new integrated approach to conservation and development promises better sense at sea.
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Acting personally, thinking globally, delivering locally amec.com/ukenvironment www.greenfutures.org.uk
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Sustainability is a guiding principle, central to our values as a business. If you’d like to discuss how AMEC can help shape your sustainable future alongside ours, call us on 0800 371733 or email francesco.corsi@amec.com, your Green Futures partner contact.
Dream for a moment that you are a sea bass. Swimming around the North Sea, the water may be a little warmer and more acid than it used to be, but some things are looking up. Consumers are demanding that you be caught sustainably. High-profile ‘fish fighters’ are trying to save you from becoming ‘discard’ – trawled up only to be thrown back dead, due to the daft way the quotas work under the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). There’s another reason to put a grin round your gills. The people who have power over your fry, and your fry’s fry, have started to get their act together. You know the kind of strategic planning they use on land, to manage the competing interests of development, residents and the environment? Now, at last, it’s being applied to the seas. (If you are a British fish, take an extra splashy leap to celebrate the fact that the UK is ahead of most other countries on this front.) The cause for celebration is the Marine and Coastal Access Act, passed late in 2009 and now in the first stages of implementation. The quango it created, the Marine Management Organisation (MMO), will, sensibly, be a one-stop shop for planning and licensing. It will streamline what was a chaotic system, and come up with policies where often none existed, for everything from port-building, dredging and pollution, to fishing methods, and even whether a dead body can be buried at sea. The principal benefit is that, for the first time, one body will “oversee the cumulative impacts of development”, says Lissa Batey of the Wildlife Trusts, one of a small consortium of NGOs that campaigned for ten years for the new legislation. John Pomfret, Technical Director in AMEC’s UK environmental business, concurs: “Our experience has been that planning in different marine business sectors has been uncoordinated, and environmental protection reactive. The new system provides an opportunity for integrated planning for both development and conservation of the marine environment.” Now, critically, the MMO promises to place more value on conservation. And its planners have been given more powers and tools than are usually granted to their profession in disciplines such as ecology and stakeholder engagement. They have already started to look at improving the CFP, with the aim even to end discard. “The management of our seas is a fascinating but complex challenge,” says Russell Gadbury of the
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MMO. “If it were easy, we wouldn’t exist!” Going forward, developers should find it simpler to find out what they can and cannot do. The policies are there online. There are maps at the click of a mouse. If you want to build a port, you can make one single application, rather than seek permissions from five different organisations. The MMO is to draw up ten Marine Plans in England, a bit like terrestrial Local Plans, and is already making headway with two: East Inshore and East Offshore. But what most excites the conservationists are the Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs), which promise greater protection to the marine environment than ever before. The champagne that greeted their inclusion in the Act, however, has gone a little flat. There is concern that MCZs won’t be created soon enough, or that they won’t be close enough together for interdependent underwater ecosystems to fully benefit. “We are also worried too few MCZs will be created and, worse, they will be ‘paper parks’, as there won’t be funding for enforcement,” says Batey. That would be like painting yellow lines on the streets but not employing any traffic wardens. We need the zones, we need the wardens. There will be conflicts, and it won’t be pretty. But the hope is that good sense on land will translate into good health at sea. – Charlotte Sankey AMEC is a Forum for the Future partner. www.amec.com/ukenvironment
“At last, the kind of strategic planning they use on land is being applied to the seas”
Felixstowe: where the fish come first
Green Futures July 2011
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Dale Vince responds: Thanks for your comments. On your first point, we went to OFGEM to double check our understanding of the FiT scheme: namely, that one technology could not prosper at the expense of another because there was no limited pot of money.
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Green Futures July 2011
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This is rare indeed. In fact it’s a first. I was so impressed by ‘The persuaders’ that I thought I’d drop you a note. The article is exactly what is needed for sustainability professionals to make a difference, as we all move away from being technical experts stuck in corporate cupboards, towards influencing and motivating the mainstream activities of our businesses. Excellent, and thank you. Greg Chant-Hall, Skanska
Dear Sally… You talk about a “fundamental shift in perspective from ‘my business’ to ‘our world’” [see Sally Uren’s column, GF80, p37]. Changing the way business is done, if only by a few companies, can change the flow of wealth, ease and eliminate poverty, and leave us all with something better to worry about. There are more than enough resources available to go around, if we can just figure out how to share. It cannot be ‘Me first’; rather, ‘Me, too’ is the order of the day. Jeff Mowatt, www.forestofdean.socialgo.com The core question is: what’s the best thing we can do? After that comes: what’s the best way we can do it? I love the idea of a shift from seeing sustainability through the existing organisational goals, to reframing the goals themselves. Apart from not-for-profits and social enterprises, who’s doing this now? Penny Walker, www.penny-walker.co.uk
In the Royal Society / Green Futures special edition, Under new management, the effectiveness of marine cloud brightening is rated “low to medium”. This is untrue, and it would be as effective as stratospheric aerosols which are given the grading ‘high’. How did you come to this grade? Moreover, marine cloud brightening is given the affordability rating ‘medium’, whereas stratospheric aerosols are rated as highly affordable. Since marine cloud brightening is significantly cheaper, how did you come to this grade? I would also appreciate justification of the ratings for timeliness (‘medium’) and safety (‘low’), as you have provided no references. Alan Gadian, NCAS, Environment, Leeds University Green Futures replies: Thank you for your comments on ‘Six ways to cool the planet’. The information presented in the article is taken verbatim from the Royal Society report Geoengineering the climate: Science, governance and uncertainty. We apologise for not making this clear. Relevant references and information pertaining to marine cloud brightening may be found on pp27-28 of this report, while references and information pertaining to land-based enhanced weathering may be found on pp12-15.
Planet management principles
I refer to the feature ‘When in doubt, talk about it’ [see Under New Management, p18]. If we move from a natural climate to an artificially controlled climate we will move from a globe where random changes might kill millions or billions to one where everyone might be killed. Geo-engineering is I love the concept of hidden capital and building wrong in principle. Don’t trust a duvet for your home [see ‘Gardens: anyone with the air you the hidden capital revealed’, online]. a greenfut ures Speci al Edition a greenfutures Special Edition breathe and the land I think the exploitation of our hidden you live on: they really assets for sustainable development don’t know what they are is empowering for residents to UNDER N EW M UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT doing and they really will understand how more of an impact Can we re-eng ANAGEMENT inee Can we re-engineer the climate? r the climate? get everyone killed. It will can be made. be a terrible choice but it Mike Beckett will be better to accept a billion dying in a century or so than e veryone dying in two centuries. We can only take the casualties, reduce the population and return I read with great interest the recent to living in harmony with the paper in Green Futures entitled natural world. There is no ‘Six ways to cool the planet’ [see technological fix. Under New Management, p8]. I was John shocked, however, to read that the
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While I am a great fan of Ecotricity, I don’t feel the article ‘Sun shade’ by CEO Dale Vince [see GF80, p45] is a very accurate representation of some important points. Firstly, when the feed-in tariff (FiT) was introduced it was never intended to have a cap. This changed in the October spending review when Osborne announced that by 2014/15 a review of the tariff levels would save £40 million on estimated costs. This effectively changed the estimates of the policy cost into absolute limits. Because the Tariff is counted by the Office for National Statistics as a tax, the Treasury, and not Ofgem, controls the budget for it. Secondly, while solar may be cheaper for large-scale installations rather than domestic, it is still a very expensive technology compared with other means to reduce carbon emissions. We must question what bang for buck we get from subsidising solar. Given the relatively small size of the UK market, what happens here will have little impact on international manufacturing costs. So while the UK can’t really help drive prices down, it can benefit from lower prices driven by action elsewhere. Indeed, prices are already dropping significantly – which is why the solar market is currently so lucrative. There are opportunities in terms of job creation and for the economy, but we are a long way behind other countries in this industry and we have no clear competitive advantage, so many of the benefits of our FiT subsidy will be felt elsewhere. As the UK is strapped for money it may make more sense to spend it on industries where we do have a competitive edge, such as marine energy or offshore wind. However, new IPPR research shows how FiTs and solar PV can have important impacts on attitudes to energy, particularly when located in communities at the domestic scale. It’s this kind of additional benefit that it is important to emphasise. Reg Platt, Researcher on Climate and Energy at IPPR
OFGEM saw it the same way as we did. We had both missed the transition from a proper FiT scheme to a capped scheme, it seems. Then on top of that it became Treasury’s domain, with little publicity it should be said. By limiting spending under the FiT the Government actually created the problem it then highlighted and sought to fix – by killing off big solar. They limited the pot, creating the possibility for one technology to flourish at the expense of others. There are some 50 FiT schemes in operation around the world and not one of them operates with a limited budget. Such a case undermines confidence in FiT schemes in general. Coming to your second point, solar is an expensive technology, as you say, and bang for buck is important. That’s our big point. You get 50% more bang for limited buck with big solar than with small. That’s no small difference. You are right that we are way behind other countries on solar right now, but that’s no reason to give up. The UK already has solar manufacturers: we are in a position to see FiT money go to British industry. Of course there’s also a chicken and egg thing going on: if we have a market – driven by an effective FiT scheme – then manufacturing will follow. You suggest offshore wind might be a better spend, in terms of jobs and industry – but the vast majority of turbines being installed in the UK are made abroad, so I’m not sure that’s very different. And in wind, like solar, the UK is well behind the field. On your last point – the Government makes a similar point, that the hearts and minds benefits of small solar are important and therefore worth paying for. I’m less inclined to believe that there is any real world impact, for example a lessening of NIMBY attitudes to other forms of renewable developments. And it’s worth bearing in mind that, other than council and social housing projects, small-scale solar support typically goes to the relatively well off – those with £5k or £10k to spare – while the costs are borne by all, including the UK’s fuel poor. As such it’s a regressive tax – making it all the more important we get bang for buck – which brings us back to the fact that big solar gives us 50% more for the same cost. I don’t believe that giving people who are relatively well-off a good feeling about renewables is a good way to spend that money. Just to clarify: I am up for rooftop installations and I can see they have a role to play, but not instead of big solar. If we can only afford one, we should go with big, not small. Thanks again for your thoughts.
‘The persuaders’ [see GF80, p26] makes lots of good points. Bringing together examples of what works – and getting businesses on board – is key. The potential of businesses to use their resources to achieve lasting change is enormous. A great example of this is employee volunteering projects, such as the EverGreen Project – a collaboration between Sky and Global Action Plan to support the residents of the Hanover (Scotland) Housing Association to reduce their impact on the environment. Global Action Plan UK
affordability of enhanced weathering was ranked as low! This is terribly misleading, as enhanced weathering is much cheaper than any of the alternatives. The proper way to compare options is, of course, to refer to the cost of removing a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere in a sustainable and safe way. Enhanced weathering uses grains of olivine, spread on soils in the wet tropical zone, and costs slightly less than €10 per tonne sequestered [see ‘An estimate of the cost of sustainable production of metal concentrates from the Earth’s crust’, Ecological Economics, 42, issue 3, 401-413]. Prof R D Schuiling
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Size matters
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Winning words
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Planet management costs
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Green Futures July 2011
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JonathonPorritt
“Is this just a cynical ploy by the would-be greenest Government ever...?”
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If nothing else, UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s feisty defence of his ‘Big Society’ has provoked lively debate. That’s partly because very few people understand what he’s on about. But it’s also because a lot of people instinctively agree that he’s probably on to something important – even if they don’t quite know what it is. Including me. My formative years in the 70s and 80s were suffused with hyperbolic enthusiasm for ‘big ideas’ like decentralisation, subsidiarity and community enterprise, and outlier visions of bio-regionalism and self-sufficiency. All of which, with splendidly sloppy sleight of hand, were summarised under the populist slogan ‘Small is Beautiful’. 2011 sees the 100th anniversary of the birth of Fritz Schumacher, with new editions of his hugely influential work, itself titled Small is Beautiful, now on the shelves. This has prompted all sorts of speculative comparisons between Schumacher’s big idea and David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’. Indeed, at the end of last year, two of Schumacher’s daughters visited Number 10 to talk to some of David Cameron’s advisors. This really got me thinking. Is this just a cynical ploy by the would-be “greenest Government ever” to wrap itself in a ‘Small is Beautiful’ banner? Or is there any serious intent to unpack Schumacher’s ideas to help inform ‘Big Society’ thinking? Many believe ‘Small is Beautiful’ has indeed had a big influence on Cameron’s idea – and one shouldn’t dismiss this out of hand. The appeal of Schumacher’s work has always been beyond party politics, despite his unashamedly left wing ideological roots. David Cameron’s own imprecision about the ‘Big Society’ makes it difficult to judge the extent of Schumacher’s influence: “The Big Society is about a huge cultural change where people in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplaces feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities… You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society…” As it happens, Schumacher wasn’t quite the fundamentalist on matters of scale that the title of his book might suggest. This is what he actually says:
Green Futures July 2011
“When it comes to the question of size, there is no single answer. For his different purposes, Man needs many different structures, both small ones and large ones… The principal task is always the restoration of some kind of balance. Today we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of giantism. It is therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness – where this applies.” Cameron’s Government is certainly keener on decentralisation than any of its predecessors. There is a sincere conviction amongst ministers that things would work out a lot better if the ‘little battalions’ were to be given their head. So there’s common ground between them on the benefits of decentralisation, by lifting the dead hand of the bureaucratic state, promoting local entrepreneurs and community volunteers, and emphasising the importance of wellbeing. But you have to dig down to see what this means to our two idealists, in practice. For instance, Schumacher really did believe in decentralised energy systems, with far more of our energy generated from renewables at the local and community level. This is what the UK’s coalition Government subscribes to in theory, but the measures currently in place will do little to deliver the kind of revolution in distributed energy that was once promised. New nuclear power stations are still very much part of the mix. And Schumacher hated nuclear power. Schumacher would also have had no truck with a Government which constantly undermines the role of the public sector, whilst talking up the role of the private sector and the liberalisation of public services. He would be astonished at the prospect of schools and hospitals getting bigger and bigger, not smaller, and ever more distant from the communities they claim to serve. And he would be excoriating about the Government’s failure to rein in bankers’ greed and excessive senior management salaries. I suspect he would be in despair that so little has been done over the last 40 years to narrow the gaps between the rich and the poor, and as contemptuous today of the Treasury’s slavish adherence to conventional economic growth as he was back in 1973. All in all, I’m pretty sure that those who see themselves as Schumacher’s heirs will fight hard to ensure that his legacy is not conveniently co-opted by a Government that, deep down, subscribes to a very different worldview. Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future. Jonathon has launched a new website: www.jonathonporritt.com
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The UK’s leading renewable energy trade association is proud to present:
RenewableUK 2011 Annual Conference & Exhibition
25–27 Oct | Manchester, UK | Wind, wave & tidal energy Three days of sessions, exhibition and side events will examine industry developments in onshore and offshore wind energy, wave and tidal energy, and micro- and small-wind systems.
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– Over 4,000 delegates – Networking & side events
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Coming next year:
RenewableUK
6 July 2011 London, UK
Global Offshore Wind 2012 Core Sponsor
13–14 June 2012 | ExCel London, UK www.GlobalOffshoreWind.com
Keynote address from Dr Vince Cable, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills
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(All RenewableUK conferences and exhibitions)
The 6th Annual
Sir David Attenborough CBE -
INTERNATIONAL GREENAWARDS 24th November 2011 - The Natural History Museum, London, UK
Broadcaster & Environmentalist
“The INTERNATIONAL GREEN AWARDS are a genuine effort to promote positive attitudes towards biodiversity and sustainability.”
Great ideas, organisations and people deserve recognition. Recognition inspires change. It motivates and rewards people. It propagates and fertilises new thinking. Which is why, in a bid to recognise sustainability wherever it occurs, we comb the globe every year to find true influencers, leaders, entrepreneurs and innovators. To discover and showcase the genuine game-changers in a way that will educate and inspire others. So make a real difference to your sustainability journey. Enter the International Green Awards. Stand up and be recognised. Enter the leading international sustainability awards of 2011 and showcase your organisation. Are you a visionary organisation or individual looking for: An event to truly test your initiatives and achievements against the best organisations from around the globe ? An awards programme that is well respected and internationally recognised as the benchmark for global excellence ? An international platform to promote your sustainability success stories and receive the recognition you truly deserve ? An opportunity to share best practice with other influential companies and inspire them through your success ?
For further information and to enter this year’s INTERNATIONAL GREEN AWARDS please visit
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