Before we start, it would be helpful if you could explain what good energy means.
For me, good energy is really about having a practical interaction with climate change. In the commercial sense, we give people the opportunity to choose a 100% renewable electricity supply.
You are reading: Books about renewable energy
The mission statement on your website says you want to change the energy market and help the UK achieve a future powered exclusively by renewable energy.
That sounds like a tall order, do you think it can be done?
yes, if we decide that’s what we want to do, it’s completely doable. it is not outside the realms of possibility. if i said i want the uk to be 10% renewable, that wouldn’t really create a seismic shift in thinking about how to get there. therefore, unless you consider the extreme position, you will not understand what systematic change must occur.
so what is it that personally made you so passionate about this?
I started out as a scientist and for part of my physics degree I studied meteorology. it was that background on climate change and understanding of the big problem that got me involved. then i went to work in brussels on energy policy, and when i came back to the uk i felt that governments and scientists were leaving people out of the conversation and also leaving them out of the equation. everybody runs out and tries to negotiate big treaties with the un, and overlooks the people who really count. they don’t understand that you should take them with you.
Your first choice is solar power by ian mcewan, who sets out to put climate change issues into a more everyday setting through a novel.
i met ian mcewan as part of the corporal’s farewell program. That’s an organization created by a lovely man named David Buckland, who is a photographer and an artist. he wanted to create a social response to climate change. In other words, he wanted people like Ian Mcewan to mingle with the scientists and find out more about what was going on. So he took a lot of people, including Ian McEwan, Philip Pullman, and Jarvis Cocker, to the North Pole along with some scientists, so they could see what was going on for themselves. Ian took what he saw and put it into a novel. he wanted to put some great scientific ideas into everyday language.
Much of our world revolves around creative media. we watch television, we watch movies and it is a very important part of our society. David Buckland wanted climate change to be part of that dialogue. A lot of people find it very difficult to write about climate change because it doesn’t lend itself to comedic effect, and it’s not something people want to write about very often, but ian nailed it.
what do you think of the actual novel, because it has had mixed reviews?
I thought it was really funny. It was an interesting take on perceptions of some of the big issues between society and scientists, and the fact that we as a society don’t really understand what scientists do. scientists are these objects that are winning nobel prizes, but not many of us really appreciate that they are also human beings. in ian’s book you have physicist michael beard, who was once brilliant, won a nobel prize early in his career and has been sailing ever since. very often a scientist makes a brilliant discovery and then you become part of a government and funding system where you are no longer a scientist. It’s a bit like teachers, who move further and further away from the classroom as they progress.
The novel begins when Michael Beard has lost his scientific thread, and there is a rather strange death at the beginning when someone falls and commits suicide in his house. he then he steals a scientific idea from the dead man, and the rest of the book is an unraveling of the professor’s personality and this idea of solar technology that he has stolen. Part of the book is set in the arctic, where Ian left with Cape Farewell. everything has the humor of ian mcewan.
Your next option focuses on the world of business. Joel Bakan’s Corporation explores how one of the most powerful commercial institutions has managed to hijack governments and let greed take control.
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I read this book over the holidays and found it interesting, because I hadn’t really thought about the history of the corporation. It goes back to the bubble in the South Seas, where the first investors were very unprotected. then a lot of legislation was put in place to protect shareholders and make sure their interests were always served. As a result, it ended up with corporations where the corporate structure is really only there to protect the shareholder and doesn’t take anything else into account.
what caught my attention is the comparison with how society is governed. for example, if you live in a Christian society, the ten commandments are reflected in the law: you shall not kill, you shall not steal, but those kinds of social norms are not reflected in the corporate structure.
presumably powerful and selfish corporations make your life difficult in your search for good energy.
It’s interesting because, as a relatively strong CEO, when I pitch my ideas to shareholders, I always talk about the company’s mission and what we’re here to do, but that’s not enshrined in my company’s legislation. It’s not naturally enshrined in any business that they’re there for a purpose, and I think it’s a really interesting concept for us if companies should be responsible, for example, in their impact on the environment.
At the moment that is something the government legislates on.
yes, but it is not part of your responsibility as a company. we have corporate social responsibility as a concept, but it is too vague. what I found fascinating about the book is that there are people who go to work every day and do things in their jobs, because of shareholder returns and because they do it for the company, that they would never consider doing in their private lives.
Do you think that, after all the global economic problems, corporations are weakening and a new system of values, perhaps more ethical, is being imposed?
I think there is room for a new system of moral values to be established for corporations. and the general population, who have to rescue the banking systems, definitely feel that representation of the people or some representation of the environment should be a key part of that.
next is david mackay’s sustainable energy, without the hot air, which explores the various solutions to the problem of climate change.
The best thing about David’s book is that it simplifies everything. so many people in the energy market make it really complicated so that no one can really understand it. what david did was boil it down to some simple numbers overall in terms of how much energy people use in their homes, how much energy people use in their cars, what we use as a society and what that’s going to look like in the next five, 10 or 20 years. if we want to provide energy from alternative sources, where can that come from? what are the resources at the moment in the uk and what are the possibilities? this is fantastic work to get people thinking about this in a broader discussion, rather than just between scientists and energy specialists. expanded it to many people who might find this type of information difficult to collate for themselves.
what kind of policies did you come up with?
He came up with six or seven possible outcomes of what you could do. now he works in the department of energy and climate change, and they have created a way for you to create your own model of the future based on the work he did in the book. We’ve done it with good energy, looking at what you’d need to do and what technologies you’d need to introduce to make the UK 100% [renewable] by 2050.
and what kind of things would you need to do?
involves changes at uk energy at every stage of the process, from grid management to investment, and from research and development to transportation. the answer will be further electrification of all our networks, which in turn will push electricity demand to at least double current levels. Satisfying this increased demand for renewable sources will be more than an objective, it will be a necessity.
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your upcoming book too big to fail by andrew ross sorkin makes you wonder how bankers could fit into all this.
I wanted to read this book because I really didn’t understand how the global economy managed to get into the current mess. suddenly the banking system was collapsing and everyone was talking about subprime mortgages. and it was fascinating to read this story of greed, egos and disregard for the process. there were all these stops and checks to prevent things like this from happening, but the key players had ruled them all out, which was unbelievable. he was so arrogant.
so where do wall street bankers fit in with clean energy and climate change?
one of the things that is really important for any business is that you need to get money from somewhere to do it. the insight I got was that the money markets seem happy to run some very high risk strategies if they think they can make big money, and they did on paper for many years. and, in fact, we need huge amounts of money to be able to meet the renewable targets that we are talking about. so it got me thinking, what are the issues within banking, who are they talking about, what do they think and might they be interested in us as a market?
Were you trying to get into their minds to persuade them to invest in you?
Part of it was that, but it’s also about how we frame renewable energy in a way that it can be an alternative to the high-risk market. I’m not suggesting that anyone wanted to repeat the risks that were taken there, but obviously people were happy to take a certain amount of risk. what we have to do is persuade the bankers that renewable energy is not a high risk strategy, and it was interesting to read the book to see what the methods were to do that.
Do you think renewable energies could be lucrative for bankers as a market?
definitely. renewable energy is fascinating because it is a very long-term asset. Right now, pension funds can buy property, which isn’t working very well at the moment, or invest in stocks, which isn’t a very good bet either. so I think maybe they should invest in renewable energy projects, which will happen in the future out of necessity.
I’m intrigued to see how his latest book, The Cup of Hemlock: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life by Bettany Hughes, fits in with its theme.
I know that sounds pretty weird, but it does. I went to the Hay Festival and I heard Bettany Hughes talk about this and then I read his book. It’s very detailed about the life of Socrates and where he grew up, and it’s a very practical book in that it discusses the world around him rather than his philosophy. the heart of the book revolves around his death with the cup of hemlock and his criticism of the emerging democracy of the time. Socrates was basically saying that he wasn’t sure that the democracy they were trying to sell us was really the way to go.
What was really interesting was that he wasn’t so concerned with democracy itself but with the way they were doing it. they were creating huge amounts of wealth in one place and forcing everyone to become a democracy. It made me think that maybe Socrates was one of the first environmentalists when he began to see that greed was not the best way to go.
Although it was sold under the guise of a democracy, using a lot of resources and gathering a lot of wealth from different places didn’t really make the Athenians any happier. and they ended up building huge walls to protect themselves and prevent other people from coming to steal their wealth. it’s really interesting to go back in time and look at alternative societies and democracies and where they succeeded and where they failed.
obviously there are parallels with what is happening in this century.
yes. I know it’s not as straightforward as my other options, but it’s important to me. We talk about growth, but what we don’t talk about is shrinking the environment we use to increase that growth.
What do you consider to be the greatest threat to the environment and how can we contribute our grain of sand as individuals?
Our use of high carbon energy is the main problem. the recession has had the welcome effect, if you can put it that way, of reducing the overall amount of energy we use, but we still use a lot of fossil fuel-based energy. people go around saying that many small actions do not make a difference, but in reality they do. Many of us are starting to feel the pinch when it comes to gas, but we still manage to get in plenty of trips.
Another important area is our homes. we all want to be warm and have light and many of us want to watch television. all those things use energy. One way to help with that is to understand how much power we’re using in the first place. Everyone can get a handheld meter, plug it into their home, and start seeing how much energy they use. insulation is another key area. we have quite a few windows in our house. I just put double glazing in two of them and little by little I am going to save and work on the whole house, because it makes a big difference. you don’t have to do it all at once, but you can do it slowly over time. put curtains over doors to reduce drafts, and watch your ceiling insulation. Most people don’t have enough insulation in their ceiling. even if you’ve already put down one layer, you should actually put up two or even three layers. These are very simple things you can do. It takes time and money, but all of those things in the long run will save people money and improve their impact on the environment.
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