The potential for energy conserving capital equipment – forty years on

I was shocked to be reminded that that 40 years have elapsed since I finished my PhD at the University of Stirling. The thesis title was the rather ponderous, ‘The potential for energy conserving capital equipment in UK industry’, and the general research objective was to test the thesis of Gerald Leach et. al., who in 1979 had published ‘A low energy strategy for the UK’. That book, like the parallel but better known ‘Soft energy paths’ by Amory Lovins in the US, published in 1976, received much criticism and opprobrium from the energy establishment, which was of course heavily supply side dominated at the time. The government forecasts had UK energy demand growing dramatically, by 64% between 1976 and 2000. Looking back it turned out that reality turned out much closer to Leach’s scenarios than those of the energy establishment. (See ‘Surprise, you are living in a low energy future…(almost)’). Economic growth pretty much matched the forecasts but energy use hardly changed.

I was fortunate in many ways as a series of seemingly ‘random’ events took me to Stirling after a year of working doing energy audits. I moved to Stirling which has one of the most beautiful campuses in the world in late 1981. I didn’t think it was such a good idea when the first winter arrived with a shock, it was one of the coldest UK winters on records, with temperatures down to minus 15^oC. The loch on campus froze over (see photo).

Having taken an unusual interdisciplinary degree about energy I continued my inter-disciplinary approach and my PhD was funded by a joint committee of the Science and Engineering Research Council and the Social Sciences Research Council. When doing a PhD the student-supervisor relationship is critical and my supervisor, Keith Jacques, was brilliant in many ways but eccentric. He had been an industrial chemist, developed some new materials and then somehow ended up as a school teacher and then University lecturer. He introduced me to soft systems thinking which was embedded into my research and I think has influenced nearly every project or job I have done ever since. For anyone not familiar with soft systems thinking check out ‘Systems Thinking, Systems Practice’ by Peter Checkland.

My work at Stirling was within the Technological Economics Research Unit (TERU), smaller but similar to Sussex’s SPRU, but with more emphasis on management of innovation and technology. A condition of doing my PhD was to take the taught part of the MSc Technological Economics so I spent my first 9 months in Stirling in a class of 12 students from 8 countries, (which was more unusual back then than it would be now), taking MSc courses similar to those on an MBA including Business Strategy, Operations Management, Statistics, Capital Budgeting, Accounting, Marketing etc and working on my PhD part time. Like most PhD students there were many, many times when I wondered what I was doing and considering going back to the world of work.

As my PhD evolved we settled on four industries to focus on – the ‘boozy’ ones of brewing, distilling, malting and dairies. The brewing industry had, and probably still has, the best industry wide records on energy performance and there is a close link between brewing and the study of energy. Joule’s discovery of the fundamental law that energy is always conserved was based on experiments undertaken in his father’s brewery. Sir Oliver Lyle’s classic work, ‘Efficient use of steam’, published in 1946, chose a brewery to demonstrate heat balances. Opening with the statement “The input of a brewery is cold water. The output is cold beer“, he then proceeded to examine why it is that a product which is as cold when it comes out of the brewery, as the water of which it is largely composed was when it went in, needs more energy than just the “necessary push to start things off”.

Much of my time was spent visiting many sites within those sectors with a strong emphasis on brewing – tough work but someone had to do it. You have to remember that in those days a) there were far more breweries than there are now, (excluding micro-breweries which hardly existed then) and b) it was not unusual to drink alcohol at lunch time even in production sites. I also spent an extended time working closely with the engineering team at Ind Coope Alloa which was a leader in energy management – led by the engineering manager Ray Banton. There I discovered that their innovative heat recovery system had been incorrectly installed and commissioned, and the team quickly put it right.

Much of my work focused on barriers to achieving the potential for energy efficiency, and how they could be overcome, something I still spend a lot of time thinking about and working on.

It also emphasized that many estimates of potential for energy efficiency under-estimated the specificity of each situation and the need to adapt a technology rather than just adopt it. Even off-the-shelf equipment has to be engineered to fit the specific application. For any particular technology, site specific technical, financial or management constraints will apply – even in something seemingly so simple as low energy lighting, which in those days did not of course include LEDs. This focus on the specificity and the importance of incremental technological change was recognised by the external examiner, the late Professor Chris Freemen of SPRU, as a major advance in innovation literature as well as energy efficiency literature. All too often talk of innovation focuses on the large, major changes as opposed to the less exciting, but often more impactful incremental changes and improvements.

Of course much has changed in four decades. First of all we have moved from talking about ‘energy conservation’ to ‘energy efficiency’. Secondly we have realized the threat of climate change and reduction of emissions has become a major motivator of investing in improving energy efficiency. There was no mention of carbon emissions reduction in the debate at all back then. We have had huge technological change, particularly around computing which was in its infancy in the 1980s, (I think my PhD was one of the last to be typed by a secretary as the University had only just adopted state of the art ‘word processors’). However, the fundamentals have not changed, the potential for cost-effectively improving energy efficiency remains similar in scale and energy efficiency is still insufficiently recognized in energy policy. Reducing energy costs remains important. Reducing reliance on imported energy is just as important. As I was reviewing some of the text for an update to my book ‘Energy Efficiency’ I thought I would explore some of the conclusions of my PhD and update them for today’s world in a mini-series of blogs to follow.