Episode 9 on Building a Net Zero Future: Startup Innovations, Data and Energy Resilience

For today's show, we sat down with Dr. Stephen Lorimer, who is responsible for Clean Energy Cities at the Centre for Net Zero (Octopus Energy Group). We delved into the challenges and opportunities of transitioning to a #NetZero future. Three key takeaways from our conversation:

\ The power of startups: Startups are driving innovation in the #renewable #energy sector, including technologies that tap into excess solar energy and power electric vehicles. These initiatives are not only promoting clean energy but also revolutionising the way we use and distribute power.

\ Digitalisation is key: To effectively integrate renewable energy into the grid, digitalisation is crucial. From smart meters at the consumer level to back-end systems for the energy grid, leveraging digital solutions helps balance and optimise energy usage. The collection and analysis of #data play a central role in making informed decisions.

\ Building #sustainable cities: Cities have immense potential for clean energy generation and experimentation. By prioritising actions for energy transition and utilising data-driven frameworks, cities can accelerate their journey towards #decarbonisation. From creating local energy systems to collaborative solutions within neighborhoods, cities play a vital role in achieving our net zero goals.

If you have any questions, feedback or ideas where we can collaborate, please contact us using our website www.pt1.vc. Be sure to subscribe to the Futurebuilders podcast, so you never miss an episode, and follow us on LinkedIn for more insights.

Transcript

You are listening to the Future Builders podcast by PT One, where some of the leading voices in real estate innovation share their thoughts. PT One is creating the European venture capital platform for transformative real estate technologies and is all about investing and supporting future builders, innovative entrepreneurs from across Europe that tackle global challenges of our time, created by increasing scarcity of natural resources, affordable living space and skilled labor. Each week, your host, King Mama and his colleagues from the PT One team interview these future builders, whether they come from the startup or corporate side, to talk about their mission of shaping the future of the built world. For regulatory reasons, it is necessary to point out that this podcast is marketing communication and that investors interested to invest in PT One should make their investment decision based on the legal documentation to get started.


Stephen, we'd love to know more about your journey, especially into impact research in the field of energy resilience and net zero transition. And also, what does center for net zero do? Give us a little bit of that. Oh, gosh. My journey has been I've seen the built environment with so many different angles, which I think has kind of helped me with this perspective of what I'm working with now with energy in cities and urban net zero. I've worked as an urban designer, a regulator, a data scientist, a funder, a mentor to startups. And I really kind of started off as an urban designer out of architecture school, working on master plans in cities across the UK, ireland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium. And after a few years in this consulting role, I saw that the engineers, the surveyors, those who had the data, were really messing up my life. They were making terrible streets of guardrailing everywhere, they were making buildings with no windows, they were cost engineering things to the ends of the earth. But one of the groups I worked with, the building scientists, the engineers working in the energy sector, really kind of caught my eye. So at the time, I was working on the Ailesbury Estate Master Plan in South London and I was writing their sustainability strategy. And those who were in the UK back then might remember that in 1997, when Tony Blair won the general election, the very first place he went after the Victory rally was the Aylesbury state saying, our built environment is broken, we need to invest in it. It's been forgotten and it's been a kind of symbolic place ever since. After kind of working with them on new district heating systems or combined heat and power plants, I kind of wound up joining them. And I did a PhD in energy and buildings at University College London, just down the road from US. And while I was doing that, kind of saw that those who were working in innovation, entrepreneurs and those ideas were really starting to get attention in sustainable development. And I went over and actually did my postdoctoral research at Imperial business school as basically a precede funder for academics, kind of giving out 50 grand at a time to academics that had business ideas in sustainable development. Kind of everything from internet of things for urban gardening to drones that were being kind of going over kind of Africa for disaster relief and beaming the data from there in a network that was called the sustainable society network, which is now part of innovate UK. And I kind of went from that to kind of working for the Mayor of London to promote the tech sector generally focus on smart cities and the energy and transport systems and kind of really started assistance programs for the mayor for startups and bringing venture capital to them as well in programs that are now called the Civic Innovation Challenge or the Tech Invest program. And wrote two smart city strategies for Boris and Sadiq. I think they can go by the first name basis to most of your listeners during that time. And between that and when I came here at center for Net Zero, the national government had noticed the work that we were doing and brought me in to look at how they can be sharing data across all their national government departments to improve their services. Not just ones with cities, but anyone. Kind of the connection between those who are in benefits in the Department for Work and Pensions to those to the taxes they're paying to Revenue and Customs through to kind of how the Environment Department kind of regulates farming and the data that needs to flow from the food system into that. And of course the pandemic happened and they found out that I had worked in a spatial analysis profession before and brought me in to be the head of science for the contact tracing app that we all had in our pockets and told us to isolate and it's okay if you turn it off. But I decided to go back to Cities Energy, the built environment again and got brought into center for Net Zero, which is a lab which is founded by Octopus Energy to be in the founding team and really kind of pivoted some of our research in flexible heating, flexible charging of vehicles. The things that we really kind of know about into the digital retrofit of our streets, our spaces, our buildings to this kind of this moment for the electricity grid which is under the most strain in cities, obviously. And kind of how all the behavior change that needs to happen in a city which is set up to help people cooperate with each other, for the economy to work, for the transport system work, for the building sector to work in that time. And in center for Net Zero, we are an impact research lab and we really focus on that future energy system which is decarbonized and digitalized and decentralized, making that a reality. And because we own Biocopus Energy, which is a supplier in nine countries, it really gives us that insight into all the different human behaviors that go into the system and happen at scale. So it's not just me which is all supply driven from the top. It's really kind of seeing the demand side of how people actually use that once it's put into their hands. We run insights, proof of concept trials, experiments, develop models for that energy system and for someone like myself, working with our analysts and our data scientists, to get that in front of governments and policymakers, urban leaders, electricity system operators around the world, not just here in London to deliver that change. That's been my journey through the whole built environment into where we are now. What a fantastic journey. I just want to remind everyone that's listening one thing is that career moves are just never know. It's just like what Steve's Job says when you're done back the dots. They need to add up. They need to count. I think it's the perfect example of where you start and then where your passions and interests take you. Okay, now, great segue into the first question that we have is your work in researching the professor at different cities, urban consumer behaviors and investment structures, energy transition plans and all of that. What has been some of the key findings when you put together all the data points here? So the work that we do in cities is under kind of a program that I founded called Clean Energy Cities. And what it is is that it's a data driven framework that looks at the effect that different actions will make in different types of cities for a future energy system that leaders, investors, and others can really adopt to accelerate their local energy transitions. And this is just helping people prioritize, because people will be trying to do everything. And the answer to the energy transition is yes, you need to retrofit the buildings. You need to put in electric vehicle charging. Yes, you need to need to change people's behavior. Yes, you need to get the products in people's hands that enable them to do it easily. But how quickly? At what scale do you need to do it? And it's different from a big Global North city like I'm sitting here in London to Global South city that is rapidly growing both its infrastructure and its electricity system and its buildings, and maybe a mid sized city which is much more stable than what it's been, or even shrinking. There will be many places, especially in the west, which will be shrinking and managing that during that time. But their literacy system use will not be shrinking. That is definitely not going to be shrinking. But one of the reasons that we focused on cities is that they're the first to really be confronted by descendantialization energy and the decarbonization of energy from transporting around in tankers and through pipes of gas through to electricity wires, and how digitalization will need to manage that to be flexible and fair to everyone. And it really be driven by what's increasingly low cost generation storage and kind of use of digital technologies. And so I'll kind of unpack those a little bit. You need to be able to have kind of the wind blown and the sun to shine to produce the renewable energy that's out there. But you need to be able to have the demand match that supply in cities. And that's why we talk about smart heating, smart charging, using storage to be able to kind of use that supply when it's there and using digital technologies to go and make that happen, to match that within cities and having that happen at scale and also kind of set the scene a little bit as well with the buildings and transport sector, which kind of the big ticket items that we're talking about within cities. The International Energy Agency says that 30% of energy uses in buildings, about 30% 7% is in transport. Now, we have to remember that the world is still growing all the time, and we think about our own audiences of in the global north, where we have building regulations and codes, and they're going to get stronger. But the IEA also say that 70% of the floor space being built, 2050, is in places with don't have a code. They will have them. It is part of their commitments that they're going to be making towards sustainability and receiving kind of the 100 billion per year from that the World Bank is giving towards sustainability goals. It is going to be tied into things like building codes, but it's almost like it's a leapfrog. They're going from nothing to a digitalized world building code, which is going to be rapid, which is actually almost different than here, where we're going from a paper based kind of building code, in a way, into one that's digitalized. It's almost harder in the Western world, you could argue, in some cases. And the IEA also says that the use of technology can reduce the sector's energy used, even with that, by 30% by 2050, before you even get into installation or kind of the physical retrofit time, what we call the digital retrofit of places will be driving it. In the transport sector, electric cars are going to the sales of electric cars have doubled in the last year. Granted, a lot of it is driven by China, so it's not so visible within other parts of the world, but it is becoming more visible. And if we're on track to net zero, the IEA says that it's going to be 25% of all sales by 2030 from and so that that is the you know, that is a scale of change. We're we're we're talking about, you know, we're talking about now there's more electric you know, more electric cars are coming onto the streets of the world every week, the equivalent of what was happening every year ten years ago. So that's just going to happen again. But of course, you have to remember that the charging is a huge challenge. Electricity system, the image charge is a huge challenge. For example, we're used to kind of having nighttime time of use tariffs to incentivize people to heat their water at night if they have electric heater, or turn on a washing machine because it's high power. Electric vehicle charger is eight times more powerful than a washing machine. So that is the kind of challenge that that's out there. We analyze these 17 cities globally and kind of categorize them into five different typologies to reflect the scale and nature of the challenges that they face, kind of to meet that. Because like I said before, a place in the global south that has no building codes, it's going to have different needs. And the rapid growth in their built environment is totally different kind of needs or approaches you need in the next 515 years than you need within a place like Manchester or Birmingham or another kind of mid sized city in Western Europe, which could be a much more stable infrastructure. Or they've kind of built all their electricity infrastructure for the most part already, and be able to kind of take their urban structure, their consumer market as well. How much have you actually offered to the market to incentivize people to use electricity at different times? If you just have a flat rate, there's no incentive that's out there. But within Octopus Energy, for example, we've had for many years what we called an agile tariff, which is something that reflects the wholesale rate. There's limits to it. It doesn't reflect the whole wholesale rate because the typical wholesale rate in the UK at 05:00 p.m., or 06:00 p.m., which is the top of the market, is something like four to ten times the price at two in the morning, three in the morning. And of course, there's a limit how you want to expose people to that, but there is economists that are out there argue you should just expose people completely to these when that happens. And all these cities that we think that they need to have those policies for the flexibility of the urban environment, the investment that needs to go in and that consumer market in their climate action plans and bring together energy and tech, innovators, suppliers, investors, those who activate the consumer market. Architects, urbanists, urban planners, of course, the electricity system operators that are going to be responsible for delivering it and charging for the infrastructure that's out there. Because if we don't do this, if we don't have this there and we've tested this out in a couple of cities around the world saying, like, what happens in 2030 and at that peak hour? At 05:00 P.m., at 06:00 P.m., I think we tested in Paris and Buenos Aires that typical demand in a peak hour is triple in the winter, is double in the summer. What it is. Now, if people just habitually use electricity the same way they're using a gas boiler or using their or plugging in their car as soon as they come in in the evening, those types of behaviors that are there and so that will just create hundreds of dollars a year onto people's energy bills, regardless of the energy use, just to pay for the infrastructure that's out there. It's almost a tax which is regressive across everyone equally obviously everyone, you know, people are really hurting from these, from these as well. And that's why consumer flexibility within these cities is going to have a central role in energy policy. Because of this rapid increase use of electric vehicles in the context of Western Europe and America changing from boilers into heat. Pumps that are powered by electricity batteries, whether in the electric vehicles that are there or kind of inside the home, the use of smart thermostats, they all have that role in balancing that system and going from something which is very supply led, very kind of very kind of stuck on that side to one where one on the demand side. To briefly kind of go through what those types of cities are and what those model cities are. There's one type that we call the connected city and this is your big traditional Global North city. London, Paris, Tokyo, New York, all those other things are large populations and big agglomerations. They have a lot of non domestic and domestic sector, often quite close together, often the same block, which is why you find quite typically there's limited space that's available if you have big assets you want to put in the energy system, the land values, all those kinds of things are really difficult to do that. But you already have, because of the income levels, high levels of electric vehicle penetration or potential that's out there, high levels of people using digital services. So they're very comfortable with using it. They're going to use apps for everything. They're first places that ride sharing went into tech savvy. They're the first place all these different products had went into. They're very used to it. And there are cities that they have the capacity to have carbon reduction policies in place and kind of ways to use it as well. So the first ones have a really detailed environment strategy, climate action plan, those types of things. And you'll have the next time we call the free market city, which kind of goes across the Global North and Global South, the more emerging economies in the Global South and Global North cities which don't really pay much attention to regulation really, that's one of the kind of things that's out there. You have larger populations in cities that are kind of geographically isolated from other parts of their country and they often will have land uses that are very separated from each other. And that's something that's important in our work on cities because you have domestic sector and non domestic sector buildings that demand energy at quite different times. And the difficulty that often happens within electricity system networks is that if they have too much of one land use that is demanding electricity one time, it's really hard for them to be resilient when that demand, that system resilience goes down. But you still have high prevalence of people who really know digital services. There's a lot of innovation in electricity markets already because governments and these are places that are typically like Singapore or Bengal or in India or Los Angeles in California, I know people are surprised when I say Los Angeles. They think they're the whole leaders and pushing on regulation in sustainability, but they're not pushing as leaders in urban development. It's a big difference between that. But these are places where the tools at your disposal has been innovation in electricity markets or putting time of use tariffs in or trying different policies. So they're used to trying to get startups and different ideas that are out there. And I'll give even an example later about blockchain being used in service announcements and that sort of thing that's happened in California so far. The next part is found in the Global South and there are places like Buenos Aires or Johannesburg or Nairobi that these are kind of we call them the scalable city. They are rapidly growing, not just their built environment, but their wealth. Their electricity network is struggling to catch up with it. These are places where we're talking about those 70% of buildings that are that are that are put in place in 2050. Maybe they have some building regulations that are out there but there's going to be kind of a lot of building out during that time. They're usually in places where there's a lot of potential for renewable energy, especially photovoltaics to a later extent, winds because of the parts of the world they typically will be found. And there's plenty of land available around the city because there's less regulation around urban development. But actually what you found is that there's little kind of innovation in the retail market inside these places, the energy market. But it's interesting, there's actually been a lot of evolution in the wholesale market in these places because they've had to manage rapid growth really quickly. So for example, in Buenos Aires they have a different wholesale environment than the whole rest of the country because of the pressure on the grids. And that results into the wholesale rates going up. Everyone is given a rate. We're saying like, you have a whole year and you have a whole year that's out there. The first few kilowatt hours you use this price, the next one, this price, the next one we call it almost like a use of use tariff which basically it only exists in this country basically tried to kind of keep electricity, use down something which is manageable, but using prices of blunt instruments. So unfortunately, those who have the least will feel the pain the most and be the most sensitive to the prices, as we found in the energy economics literature that's out there. And the next two types of cities typically found in Western Europe and America or North America and Western Europe, we call it like the distributed city and the available city. And there's differences between them. Distributed cities are places where they've already made a lot of investment within and around the city in renewable energy already. So this is typically a place like Vancouver or Stockholm, which has a lot of hydro, which is just nearby from the lakes or the ocean that's there. There'll be places like Medellin in Colombia which has made similar investments and also kind of done it on wind, and Amsterdam as well, which has done it with offshore wind, which is just kind of there, thereabouts and nearby they have kind of small but kind of really increasing adoption of electric vehicles. They have some digital skills that are there. They have some innovative retail tariffs to maximize that consumption that's there. They're a little bit more spread out. They're kind of one type that's there. And the available city is places where there are also smaller cities that have denser cores. And there are places that we took data from, such as Sydney or Manchester or Valencia or Nont. They're spread out on the edges, but they have kind of denser cores on the inside that have domestic and non domestic users that are there. And they typically will have further field away wind farms, solar farms that are pumping out a large amount of electricity, usually bypassing the city. And that's something which is a goal for them, is actually how to actually take advantage of that kind of resource that's out there. And because they are in developed countries, they have the greatest innovation in retail tariffs out of any of the types of cities. And they also have a very high degree of digital skills, maybe not to the extent of the connected city, but pretty high as well. So that's kind of the types of places that we worked on. And when we go kind of further into the podcast, we'll touch on examples of kind of the immediate actions that those cities can take by 2025. That the powers that they have in hand with land use transport systems using their own kind of resources that they have there in regeneration programs or kind of use of government grants that they have for the energy sector right now to kind of assist home property owners right now with renewable energy or community energy to kind of really come more visionary things that we need to think about. 2040. Those are the things that cities don't have, the powers have right now. And they typically need the national government taxation system, building those kinds of incentives that's there the regulation of the energy market, the way the electricity grid interacts with its users and the market as well. So gathering all those together and bringing all those pieces together to essentially manage energy congestion of the future that is coming, we've had 50 years, 80 years maybe, of cities managing traffic congestion. We need them to take all that expertise and capacity and apply it to the energy system. I totally stole that from the deputy Mayor of Amsterdam who said that to me a few months ago. So thank you, Marika, for that. But it was an amazing kind of way of phrasing. Yeah, what a great analogy. Wow, Stephen, this is such interesting, interesting research.


Stephen. It's amazing to hear your passion and your knowledge about this topic. I just have three questions, if I may, actually to ask. To cover some of the areas you were talking about, the first ones on building codes itself is something you mentioned kind of towards the start of your introduction. About your research, your findings from Tentative Net Zero, which is you mentioned that 70% of building floor condition area additions will be taking place in areas that either don't have or have limited building energy codes. Can you kind of just explain to us, and for the audience out there who maybe aren't so familiar with building energy codes, what are they essentially? What's required to get?


Oh, well, the kind of ratings that we have. So I'll give ones that are examples from the UK that we know about. Building codes typically will go through a building's fabric their insulation, the equipment that they have within that, and they'll make an estimation of how many kilowatt hours per year is going to be consumed by that unit, let's call it, because it's not really a building, it's per unit. Or hereditament, as they call it in the commercial sector, which is the most bizarre name I've heard in a long time. And in the UK, you're typically in a home, you're going to be talking about something going from A to G and A to C are seen as good and passable, and D onwards are seen as not. In the commercial sector, they use the same sort of scale, but by 2030, only A to B are going to be kind of lettable over that time. It's either 2030 or 2032. I can't remember which one it is. But of course, in the future it may not be the total number of kilowatt hours per year, which is important. It's when they're being used, it's when the sun is shining and when the wind is blowing. There are things that we're very interested within center for net zero in. What are those changes that need to happen which say we gave the big ticket examples before of charging the car and heating the home. We don't mind if you use more electricity to heat your home. But if you're turning up the temperature at 02:00 p.m. When the sun is shining so you can be at the right temperature at 05:00 p.m., we want that to be cheaper and more affordable and better for the environment, rather than judging everything on how many kilowatt hours per year it's being used. So that's where the digital part of the system comes in, because you can't do that kind of estimation without knowing the equipment and the technologies that are being used to automate that shift from the peak hours. That could be the dirtiest for the use of charging your car or heating your home to ones that are better for you. On the electric vehicle side, we have a product within Octopus Energy which is called Intelligent Octopus, which is testing out with drivers to automate their charging. They get given three half hour blocks at any time between 09:00 P.m. And 07:00 A.m.. They tell us what their preference is, how charged you want to be at 07:00 A.m., that's fine. But then that day before, we say, here are the half hours you're being given. Because if you have a cheap rate and everyone turns on at midnight, for example, you just create another peak and the reinforcement costs and the cost to everyone and the potential for people to be just turned off and not being allowed to charge their car, which is going to come in, and consumer dissatisfaction will come in and electric vehicles will not sell because of that dissatisfaction as well. And so, in a neighborhood, you can see how you are taking turns with the other people on your streets to be able to be able to use the capacity that's there. Because ten years ago, when I was first working with the electricity grid and the sector kind of sitting with what's now UKPN inside their control room, they would say, we know when there's two electric vehicles on the street, because there's more than that, it blows up the transformer. That's how sensitive the system has been. It's more resilient than it so that's something be very important in the future. And that's why, for example, in our findings that we had in our work on our report, which is called Clean Energy, cities didn't name check that over and over again. If you look in center for net zero. That's why we said, for example, that the number and capacity of kind of assets within the built environment in different cities will vary quite a bit between kind of those who are the most dense where you really have. To have many and kind of have that capacity that's out there to those who are kind of those who are more mid sized cities and have a bit more capacity with their electricity system where you can start to do collective solutions together to have larger batteries or larger solar panels that are paired up with buildings because they'll need to. Have those energy assets that are both generating and demanding be able to be paired up with them. And of course, in a density with so many of these things, say in an apartment building where you have many, many electric vehicles that are charging many, many homes that are demanding heat at the same time, you need to start to kind of pair that with that generation that's there.


Just systems. You talked about the importance of systems to collect the data and also to make smart decisions when it comes to balancing the grid. And you talked about some of those front end systems that can exist sort of at the consumer home level for smart meters and also the back end systems as well, that maybe the energy grid, the ESO or the entire kind of infrastructure needs to better adopt as well, especially with the kind of availability and greater demand of electricity. I just want to ask, from a startup perspective, do you envision these system innovations, let's say, to be really coming from startups or do you envision them coming more from the kind of the energy corporates or even the governments itself to be able to implement them?


Yeah, I think in different kind of city situations that you'll have to focus things. And there are definitely technologies that could come from startups. For example, one example that we have from kind of big global cities is an idea that because in the commercial sector, so much kind of excess photovoltaic energy that's coming from installations that they're doing that actually it's curtailed and has nowhere to go. And actually, how can we get those who have electric vehicles that tap into that excess energy? And we really need kind of those who those are actually good at exchanging data between so many different groups. For example, because especially in the summertime, this can go up to a very large number of kilowatt hours, which is never being used. Like the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the US. Said this, which is called instantaneous curtailment during any particular hour can be over half of a city's renewable energy power. In these times and in a dense urban area. It's kind of a shame that these things go away in other kinds of cities. Cities that we call free market cities where they don't do that much regulation on the grid. So a place like California or kind of Bangalore and India was another example of a city that did that, or Singapore, that kind of really putting the information as alerts into the hands of people to get kind of automation to happen or getting or even manual things to happen in the past. And in California, they've actually hired kind of a blockchain company to actually create digital identities to protect the data and make sure that my own home's responses to those signals from the grid aren't recorded or kind of paired up with don't. Because one of the concerns that are out there is privacy. The idea that if you are agreeing for a system to turn down the thermostat of your home, that every response is going to get pulled back into the system. And you'll have a whole history of every time you responded feels uncomfortable to people because we surveyed people across in the UK and found that about 30% of people said they didn't want any kind of remote automation of how they used electricity for charging and heating because they felt invaded. For example. It's out there. There's also on the financing side Ernsting, I've found that in the UK there's only about 1200 qualified heat pump installers and about 10,000 are going to be required by 2025. And in many kind of smaller sized cities that we find in Western Europe or the UK. For example, kind of like Stockholm or Amsterdam. We need to install many of these at the time that they really need to finding kind of those who can build the platforms that can start to match those installers to the demand that's out there and basically have a better customer experience for that. Because that's one of the things that we've gotten. I was at Cop a couple of years ago and Rock Wool was on the panel and their message was the user experience of renovating properties is so bad it is slowing down the energy transition and that's something which is going to be very important in the past, very important as well. And also on the fintech side in what we call available cities, places like Nolan to Valencia or Manchester or even Sydney that have a lot of renewable energy which is in solar fires, wind farms or even kind of distributed nearby already really kind of those are going to be pioneers for the financing of storing that electricity for private owners or buildings that's there. Because right now kind of Solar Choice Australia, which has kind of started to really kind of work on this, found that the return on investment is kind of eight to 13 years, depending on the system used or the location used. And for most people that is just not enough. And what are the financial instruments that could be used in the fintech sector to be able to increase that as well? So those are some examples that you can get from the fintech sector or even kind of that matchmaking of installers with those who actually need it even from the ed tech sector like trying to get that training going as well. So it's really kind of thinking about those transaction and platform products that can increase things in the future. So it's not all about kind of software as a service. And I wanted to emphasize that there's a whole wide range of ways that startups and investors can make changes. Stephen, that's a lot of information and then we spoke about so many interesting things but one thing that was a repetitive theme amongst so many other fields that we spoke about is cities and different cities across the globe trying out different ways to sort of balance and optimize the way they consume energy and transmit energy. So within the UK, do you think there's a particular city or town that's optimized for clean energy consumption? I mean, statistically, if you're going to just say the raw data that's out there, inverness is way far away from everyone else for one particular reason is that in Scotland they have onshore wind and they produced about 4000 gigawatt hours in 2021. To put that in perspective, that's 3% of the UK's total renewable energy generation is just in and around that city. So it shows that for those who want to argue about kind of can cities live with onshore wind as something which is a positive, there's an example that's there. And to give it in perspective as well, the biggest kind of local authority for producing solar power is Cornwall, because it's the southernmost, which kind of makes sense, and that's only about 500 gigawatts that's there. But PV will do a lot of heavy, most of the heavy lifting within cities. So that still shows the potential that's there. And we can't just kind of pipe down electricity from faraway wind farms. We already kind of discussed that bit as well because the transmission costs are like 20% that's there. And there are places where there's cheaper land and grid capacity that it's easier for them to do it. So the places that went through the Industrial Revolution and Deindustrialization, Manchester, Wigan, Birmingham, Newcastle, the list of those kinds of cities go on that's there. So those are places where you can experiment and put in clean energy much more quickly. And then there are the places that like London or Bath or kind of Oxford or Cambridge or places that didn't go into the Industrial Revolution in the same sort of way or kind of their growth has far kind of outstripped that legacy that's there because they don't have the electricity capacity that's there as well. So you say it's a national government. That's why we kind of said there's different typologies of places that's there. That's why we came up with one type of city that we call the available city, because a place like Manchester, where the capacity is available, the kind of generation that's around is available. It's about kind of grabbing it and using it and putting it into storage or experimenting before it goes on to the rest of the network that's there. And that's different from kind of a place in the global south which is about to roll out renewable energy in a huge, massive way and do it at scale. And that's where we took data from Buenos Aires and Johannesburg and Nairobi and those places to try to see they are kind of building up their electricity system right now at scale because they're growing so quickly and doing the same with renewable energy. And so one example that we found, which was amazing, kind of we kind of said for those kinds of cities that you really need to build kind of that rapid transformation from centralized kind of coal plants or natural gas plants to those with solar, wind, battery and kind of build the data platforms to make that work then. And just like a couple of months ago, Sariti in Johannesburg in South Africa said, we're just investing 700 million to take out 220 coal and put in 150 of solar and 70 of wind, just replacing the plants altogether. Which was those are the kinds of big, bold actions. But you have to kind of back it up with the digitalization side of things because you can't just pipe it into the grid and expect it to just work exactly the same way. And you need to build those connections between those who are building the system and the city, who is actually managing all the consumers and convincing them to actually be participants in this system.


Can I maybe ask about the role, your opinion on the role of private solar panels? So I know the kind of citing a source from Bayes, the UK government's Energy Department report from 2021 saying I think less than 3% of all sort of eligible private house roofs in the UK actually had a solar panel fitted onto them. So just from your research, what's your kind of opinion about solar panels? Sorry? Increasing the adoption of solar panels on roofs. From a kind of return on investment.


Perspective, I think that different types of cities will have different emphasis for this. It's something which should benefit from all cities. But for example, we had said in our 2040 actions that we suggested for cities, for kind of what we call a free market city, a place like Singapore, Bangalore, Los Angeles, those are places where they can really focus effort into particular zones or even microgrids and areas for generation from rooftops that are there. It's both because there's a business opportunity for the kind of use of excess EV that's there. A place like California is actually one of the highest for what we call curtailment. About 7% of their total photovoltaic generation isn't used right now. That's there. And of course, on a point basis, on a single point in time that goes much, much higher. And inside of what we call the scalable city, a place like Buenos Aires or Johannesburg or Nairobi. Those are places where you can start to build virtual power plants and build aggregator, really build the support of the growth of aggregators that can sign up many, many people that have a PV onto their roof and actually make it an asset that a purchase power agreement can be done with a building owner or a corporate that wants to invest or even just be part of what we call the dispatch. A dispatchable kind of part of the energy system. So instead of asking a natural gas plant to fire up and put energy in, as you might kind of plan to do a day ahead, the energy market isn't instantaneous. They all kind of tell people what's going to tell all the generators what they need from them a day ahead based on the weather or any kind of hackters. Instead they ask a group of people that's distributed through a city or a neighborhood of a city, we want your solar energy because we know it's going to be sunny day, we know how much you're going to probably use and we're going to go and buy it from you. That kind of product of building aggregators. Those companies are going to start to kind of multiply and multiply in these places that are about to build a huge amount of energy that's out. And in places in the west, like one place that we call a distributed city, a place like Vancouver or Medellin or Amsterdam or Stockholm, where the wealthy will be having a lot of PB put onto their roofs because they have that capital to invest that's there. But there are those who are very left behind of having access to capital, kind of they're transient or the payback periods don't work for them. Building those kind of almost joint venture vehicles for energy sharing that cities organize between those that are kind of on benefits or on their book sets there and getting them to have the benefit from those who have the money and resources to put that on there. So how do they build ways for their taxation and benefit system to make that kind of sharing and almost making it a joint venture between those who can afford the capital and those who can't. So those are kind of examples of ways that we think kind of over the next 15 years different types of cities are going to be focusing on these different types of products that will have a benefit for them in the future.


That's really interesting. And we'll be sure to link, put a web link to your report essentially in our podcast notes as well so anyone can read through those over time. I think we've only got time to make one more question left. So Jayjeri, do you want to go ahead and take that one?


Sure. This is going to be the rapid fire section because I think it's a useful question that we all can sort of practice at home. So what would be your tip to reduce one's own personal carbon footprint? I was thinking about the audience that you have. Everyone's very busy. I don't know, maybe even like half of the people outsource their laundry. I don't know. We'd like to keep ourselves busy but I would say find as many ways to outsource it. And if you have low carbon technologies to use smart heating or smart charging to actually kind of use that as well. So I mentioned before, intelligent octopus, go sign up to an energy plan. You plug in your car when you get home. It's just going to do it for you. It's going to be charged in the morning. You probably even forget about it during that time. Sign up to a plan where you have a smart thermostat that turns on when you have the lowest carbon report from your national grid. Those kinds of links of data that are out there when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Just find ways to outsource that because we don't have time to pay attention to pay attention to this. We know from people's behavior change, from the literature on behavior change that after two weeks you lose momentum of manually turning down your thermostat and turning it up again because you know that it's cold, et cetera. It only lasts people for so long. So, yeah, outsource it, don't work so hard. That's perfect. It's perfect advice. Just one last question. Given that I see you're a voracious reader, I'd love to know if there's one book or research or report that you have in mind that's a must read for anyone that wants to know more about this topic. What would that be? Oh, my God. Of course, I would say, like, read our reports, clean energy cities, that's out there. But that's a really good question that I reflect on. There's so many that are out there, right? Mean, you could go to the classic ones that are kind of put out by the International Energy Agency or the National Grid Electricity System Operator on the scenarios that they see for 2030, 2050, that's out there. And here are the choices that we'll have to make for the buildings and transport sector and really what kind of the net zero scenario means for the change in that sector in the future. So dork out on those. Well, thank you so much, Stephen. What a fantastic episode. What a rich conversation. Thank you so much for your time. You've been very generous with it.


Thanks, Stephen. Thank you so much again, I'm sure.


I mean, after this recording, I'll get a link to all the research papers that you've mentioned and leave them down in the show notes. So anybody who's listening to this can also go look at it and deep dive. Thank you so much for this. I think we did a really good job by re recording this bit because it was much more clearer and then very well illustrated. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you. Have a great day. Thank you so much for your time.

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