15: Get smart: data and local net zero
What role does “smart” have to play in a local, net zero transition? How crucial is data? What are the key issues to address? The team are joined by Stephen McArthur, Professor of Intelligent Energy Systems at Strathclyde, and Gavin Starks, founder of Icebreaker One, a company working to unlock the value of data to deliver net-zero.
Episode Transcript
[Music flourish]
Matt: Hello, I’m Dr Matt Hannon.
Rebecca: Hello, I’m Dr Rebecca Ford and welcome to Local Zero.
[Music flourish]
Matt: So from smart meters to smart homes, smart cities and smart grids, this episode will focus on unpacking the smart side of our net zero energy journey. We will explore why data and digitalisation have become such hot topics and being smart about how we use data and how we design the digital infrastructure that underpins this is critical for delivering a better energy system. We’ll also consider some of the possible issues and challenges facing the industry.
Rebecca: And we’ll talk about what this actually means for households and communities; the sorts of data that they might be generating or using and the benefits it could bring to them, whether or not they should be worrying about who might be able to access their data and what they can do to get involved.
Matt: So today, we’ll hear from two people who are at the forefront of data in the energy sector. The first is Stephen McArthur who is Professor of Intelligent Energy Systems at the University of Strathclyde and Head of the EnergyREV Research Consortium that Beck and I work with.
Rebecca: We’ll also be joined by Gavin Starks, CEO of Icebreaker One, a company working to unlock the value of data and use it to help deliver net zero.
[Music flourish]
Matt: As always, we want to hear from you. Please tell us what you think of the podcast, leave reviews and also ask questions or suggest any topics for future episodes. As always, you can tweet us and actually now, we’re at a new handle which is @LocalZeroPod.
[Music flourish]
Okay, so introducing the award-winning Fraser Stewart. Fraser, how are you after what can only have been a fantastic and rather exciting night for you?
Fraser: It was an exciting night, thanks very much, Matt. For listeners that don’t know and didn’t see my news on Twitter, I won the Scottish Renewables Award for young, green professionals working in academia, so the award for a young person having an impact in research and academia.
Rebecca: Well done!
Matt: Yeah, congratulations, Fraser. That is quite the gong.
Rebecca: Great news.
Fraser: Thank you very much and I’d well insist on being called ‘the award-winning Fraser Stewart’ from now on [laughter].
Matt: I’m really hoping Dave can put in some kind of party popper in the background here or fanfare...
[Fanfare horns]
...because it is worthy of that [laughter].
Rebecca: So Fraser, do you have a big statue to show us, or a big rosette or something?
Matt: They haven’t built a statue of him yet [laughter].
Fraser: No, no, not yet. I’ve heard my name is in the running for the new university building, the one that’s just been built on the hill [laughter]. I do have various other awards here that I can hold up.
Matt: Stand aside Alex Ferguson, the new man is in town [laughter].
Rebecca: You have other awards?
Fraser: Oh yeah, I win so many I just forget to tell you about them [laughter]. This one is from Scottish Edge which I also won this week.
Matt: For the benefit of the listeners, he is actually reaching for an...
Fraser: I’m holding up awards.
Matt: Yeah, this is well done, Fraser and, of course, Local Zero was mentioned.
Fraser: Yeah, they were very, very impressed with how far Local Zero has come with the guests that we’ve had on and the work that not just me but us as a team at Local Zero are doing. So I do think that it’s partly a shared thing for us as well and it’s good to know that that’s been recognised.
Matt: But they also mentioned some of the work you’ve done with Glasgow Community Energy and, of course, it’s probably a good time just to say that Glasgow Community Energy...
Fraser: Plug, plug, plug.
Matt: ...yeah, are looking to raise some community shares for some solar PV on a couple of rooftops in Glasgow.
Fraser: Yes. Well, we’ve already done the installations with CARES (Community and Renewable Energy Scheme), the Scottish Government and various funding pots. The installations are up at Glendale Primary in Pollokshields and Ashton Primary up in Easterhouse, one of the most deprived communities in Scotland and we expect them to generate, at the end of this year, about £5,000 in community benefit per location. The share offer is live just now. If you search for ‘energy Glasgow’ on Twitter or on Google and you’ll find it. We’re trying to raise £30,000 in shares to bring more members on board, pay off one or two of our costs and build the project going forward. So yes, plug, plug, plug.
Rebecca: And let’s just be clear that we don’t need to be based in Glasgow to contribute.
Fraser: No, you don’t. If you live in either of the postcodes right next to the schools, you’ll get priority if we exceed the share offer but you can absolutely pitch in from anywhere.
Matt: If you’re interested in community energy, do check it out and also check out the earlier episode that we covered two or three episodes ago on community energy. So Fraser, this is very much Local Zero and this is putting these ideas into practice.
Fraser: This is it. This is everything that we’re about; the ethos of the pod in action in real-time. So yeah, get involved. Please, please, please get involved.
Matt: Fantastic! So Becky, tell us a little bit more about the episode today. We’re on smart energy which I know is very close to your heart at the moment.
Rebecca: Yeah, well I think smart energy is often the thing that underpins a lot of the ambitions that we’re trying to achieve with local energy but it’s the bit that we don’t talk about as much. For most people, probably ourselves included, we don’t really know all that much about what we mean by the smart bit. I mean do you guys have smart meters in your home? I’ve found out recently I’ve got a smart meter in my home [laughter]. How about you? Matt’s looking puzzled.
Matt: I do but I just don’t know how smart it is. It tells me what I’m consuming at any given time, so that really kind of triggers the general dad in me of like, ‘Who’s turned the light on?’ [Laughter] ‘Is that emersion heater still on?’ So I just patrol around the house turning stuff off but beyond that, it doesn’t do a great deal for me and it also doesn’t cover gas. I’ve asked many, many times. It’s just power. No time-of-use tariff. It feels pretty dumb to me at the moment rather than smart.
Rebecca: Well, you probably could have a time-of-use tariff. I’ve just changed my supplier and signed up for a time-of-use tariff. Listeners of the pod will probably have heard me talk about my very old, slightly rundown Vauxhall Corsa that I’ve been driving. We’ve just had an upgrade and now I’ve got an EV which is super exciting. It is like driving a rocket ship. I can’t quite figure it out and how to use it properly but I’ve been able to switch tariffs. Now, because I have a smart meter, I have one of these tariffs where I get cheaper energy at certain times of day...
Matt: So it’s time-of-use, yeah.
Rebecca: ...yeah, and you can set it to charge when the electricity is cheaper. So these are like little examples of how the smart, the data that we’re starting to collect and the new ways in which we can use that data to control our energy can start to deliver benefits. So now we’re setting the laundry to take advantage of that tariff. We’re setting the washing machine to take advantage [laughter].
Matt: So it’s a hive of activity at 2.30 am [laughter].
Rebecca: Absolutely [laughter].
Matt: Looking at the electric vehicles, I suspect consumers’ ears will prick up once people understand that these are essentially roving batteries. What I mean by that is once it moors up at the house, this isn’t just something you charge up and zoom off in. It can, in good time, be something that could release power back into your house or into the grid at times when it is most needed. These electric vehicles can perform a wider storage function as part of a smart grid and a smart home.
Rebecca: I think that’s the hypothesis but whether that is actually something that plays out in reality, I’m not sure and I don’t know that there’s consensus there yet. The batteries in our cars are not the easiest battery. If you’ve got a big static battery on the side of your house, that’s not something where you’re trying to minimise the weight to take it round in the car. I think that there are a whole load of factors as to whether cars will be able to perform that function. So mine doesn’t do that right now and I don’t have the option of doing that right now but I certainly know that friends of mine, who’ve got solar on their roof and a static battery, can start to not only take advantage of the innovative time-of-use tariffs but can also use the battery to suck in power from the grid when it’s cheap and charge up and then when power from the grid is more expensive, they can use that battery to then power their home. So they’re starting to use all this extra information not only to reduce their bills, because it probably has a positive impact on their bills but also to maximise the use of local renewables.
Matt: Yeah, and I think what consumers are starting to understand is this is what a smart home and smart grid can do; that it can not just save them cash but it can create a whole realm of possibility which wasn’t initially open to them. Who would think of their car as something which they can... I mean I was having this same discussion with my wife because I’m looking to hire an electric vehicle today actually for the first time. We were talking about all the hassle that I’ve gone into about looking into where to charge and the different networks I’ve got to subscribe to and she said, ‘Oh, it sounds like a lot of hassle.’ I said, ‘Well, on the face of it, it is but when I pick it up, it’s fully charged because where it’s sat is charging the vehicle itself.’ To put that analogy back into the home, you can drive your car, you pull up when it’s almost empty, you drive off and it’s full. Your house has potentially drawn that power down at the cheapest time. It’s very exciting and I’m very jealous of your car, by the way, Becky [laughter].
Rebecca: Oh, it is amazing. I still can’t quite get used to it. Let’s just think about what we were talking about a few moments where Fraser was talking about the share offer and the idea that it’s not just about the energy that we have in our home and thinking about benefits at the household level but a lot of this happens at the community level. It might be that there are shared community-level assets and perhaps it’s not about just minimising the bills for those people who have these technologies in their homes but actually, how we can start to use this data and this new digitalisation and advanced forms of control on our energy systems to deliver benefits back into the community. What could that look like?
Matt: I do some work with some of the Distribution Network Operators, like Scottish Power Energy Networks and others. A bit part of the smart is that they can better balance supply and demand and with that, they’re not necessarily having to reinforce the grid. As we electrify our heat and as we electrify our transportation, all things being equal, we’d actually have to increase generation capacity and we’d have to reinforce the grid to carry that additional power. Well, if you can use smart tech to balance that supply and demand, you’re not having to build those overhead lines and reinforce them in the way that you otherwise would. That saves people money directly on their bills. So there are different ways of saving the cash for the average household.
Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely.
[Music flourish]
Matt: So what are we going to hear about today?
Rebecca: Well, I think what we need to really start talking about is what we mean by this data. Where is this data coming from? We’ve been saying ‘smart meters, smart homes, smart cities, smart grids’ but what is it that’s making it smart? Is it the data? Where’s that data coming from? Who’s generating it? Who owns it? Who’s got access to it? Who’s using it? I think even more than that, how are we starting to use that data to deliver a better future because, as we’ve said, it’s not just about cost minimisation. We also want to maximise local renewables and there might be other benefits that we want to bring. Maybe, in my home, I don’t get it that much cheaper but money can somehow flow back into the community or deliver community-level benefits. I think there are a lot of questions here about that.
Matt: Yeah, smart and communities are exciting.
[Music flourish]
Well, we’ve got an exciting episode lined up. We should invite them in and hear a little bit more.
[Music flourish]
Stephen: Hi, I’m Stephen McArthur and I’m Professor of Intelligent Energy Systems at the University of Strathclyde.
Gavin: Hello, I’m Gavin Starks. I’m the Founder and Chief Exec of Icebreaker One.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Gavin, tell us what does Icebreaker One do?
Gavin: We set up Icebreaker One to help bridge some of the data gaps between finance and climate change. We’re trying to make data work harder to help deliver net zero. The way we’re going about that is working across the energy sector. We have a programme called Open Energy which is trying to make it much easier to share information between organisations right the way through to government by making the roles of sharing easier as well as some of the technology pieces.
Rebecca: Brilliant. So thank you so much, both of you, for joining us today. We’ve had a little bit of a chat before you’ve come on the show and I think, really, what I can say is that Matt, Fraser and I know very little about the smart side of smart local energy. In the pods so far, we’ve talked a lot about local energy, community energy and how this can help households, communities and so on but I guess alongside this, we’re hearing a lot more about smart or intelligent energy systems. Most people think, ‘I might have a smart meter but I don’t really know what that does.’ Maybe I’ve heard of smart cities but probably, most people haven’t. Clearly, there’s something going on but a lot of people aren’t familiar with this and so I’m wondering, Gavin, if you could just kick us off by just telling us about what you mean by data working harder. What is this data we’re talking about and what is this smart? Why is this such an important and timely topic?
Gavin: That’s a great question and I think at the heart of this, there’s a real shift in the way that we both produce and consume energy. It used to be the case that we had a relatively small number of power stations supplying the country and they all fed into the National Grid. We’re now in a situation where there are tens of thousands and there will be millions of assets producing energy. We’re also electrifying all of our transport as part of our net-zero targets and so there will be millions more assets at the other end on the supply side. They’re going to be moving around. They’re all going to have batteries in them. So part of our energy storage is going to be mobile and so you end up with a situation where there are millions of things acting on the supply side and millions of things acting on the demand side. They’re all decentralised and distributed. That presents major challenges for everybody who is trying to operate in that ecosystem. We’ve mapped out over 9,000 companies in the energy sector in the UK and they all need access to information to make different kinds of decisions at different points but also the systems themselves have to migrate from a low-balancing framework that balances out every 30 minutes or so using a lot of systems that were developed a long time ago. We need to move now to a situation where the systems can self-heal and self-balance because there are too many of them for much human intervention. We need to help the machines help us to manage the whole network and that requires digitising everything.
Stephen: Gavin, can I just say something? I’m not sure whether you would agree with this but thinking about Becky’s discussion around what’s smart as well, that was very eloquent in terms of the challenge and the size of the problem and what we’re trying to do. But a lot of people have probably heard and read a lot about what we’re trying to do with autonomous, self-driving vehicles, for example, which is a really complex system of trying to maintain the correct speed, avoid objects on the road, avoid traffic, taking signals from cameras, taking signals from road conditions and taking other signals coming in about what’s happening around the roads. I always think of these future intelligent energy systems that need smart as being an equally complex system of running energy where we need to work out what energy to use in the home and when, how that interacts with the energy networks that move the wholesale energy around and how that interacts with the energy suppliers and the generators. For me, the analogy for people is it’s a bit like the complexity of a self-driving car brought into the energy space and you don’t have to think about it. That’s why we need smart because the system you described at the beginning we used to have was difficult and complex but humans could get in the middle and help make decisions. But with the millions of interactions you’re talking about, we just can’t do that in terms of manual control and so we need smart.
Matt: I think you both very eloquently outline what smart is and, in a broad sense, why it’s important but for the listeners of this pod, net zero is very much at the forefront of their minds. How does smart help us get there?
Gavin: One of the things we’re doing in the development of Open Energy is anchoring everybody around a core use case and the use case we’ve picked there is a local authority trying to work out how to understand the impact of low-carbon technologies when they’re either retrofitting buildings or looking at how they’re going to deploy EV in their area and so on. In order to do that, they need access to a lot of information. They need to know the data from smart meters in apartment blocks. They need to know the capacity of what’s already out there in terms of solar panels, heat pumps, wind turbines and so on. They need to know what the demands are going to be today, tomorrow and a bit further away for public EV charging points and the performance of that. You don’t want a whole street's worth of cars turning up, plugging in and then overloading the system. So then you need to know what’s the capacity at the sub-station and what’s the headroom right the way through to the National Grid and the transmission constraints. It’s already a complex system but it’s just going to get more complicated and when we bring this back down to the ground, as it were, when someone is sitting there, how on earth do we make a decision about what we invest in over the next six months, 12 months, five years or ten years to drive to net zero? There’s an opportunity in here to enable all this data to flow with the minimum of hassle which we don’t have yet and that’s really the thing that we’re focused on.
Rebecca: I love the autonomous vehicle example but it also made me think of an article that I read last week or the week before. I know we don’t have fully-autonomous cars at the moment but somebody had completely switched off, got into the passenger seat and the car crashed. So it makes me worry sometimes when we think that it’s just the machines that are doing something. I love this use case where part of the data is to help this more autonomous operation to stuff that’s happening in a faster timeframe than perhaps it’s appropriate to ask people to make judgements and do more manual control but then, at the same time, it’s about using that data to help people make better decisions. So we’re clearly talking about different types of data, so who do you see using this data? Is it a combination of different sorts of people in organisations? Is it the machines themselves? What’s this balance?
Stephen: For me, I think it’s all of those people. When Matt asked the first question, he asked how this helps local zero and if we think about it as a user just sitting in our household with the energy, we’ve got all this complexity but I’m sure, Matt, Becky and Fraser, you don’t want to be constantly checking a display or a system to decide when you charge your car, or when you charge your battery in your house, or when you use your energy. So there is that support side of things where it’s nudging, advising or taking some of those decisions for you but also advising you on how you could use your energy. More so, I think there’s the element of us, as consumers and end users of energy, getting advice from it but as Gavin outlined, then you might move into more automated control within the networks. We already do it with something called Active Network Management which means that we can control the amount of renewable energy going onto a network to make sure we don’t go over the limits of that network and we don’t damage the equipment, so we can dynamically control when and the amount of output that comes from the generators. We’ve already got elements of that automatic control in and helping the network become closer to net zero. I think we’ll have a whole continuum of users across it.
Matt: Stephen, could we do net zero without smart?
Stephen: That’s a very big question. I think, in some of the studies I’ve seen, one element of the answer is around how much you would have to invest in equipment to make sure you’ve got the headroom. Obviously, we’re electrifying transport and we’re moving towards electrifying heat. I know there will be hydrogen coming in alongside that but one way or the other, there’s going to be a significantly greater load on the electricity network. The usual way to build headroom, as they call it, to make sure that we can handle that is to invest in copper and to put more metal and equipment in. It will be very expensive to disrupt streets and to disrupt the environment by building more infrastructure. Smart is a way of making sure that we take into account the flexibility you can get from when things are generated and if you can store it, to make sure you don’t have to invest in the network. So you probably could build a physical infrastructure without smart that could help you get to net zero but it would be expensive and it would have an impact on the environment.
Matt: And arguably, quicker because you’re not actually having to make these interventions in the infrastructure.
Stephen: Yeah.
Gavin: My view on that is, categorically, no, we will not hit our targets if we don’t embrace this, I think, even if we didn’t have climate as a driver. The complexity of the system is growing exponentially and so we have to enable the digitisation and the digitalisation of our networks. It’s just a mandatory process. When we look at it through the lens of climate, it reinforces that. You may be able to correct me if I’m wrong on this but if we were to simply electrify all our vehicles today, I believe we’d need multiples of our current generation capacity to deliver it. I’m assuming that we don’t want to go out and build a lot more supply. We’re going to have to build some more supply but when we’re trying to think about how we can be more efficient and how we can manage our costs better, we have to be looking at the efficiency gains from a smarter network as a significant and material contributor to our net-zero targets. If we were to just switch it over, we’d just end up building a lot more infrastructure which we shouldn’t have to build and that comes with its own costs in terms of money and its own costs in terms of carbon. We just can’t do that in my view. So the big challenge there is how we de-risk all of this. Risk is a huge component, obviously, of maintaining reliable supply and managing demand at the other end of that.
Rebecca: So what sort of data are we talking about? I think I heard you mention smart meters from apartment blocks. We’ve talked about data on our networks. What is the data we’re talking about? Is that it? Are there more types of data?
Stephen: It’s hard to know where to draw a line under the amount of data that could be coming into it. There’s data around smart meters and how people are using their energy. There’s data that has already been gathered and will increasingly be gathered on our energy networks about how they’re operating and how the equipment is operating. We want to get efficiencies out of the generation side of things but also, the type of data we’ll use in the energy system going forward includes weather feeds that allow you to more accurately predict what your generation might be or actually, in some instances, companies are using weather feeds to predict where they might see faults and there might be security or problems with supply because of faults in the network. You then get to research and consideration around things like whether we can use social media feeds to give us early alerts about events or things that might be either a fault that might tell us there’s something that has gone wrong in the network or tell us that there’s going to be a pick-up in load. As Gavin talked about, you’ve got these movable loads and batteries in terms of electric vehicles moving around, so you’ll want some of that data about location and travel to try and help predict where you’re going to be having to charge vehicles or where you’re going to have increased load. I don’t think there’s an end to the type of data that we might be thinking about and there will be areas that we haven’t even seen emerge yet.
Rebecca: But we’ve got a lot of this data already. We’ve had smart meters for years. When you get an electric vehicle, you have to register it and if you want to put solar on your roof, you’ve got to, again, get approval. So a lot of these data feeds are already there and we’ve been forecasting for generations. What are some of the biggest challenges? Why aren’t we doing this already?
Gavin: Well, I think we’ve got a lot of legacy systems. There’s a huge amount of work being done and I think we’ve got to acknowledge that it just takes a lot of time to get these things to work in the first place. I suppose the key thing we’re working on is how we enable them to be linked to each other. Going back to your question, that includes everything from hydro-energy storage to large-scale hydrogen production and connections with Europe around gas and electricity. It’s not just about electricity. It could be geothermal. It could be combined heat and power, industrial heat pumps and biogas. There’s a whole suite of things in our energy production and consumption across the country. Because energy is at the core of the climate issue, there are Scope 1 and Scope 2 elements of carbon reporting which is pretty much dominated by energy consumption and production. That then links us out into other areas of policy and that links out into the investment community and the potential liabilities that people are facing. The asset managers and the investment community are going to require information about climate risk and so there are going to be new demands on energy provision being able to build more adaptive systems. There are thousands of use cases here and there are millions of data points flying around.
Rebecca: So there’s data there but it’s either not accessible, or not accessible in the timeframes that we need it, or data from one system, like the weather system, can’t be taken in alongside data from a different system and used together. Would you say those are some of the biggest challenges?
Gavin: Again, it’s not that the data, in many cases, doesn’t exist. It’s just hard to plug it all together and one of the programmes we’re working on at the moment, that BEIS is funding which is called the Energy Data Visibility Project, is anchored around search and discoverability. Do we even know what information is out there? There’s another UK national programme through UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) called MEDA (Modernising Energy Data Applications) which we’re also developing. It’s modernising energy data access and that key word is access. The first point of call for us is about everybody publishing metadata and the descriptions of the data that they hold in an open format so that people can find it in the first place. No, that’s not solved the problem. Technically, it’s solved but operationally, it’s not solved.
Rebecca: Stephen, you’re obviously working on something that requires data at a much faster frequency. You were talking about these systems that need to run themselves because decisions are happening too fast for people to get in the loop there. Does that bring an additional layer of challenge?
Stephen: I think some of it is the same challenge that Gavin’s spoken about. It’s about legacy systems, in some instances, and you’re trying to bring data in from different manufacturers and different systems that have been built in the past. You’re trying to do it in a way that allows all that data to be used in some type of decision-making to be made and then some type of control to be sent back to tell the device to charge, or the device to generate less electricity, or whatever the decision is. So the challenge comes around how you make sure you can bring that together and understand what the data means. One of the challenges is interoperability in terms of being able to take data from one system, put it into another one, analyse it, know what it means and get the benefit from it and the information from it. One of the big challenges with legacy systems and new data sources is plugging that altogether. Now there are technologies and there’s lots of work going on in that area but without the type of approach that Gavin was describing, you still end up with some silo data because although you can access it, you don’t necessarily know what it means.
Gavin: To build on that, it’s partly a tech issue in terms of how you plug the systems together with the same plugs and sockets for data. The great thing there is we’ve got loads of blueprints on how to do that. It’s called the web. We do that at scale on the web every minute. The harder piece of this, from my perspective, is everything not to do with technology and everything to do with intellectual property and liability transfer. That’s where we need to bring in the governance frameworks that can align with our political objects and our policy requirements and help everybody move forward in this quickly and not have to negotiate and say, ‘Oh, can I use that data for that purpose?’ every single time that we have a question we need to ask. We need to be able to give confidence to the commercial sector that it’s okay to share data within a trusted network of people who have all agreed to the same terms and conditions.
Matt: I think you’re probably starting to stray into the area that I was going to ask next which is around the ethics, the privacy of data and the ownership of data. I’m going to simplify things terribly here and you’ll probably be right annoyed if I do so but if we go back a few years when the stories of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica blew up, people were starting to become a little bit clearer about how big tech companies were using their data. Analogies could potentially be drawn with a smarter energy system. I wanted to ask two questions in relation to this. Do you think most consumers will be comfortable with their data being used in the ways that you’ve just outlined? The second related question is even if they weren’t, have they got a direct say over this or are they essentially powerless as things move forward?
Gavin: Let me come in on that, to begin with. I think, first of all, let’s be very clear that there are two quite distinct categories of information here. One is data that is directly linked to consumers and the other category is what I’ll call industry data. The engineering performance of a wind turbine is the intellectual property of the company that runs it. Your home energy consumption is actually your personal data. We’ve got an outline of that which is GDPR and that applies to any use of personal data or any aggregate data through which it’s possible to identify a living person. The confidence piece that I can bring to this conversation is we have addressed exactly this challenge in banking already. There’s a standard called the Open Banking Standard and really it’s a business-to-business set of rules that protect consumers. It’s not really a consumer standard, so to speak, but what it does is it mandates and it’s regulated through the Financial Conduct Authority firstly, that companies have to share the personal data of the individuals. In that case, it’s their bank statements and not their energy statements but the data is owned by the customer and not by the bank. The thing that then is built on top of that is an explicitly regulated consent process where, as an individual, I have to say, ‘Yes, I want to share my data with this third party.’ There’s an explicit mode of redress, liability transfer and all these other non-technical things where people can be held to account at scale. For me, the Open Banking Standard has helped to codify some of the potential chaos that we’ve seen with the likes of Cambridge Analytica. We think strongly that those principles can be applied to personal energy data in the mix here. The guidance here I give to everyone is when thinking about personal data, it’s very easy to find a ‘what if’ scenario that blows everything up. Much more useful, from my perspective, is to pick individual use cases and walk through them and say, ‘What are the potential benefits? What are the potential harms? How do we mitigate against them?’
Matt: Of course, it’s a trade-off, right? Stephen, any view on this?
Gavin: It’s a trade-off, yes.
Stephen: Gavin is the expert in this area. The area he defined as engineering or industrial data is mostly the area I operate in. We’re often thinking about that more technical, second-by-second data that’s owned by the companies and where it starts to interact with what Gavin was talking about, the IP part, where there needs to be agreement for interoperability, i.e. the ability to take data out of one system owned by one manufacturer, or one energy producer, or one energy network and put it into another. Again, it comes down to Open Data Standards, agreements and the understanding of why that’s being shared.
Rebecca: I love the way, Gavin, you framed it around the idea of cost versus benefit and I think we need to think about that for these different types of consumers. For an industrial partner, what are the benefits they’re getting? We talked about potential benefits earlier around meeting net zero and this idea of using data versus putting a lot more copper in the ground. I guess you can think about that as broader, national-level benefits and system-level benefits but for those industrial partners to engage, what are the benefits that they will get out of the system? Why might they want to do that? Have you had any interaction with industry partners, Stephen, and are you seeing them talking about this as something that’s of interest?
Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. It depends on which industry partner you’re talking about and why they’re interested in it. If you think about the electricity network operators, the complexity of what they’re trying to operate and manage going forward, there’s this drive to move towards something called Distribution System Operator which means that at a distribution level, closer to our homes and towns, the companies that will run electricity networks there need to be able to balance the generation coming onto the network at that level, the charging of batteries and the management of all their equipment so that it’s within limits. As Gavin outlined as well earlier, they see digitalisation, data and smart as a way of doing that and managing that complexity. So they’re interested in it because that delivers value to us as end consumers. You then have other industry clustered around that. You’ve got manufacturers of technology, software and analytics and they see great opportunity for new products and new services that can then be layered on top of the energy networks. Those could be facing out to the industrial companies or the energy networks which could be helping them manage equipment and doing maintenance more effectively to keep costs down, or it might be making sure they don’t need to put more copper and metal in the ground and use smart and flexibility to avoid that, or they might be trying to sell services to us as consumers by aggregating energy, allowing us to share the battery in our home, etcetera. There are a lot of opportunities people see for efficiency, cost savings, optimisation and new products in the industry space I’ve been working in.
Gavin: The benefit for industry are super clear to me; the radical efficiency. We’ve got to see double-digit percentage improvements in the efficiency of our systems. That’s mandatory if we’re going to hit net zero. Secondly, around that managing risk, as these systems get increasingly more complex, if they’re not interoperable, you’re introducing risk into the system. From a governance perspective, if I was involved in the energy sector, I’d be really looking at this through the lens of risk and efficiency because they’re the big drivers. On the consumer side, data at the metering points and behind the meter is considered personal data, so it’s owned by the customer. We’ve got to be very careful as we step forward here because what we’ve seen and what we know from direct experience of the gaffer, crew and so on is that if they can track something, they’ll track it. When you start placing that into devices in the home, there are some new threat vectors there. There are some thread vectors from a hacking point of view in the mix here but I don’t want to dwell on that for this podcast [laughter] but there are some threat vectors for us, as individuals, and our own privacy and our own ability to have agency over that. I’d say most consumers, from my experience of smart meters, look at them for a couple of weeks because it’s novel and it’s interesting and then they close the cupboard door and never look at them again. So smart needs to mean, from my perspective, that the efficiency gains from in-home load balancing, for example... if you’ve got a battery in every home and you want to switch the kettle on, the fridge switches off for a minute. Those kinds of things need to be completely invisible to the user but the user has to be protected. So there’s an absolute need here for policy to have a strong steer so that we don’t end up with cookies being set on a fridge, for example, and smart appliances because that way madness lies. We will not serve our society well if, in the rush to unlock innovation which we have to do, we don’t accidentally open up new ways for people to engage in exploiting individuals and communities based on their behavioural analyses.
Rebecca: Sorry, you’re going to have to tell us what cookies have to do with all of this.
Matt: Not the edible kind in the fridge, are they?
Gavin: Well, I mean cookies are at the heart of how we are tracked online. If you end up putting every device in your home online, then the utilisation of those devices becomes trackable and if you start marrying that up with your mobile data and so on, you’ll be able to have a very clear view of what I’m doing as an individual. How often Gavin boiled the kettle this week will be a knowable thing just from the smart meter data itself.
Rebecca: I dread to think if my husband could see how many times I’ve run the coffee machine [laughter].
Gavin: Well, I think there are lots of material things there that we need a public and informed conversation around and there are lots of ways of getting insight from all of this amazing, new information flow that’s going to exist without undermining privacy in the mix. I think if we don’t manage that well, then we’ll see huge consumer pushback. We’ve got plenty of examples to look at there; not just the whole Cambridge Analytica thing but you could look at Care.data around our health information which was a huge disaster in the way that the communications around that were managed and some of the material things underneath it. I think we’ve got to step forward with caution and move forward at pace and so how those two things fit together is a good question.
Rebecca: Are you worried about some people getting left behind here? Everything that you’ve talked about, I mean I’m just about wrapping my head around it. When you first said ‘cookies’, I was genuinely thinking about the edible kind. I think it was using it in the same sentence as the word ‘fridge’ [laughter]. Do you think there is the potential that some people could be left behind or penalised in this?
Gavin: I think if we don’t manage the process here... and this is where it’s not so much a technology problem as a regulatory, principles and practice challenge. I think we’ve got plenty of prior art to move forward here that we can build upon and I think it’s beholden on all of us who are working in this sector to take a really measured view of what we need to do and when and we sequence that in order that we minimise the potential harms and maximise the benefits. At one level, that is the function of policy and government to make sure that nobody is left behind. Equally, I think there’s a huge component of this that actually links with some of the political agendas to help bring better energy equity to the country and help pipe innovation and pipe finance to the people who are struggling. If you insulate a home, you improve its energy efficiency, you reduce the bills to the individual within the home and you also improve their wellbeing, so they’re less likely to get ill which means they are more employable and so they can get a job. There’s a whole sequence of systems-thinking that we can bring to this that the data here can help with.
Stephen: Yeah, and taking part of your question, Becky, you talked about how the technology language becomes confusing very quickly and people feel left behind. There’s a lot of activity in this digitalisation area going on in energy and there are a lot of complex data concepts being discussed but I always think that it just needs to be in the background. We need to make sure that we do the technical work and that we take into account all the caveats and the challenges around privacy and policy that Gavin outlined. I know there’s still some complexity in this but when you get a smartphone and you want to load apps onto it and you want to get new functionality, there’s a very complex ecosystem of technology going on in the background there but the average user of the smartphone is not aware of it and only needs to understand a few of the concepts to really extract the value from it. That’s really, I guess, what we’re trying to do with the digitalisation of energy and get to the same point where people can access the services and the value that they really want but they don’t need to be experts on how to build data interoperability and pipelines to get the value in their home.
Matt: Finally, the podcast is all about local action to deliver net zero and what we can do on our doorstep. That may be as an individual, it may be as a household but it also might be as a neighbourhood, as a community or in conjunction with other local stakeholders like local authorities or SMEs. So in that vein, if folk want to get smarter and do energy in a smarter way and to be part of this smart revolution, what can they start to do and how important is the local element of this? Stephen, I’m going to go to your first because you head up EnergyREV which Becky and I are part of and this is all about smart local energy systems. You’ve been leading this for a couple of years now and so what are your thoughts? We’ll then come to Gavin.
Stephen: My immediate thought was around the smart and the data side. I’m not sure there are immediate opportunities for us, as end users, because there are a lot of technical, infrastructural and open data requirements to bring datasets together. I think it’s for local communities and local energy systems to work closely with people like Gavin and me, and people working in this area, to come up with the high-value use cases that they’re trying to unlock. I think it’s more of a closer interaction between technologists and those in the data journey within energy that are trying to deliver the vision with the local communities to make sure we join up our aspirations, the use cases and the value we want to get rather than there is something that people could run out and do.
Matt: So almost like exemplar cases of where value has been created... ‘Look at this, guys. This is fantastic! How about we do this?’ but ten or hundredfold.
Stephen: Yeah.
Gavin: There are some design patterns in here that we can learn from the way that digitalisation broadly has completely transformed other sectors. Part of what has happened is that we re-democratise the ability to engage at a micro-level. Now if we can engage on a micro-level and enable people to engage on a micro-level by building their own local power grids that are interoperable and fit with large-scale industrial national infrastructure, then we could unlock innovation at the local and regional levels. People like Cambridgeshire Climate Emergency have been building some of the tools there where you can take the area and you can drag and drop some wind turbines onto your area and look at the impact and the payback curve. So I think there’s a real opportunity here to engage at scale. If we look at the web and copy some of the principles of the web here, the good ones that is, and say if we’ve got a common way of joining things together, we can enable many people to act. If we make it easier and easier to plug things together and the data can tell us whether or not the thing plugged in is fit for purpose, then we can start to break open more avenues for local action and more avenues for innovation.
Matt: So smart tech could unleash community action by creating new opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t have been available.
Gavin: We’ve seen it in every other sector. In some ways, you could say banking was 20 years behind the curve of the web before they got to Open Banking and now there are hundreds of Fintech companies who can access and interoperate with the entire banking system of the UK. So let’s do the same thing for energy.
Stephen: Matt, just finishing off and going back to the start of your question about EnergyREV, which is part of Prospering From the Energy Revolution. As you know, Prospering From the Energy Revolution has a number of demonstrators, so the type of thing that people could do to help, what Gavin’s described and what I’ve described, and if there is demonstration or enthusiasm in an area for some local energy system to enhance, to push on energy in that area and to get involved because that will give us the use cases. That will give us the exemplars Gavin was talking about and that will start to unlock this journey more quickly.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Absolutely. No, that’s a really good plug and, of course, we didn’t say this at the beginning but we’re launching a new website shortly which we will be curating information for and linking to the pods. We’ll be sure to link to that scheme that you mentioned and the various demonstrators but also, Gavin, the work that you’re doing with Icebreaker One. So thank you very much. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Gavin: Thank you very much.
Stephen: Thank you.
Rebecca: Can you both stay on and join us for Future or Fiction?
Gavin: Sure.
Stephen: Sure.
Rebecca: Brilliant. Well, Fraser, over to you.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: Yeah, the part of the show that everyone actually tunes in for [laughter]. So for the uninitiated and for our guests, Future or Fiction? is a game that we play at the end of every show where I present you with a brand new technological innovation. You have to decide if it’s real, i.e. it’s the future, or if you think I’ve just pulled it out of my backside. In this episode, the invention is called Sun in the Hand.
[Music flourish]
The things that we can do with prosthetics these days really are incredible but how about this? Scientists have devised a smart prosthetic arm which looks very realistic but is, in fact, powered by tiny solar panels. These panels generate power for tiny sensors that can detect the size, shape and proximity of objects and pick them up or grip them with minimal to no input from the user. Do we think that a solar-powered prosthetic is the future or do we think I’ve just made it up?
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: So you’re going to have to give us a little bit more information here, Fraser [laughter]. Lots of mini solar panels...
Fraser: Teeny tiny wee... yeah.
Rebecca: ...built into...
Fraser: Built into a prosthetic arm.
Rebecca: ...and they’re used to generate energy in order to power sensors?
Fraser: Yes.
Matt: Some prosthetics, of course, don’t have motion at all and they can be very simple but the much more complex ones, how are these powered at the moment? Have they got some power pack attached to them? Some of them, I guess, are powered through the body and linked to the muscles. How do they work, Fraser? [Laughter]
Fraser: What I want to be clear on, Matt, and what I think shines through in every episode...
Matt: Is my lack of knowledge? [Laughter]
Fraser: No, I was going to say my lack of knowledge. Whether I’ve invented this or whether it’s real, I don’t know enough about it in general. What I do know about this is that, typically, the more advanced ones now are powered by batteries. What do the guests think? Stephen and Gavin, what do you guys think?
Gavin: My inner engineer immediately comes out and says what’s the surface area of the prosthetic? How much of that is solar panel? How much voltage do you get from that? Where’s the battery?
Fraser: You’re not going to get that out of me, Gavin.
Gavin: I suspect not [laughter]. I have to say, my gut reaction here is you’re making it up because you could just strap a solar panel to your backpack and put it on a battery.
Fraser: Like a solar ninja turtle? [Laughter]
Gavin: Why does it need to be embedded in the prosthetic? You then put a jumper on and it’s not exposed to the sun.
Rebecca: Or the sun goes down in the evening and, all of a sudden, you can’t pick up your beer.
Gavin: Yeah, you’re out partying and you can’t drink your beer anymore.
Fraser: You just can’t pick it up.
Matt: I can imagine us focus-grouping this and on a whiteboard somebody writing in one column ‘jumper’ with a sad face [laughter].
Fraser: Yeah [laughter].
Stephen: Exactly or you live in Glasgow...
Fraser: Yes [laughter].
Stephen: ...and it’s not much use to you. So I was going to put my practical engineering skills around this and say what happens if you’ve got a long-sleeved shirt, etcetera, but somebody has beaten me to it. I don’t want to be disparaging to my community but I’ve been long enough in the academic community to suggest that I have seen similar ideas around other devices where people would experiment and try it. So I could see that being a research project out of somewhere, so I’m going to go for future but notwithstanding all the failings that we highlighted.
Fraser: Yeah, future but probably not in Glasgow [laughter].
Rebecca: Let’s just paraphrase what you’ve said though which is that academic engineers don’t think about real-world application [laughter].
Stephen: No, I should have maybe thought about that a bit more. That wasn’t quite what I was going to say [laughter] but you didn’t give us a full abstract and they may have covered all of these issues. It might have been for a specific use case. I’m trying to rescue my community now [laughter].
Gavin: I’ll give you a bit of help there, Stephen. There is an example I came across which I think was DARPA which was extracting energy from blood flow in soldiers as they were on the field to maximise all energy because they’ve got so many devices they’re carrying with them. But that kind of power harvesting seemed extremely, I’d say, at the edge.
Stephen: Exactly.
Fraser: That sounds way more exciting than the thing that I picked.
Gavin: Now you have to tell whether or not I made that up [laughter].
Rebecca: Fraser, your job is in doubt here [laughter].
Matt: The more we do this game, the more we realise that actually, there is quite a fine line between fiction and future and that some things have existed to a lesser extent either on paper or in a lab somewhere but haven’t quite made it out of the shadows yet.
Rebecca: I just think back to our first episode where you and I, Matt, were so convinced that what Fraser proposed was fiction. I was actually on a webinar earlier this week where the Chief Scientific Advisor for BEIS was talking about it as the future [laughter].
Stephen: What Fraser is doing is if he manages to divert us and gives us fiction that we believe, he then runs out and patents it.
Fraser: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right [laughter]. This is all protected. I’m getting royalties from BEIS for space-based solar panels as we speak [laughter].
Matt: Right, so we’re going to have to have scores on the doors.
Fraser: Yes, so Gavin?
Matt: Future or fiction?
Gavin: Complete fiction.
Fraser: Stephen?
Stephen: I went for future.
Fraser: Becky?
Rebecca: I’m going fiction on this one.
Matt: I’m fiction as well, I think. I can’t get that jumper out of my head, so fiction.
Fraser: As we do every time Matt gives an answer, Becky, do you now want to change your answer?
Matt: Yes [laughter].
Rebecca: Well, I didn’t last week and it paid off and so I think I’ll carry on.
Matt: There was still a pregnant pause there of ‘I might change my mind.’ [Laughter].
Fraser: So that’s three fictions and a future from Stephen. Okay, the answer is... the future [laughter]. That’s right, Sun in the Hand is the future. Researchers at Glasgow University, of all places in the world – sorry, Gavin, Glasgow is the second best university...
Gavin: I’m going to have to have words.
Fraser: ...- have devised a prosthetic arm powered by solar panels that work through polymer resembling the colour of skin. Rather than typical sensors, this prosthetic uses light and shadow cast by an object to judge proximity, shape and size. Lighter than the typical sensor-based battery power prosthetics, the arm actually uses the light into the solar PV units as part of its analysis. The solar PV itself is to power it but is also part of the sensory unit as well.
Matt: Excellent.
Fraser: So there we go. I don’t know where the jumpers come into it and I don’t know how far along they are. This was from last year, so it’s still early stages but yes, it’s the future.
Matt: Now, Fraser, we’ve got one thing to say. We had a listener write in who is a colleague of ours but I won’t name them. It was somebody questioning whether something was future or fiction from an earlier episode. It was the user-powered gyms. They have fact-checked this and they have contested the fact that I think you called it fiction and that there is actually a gym out there run, I think, by the Great Outdoor Gym Company which is powered by people. We’re going to need to look into that.
Fraser: Yeah, yeah. No, I think it’s right. I’ve seen the links. That particular episode of Future or Fiction? was literally me walking out of the gym and thinking, ‘Oh no, I haven’t done a Future or Fiction? for today.’
Matt: It’s a big world out there, Fraser [laughter].
Fraser: I’m surprised it’s taken so long for a correction.
Matt: I said I wouldn’t name them but thanks, Jeff, for that [laughter].
Rebecca: Oh, brilliant.
[Music flourish]
Thank you so much everyone. You’ve been listening to Local Zero. Remember to check us out on social media. We are @LocalZeroPod. Yes, that’s a new handle. Find us on Twitter @LocalZeroPod. You can also follow along @EnergyREV_UK and remember to tag us if you do use that with #LocalZero but for now, I think all that’s left for me to say is thank you, Gavin and thank you, Stephen, for such a great discussion and more importantly, such a great contribution to Future or Fiction? Thanks everyone for listening and we look forward to seeing you next time. Bye.
Matt: See you.
Gavin: Thank you.
Stephen: Bye.
Fraser: Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.
[Music flourish]
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