61: Prospering from the Energy Revolution 3 - Skills and Supply Chain

This penultimate instalment of our month-long Prospering from the Energy Revolution (PFER) series focuses on Skills and the Supply Chain. Matt, Becky and Fraser chat acronyms, and a personal experience of issues faced by those trying to find work in the energy sector, before being joined by Louise Alter from Equans and Melanie Bryce from SSEN. 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[Music flourish]

Rebecca:  Hello and welcome to Local Zero with Matt, Becky and Fraser. Throughout February, we’ve been talking to people who have been working hard over the past four years to help turn their communities into energy-smart places, bringing together energy supply, demand, infrastructure and people and connecting them in a smart way at a local level like a town, city or region.

Matt:  So this is the third of four weekly episodes we’re recording this month covering some of the very exciting findings that are coming out of the UK Government’s Prospering From the Energy Revolution programme, or PFER for short. So if you’ve missed our previous two chats, the first on policy and regulation and the second on finance, do go back and check them out. But this week, we’ll be focusing on skills and the supply chain. Joining us later are Louise Alter from Equans, that is leading the Zero Carbon Rugeley project, and we’re also joined by Melanie Bryce from Scottish & Southern Electricity Networks or SSEN for short that is leading the Local Energy Oxford project or LEO Project for short. 

[Music flourish] 

Fraser:  If you’re a fan of Local Zero, do remember to subscribe; a small gesture from you that makes a massive difference for us and for the pod. Check out our website where you can search for episodes and listen back to the whole catalogue at LocalZeroPod.com. You can also find us on Twitter @LocalZeroPod or email longer thoughts or responses to LocalZeroPod@gmail.com 

[Music flourish] 

Matt:  Well, listen, I’m going to start with this. We had a lovely review from somebody called ACTGreen. Thanks, ACTGreen. We got a lovely comment from you saying, ‘Top stuff from smart people’ – (too kind) – ‘learnt a lot about the complexity and pitfalls of Local Energy Systems, decarbonisation and just transitions but what I like about this, guys, is the emphasis on optimism.’ That’s something I’m not regularly accused of in my household anyway [laughter]. He goes on to say, ‘A little plea, please keep translating the jargon and acronyms.’ So today, that is our homework, so thank you for that. 

Fraser:  Yeah, absolutely. 

Rebecca:  Yeah, I think we’re going to be talking about a lot of jargon today, aren’t we? The news that we’ve seen about BEIS – Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy - Matt, do you want to hit us up with that and tell us all of these new, wonderful acronyms we’re going to be dealing with in the future?  

Fraser:  Rest in peace, BEIS [laughter]. 

Matt:  So apologies to ACTGreen. We’re about to go into a jargon storm [laughter]. Many of you will be familiar with the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy or BEIS for short which, until today as we’re recording or yesterday, was responsible for energy strategy and all things climate change, innovation and trade. It was a bit of a super-group of former departments and within that, we had the former Department for Energy & Climate Change or DECC for short.

A few years back, DECC along with other bodies, like the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, were all lumped together into this super-group and really, Becky and Fraser, a lot of the net-zero thinking that has come out since then, like the net-zero strategy and the policies, have fallen out from this super-group or this department of departments.  

Fraser:  I don’t know that anyone has ever described BEIS as a super-group before. 

Matt:  Yeah, the Travelling Wilburys of the civil and public service [laughter]. 

Fraser:  Tom Petty... 

Matt:  George Harrison. All of these [laughter]. Anyway, it doesn’t exist anymore and now we have the worst acronym of all time. It doesn’t get any worse than this. Are you ready?  

Rebecca:  Go on. 

Matt:  The new department for energy, climate and net zero is now called DESNZ which is the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. So there we go: DESNZ – one acronym to rule them all. I challenge you to find a worse one [laughter]. 

Rebecca:  It is pretty special. 

Matt:  Yeah, what do you think about that? Basically, this is quite a bold move taking energy and climate change back into its own department with an emphasis on security but divorcing it from trade, business, innovation and science. How do we think this will play out? 

Fraser:  It’s challenging. I understand the division of those things and the way that they’re set out to give each that individual attention but something that we’ve struggled with a lot so far and something that’s been highlighted time and again is the need for whole-systems thinking, for a joined-up approach across all different departments, for less siloed working and for more collaboration.

I think however BEIS worked before, and I’m sure it had a lot of issues on that front, there’s definitely a little bit of a worry that splitting these things out – things are inherently linked together and net zero has to underpin all of them in some way – may put up some of those partitions again. I hope not but that’s instinctively something that we need to be mindful of or rather that these new departments need to be mindful of themselves.  

Rebecca:  I’m kind of in two minds about this. I think it’s really interesting. Part of me thinks decoupling the focus on energy and net zero from business and growth could, in some ways, be liberating but I think you’re right and the devil is going to really be in the detail of how these things come together to make sure of where we are within net zero and maybe we can be more ambitious around some of our thinking in net zero now that it is decoupled from these other departments but we really still need to make sure that it underpins everything that’s happening in the UK. I think it’s going to come down to how those connections continue to be made and the opportunities for that. 

Matt:  Yeah, it’s this kind of tricky balance between having a laser-like focus and a ringfenced budget for certain stuff like climate and net zero versus being a much smaller department that’s operating on the fringes of some of the larger departments, aka, the Treasury.

Obviously, we’ve just had this news but my instinctive response is that these three new departments – one for science, one for trade and business and the other for energy and climate – are going to have to work very closely together to make a case to the Treasury to get the money to be brought down. With that wicked term of ‘systems thinking’ that I think we’ve already had, how do you do systems thinking across departments? If you’re a public or a civil servant out there and you’ve got some hot tips, let us know. We’d love to hear from you. 

Rebecca:  I think this actually leads beautifully into what we’re going to be talking about today around skills and supply chain because we have these phenomenal ambitions, and I’m probably still going to call them ambitious at this stage, in the UK around net zero. We have an understanding of what that actually means in terms of delivering it thanks to the great work of the CCC (Climate Change Committee) and others. What we don’t seem to have are the mechanisms that will allow that to be delivered.

A case in point, and this is one that I’ve been experiencing directly through my husband, is around the workforce that we’re going to need to transition our homes from the heating systems we have now to the heating systems of the future which is probably going to be heat pumps for most of us. It’s a trade that is going to require a huge number of new jobs, new skills and training and my husband is trying to retrain in this space and can’t get a company to sponsor him through the course that he needs to do in order to train. It just feels like the dots have not been connected.

So we have this ambition, we have financial incentives for people that want to retrain and so my husband can get financial incentives to enable him but he can’t get a company to sponsor him because there is no incentive for these companies. 

Matt:  That’s a really interesting point. I think you’ve got this opportunity to retrain but you know what frightens the bejeezus out of me is when you look at things like net zero but more recently, the focus has been on nurses, doctors and dentists. It takes an age to get certain individuals, not just highly skilled but right through that whole spectrum, trained up to know what they’re doing. Now you can’t do that overnight and we really don’t have very long to deliver on net zero at all. If you’re looking at some of these eyewatering targets for heat pumps, who is going to install them, Becky? If it’s not your husband, then who is it, where are they going to be and how are they going to train? 

Rebecca:  No, it’s a really, really challenging environment. As I said, the industry is ageing and there are real challenges around diversity in the industry and I think that’s actually reflected in the lack of different points of entry. We’re still seeing a lot of support for people coming in at that apprentice level but that is not going to be enough. We need to have more diverse paths into the industry and we need to see that put in place because unless we can see the funding, the support and the incentives for those different pathways, we’re never going to join that up with our net-zero ambitions. That’s just one example. There are so many. 

Fraser:  Yeah, I think that’s spot on, Becky. Out of the work that we did around Prospering From the Energy Revolution and a lot of that talking to people who have been working in these industries for a time, something that we’d heard was about that pipeline of skills and incentives to do it but on a long-term scale with certainty for industry, they’d been burned with things like the Green Homes Grant which was there and then it wasn’t and then that support and incentive to upskill were gone. So building that in – and again, starting now because the clock is ticking – is key to this. We can get it done. I think the viable solution is there but it has to be long-term and it has to be certain. 

Rebecca:  We need to make it more attractive to different folk. I was in a workshop yesterday and I heard a statistic from one of your wonderful colleagues – our wonderful colleagues – at Regen, Fraser, about the fact that women in this particular industry only make up 2% of the workforce and I thought that was shocking.  

Matt:  Yeah, shocking. 

Rebecca:  Shocking! 

Matt:  So there’s something very important here. It’s not the old adage of build it and they will come – no pun intended on the building point – but you can’t put the architecture in place and just assume people will want to train as a heat pump installer. This has got to be attractive. This has got to be well-paid. It’s got to be desirable, meaningful and fulfilling work.

This is where we have an opportunity and this is where net zero bleeds into this idea of a just transition. How do we make this attractive? This should be the first question and not the last one. It’s not like, ‘Oh, we need 8,000 installers in this postcode over the next ten years.’ How do we make this attractive? If it’s attractive, people will want to train and want to take that work up. What does that look like? I’m not even sure we’re having that discussion yet [laughter]. We’re still talking about skills and supply chains. How do we make this desirable?  

Fraser:  I think that’s a great point, Matt, and I think it links to Becky’s point before nicely which is that the access is limited but for a lot of people, they don’t know what these jobs look like. They don’t know where they are and they don’t know who they’re for. Especially if you get into more technical levels of that, it’s difficult. There’s not a huge amount of promotion for it. There isn’t really the training out there at this moment in time to access, let alone at a scale in such a way that it’s going to be viable for people to retrain across the board. So I think that just transition element is bang on and it’s so, so critical. We talk a big game on the jobs that net zero can offer and the opportunity really is massive but we have to get to work now on making that happen in practice. 

Rebecca:  So before we get into today’s talk, my plea is if you work in industry, if you run a company like this, reach out to us and let us know what’s going on. If you’ve got a job for my husband, and I’m not ashamed to use Local Zero to plug that [laughter], we want to hear from you. How are you pulling new people into the industry, if you’re doing it, because I can’t see it happening and I’d love to hear from folk on the ground who are actually doing and delivering this... but perhaps that is a beautiful time to invite our guests in. 

[Music flourish] 

Louise:  Hi, I’m Louise Alter. I work for Equans as an Energy Innovation Manager, mainly the Zero Carbon Rugeley Detailed Design project in the PFER programme. 

Melanie:  Hi, I’m Melanie Bryce. I’m the Oxfordshire Programme Director at Scottish & Southern Electricity Networks and I’ve been leading the project Local Energy Oxfordshire (LEO) for the past four years, so looking forward to sharing some of it with you today. 

[Music flourish]  

Rebecca:  Thank you for joining us, Louise. Thanks for joining us, Mel. It’s great to have you both here and to be talking a little bit about the two projects that you’ve both been involved in, particularly thinking about what all of this means for the skills, the supply chains and the new ways that people, whether workers or users of energy systems, need to be interacting with it.

But before we dive into too much detail, maybe we could just start by learning a little bit more about the projects that you’ve both been leading and how they’re doing things differently and why this is really important. So maybe, Louise, could you kick us off?  

Louise:  Zero Carbon Rugelely started just under three years ago. Basically, the idea was to develop a Smart Local Energy System for Rugeley on the back of a regeneration project. There used to be a coal-powered station in Rugeley and now that has closed and that has sparked that regeneration that is looking to be zero carbon. The idea is we are looking at transport and housing in the energy system and how those things fit together and specifically how they impact and involve the community that is in Rugelely, acknowledging that they have a central role and that their buy-in and leadership are key to achieving that transition. 

Rebecca:  Mel, tell us a bit about LEO. 

Melanie:  Yeah, so LEO has been going for four years now. It was three years but we got an extra year because of the pandemic which has been great because we’ve been able to move things forward that little bit further than we would have been able to do. It’s really about getting markets for flexibility to operate in Oxfordshire. By that, I mean the ability of assets to be able to turn their generation and demand up and down in response to a signal from the Distribution System Operator who looks after all the wires and cables from the cut-out in your home right up to the circuit-breaker at the grid supply point. We’ve been looking at that for the last four years.

We’ve been looking at developing the markets which has meant starting from a blank sheet of paper and really looking at the concepts, developing the concepts and then moving them into more of a trial situation. We’ve been recruiting people and recruiting assets that are able to deliver flexibility and test and trial our market design and also the systems that need to be in place in order for that to be able to be delivered. It’s very much a demonstrator project and so for this to work well, we had to make sure that our pounds were exchanged and also kilowatt hours were displayed on the system. So it’s a real demonstrator project.

Part of the outputs that we’re looking for is investible business models. We wanted to be able to test and trial whether this was an investible business model for assets and for people, whether that be demand side response or whether that be, say, a solar farm. We’ve been looking at that piece and then also the big collaborative piece and so building a collaborative set of people who are able to learn from each has been a key part of the project. Looking at that from a whole-systems perspective and working closely with the local authorities, for example, has been a big output of the project as well. 

Matt:  Louise and Mel, I’m wondering if you could translate the two projects that you mentioned into why this will make a difference to businesses and householders in the future. How do you see some of the demonstration projects that you’re involved with and the innovations that are coming out actually changing people’s lives in the home and the workplace?  

Melanie:  For me, the big output in the longer term is that people are able to connect more low-carbon technology and connect it more quickly if we can demonstrate flexibility at the very edge of the grid. That is the big output for me; that we can increase the uptake of low-carbon technologies and, therefore, accelerate the path to net zero. 

Matt:  So is that about getting more onto the network and giving people the opportunity to connect their own generation that maybe didn’t otherwise? That might be rooftop solar but it could also be a larger small-scale project like a local farm or a business. 

Melanie:  Yeah, I think it’s more along the lines of those elements of society today that are driven very much by fossil fuel. Things like heating and transport are the two areas that we really need to decarbonise first. It’s about putting in heat pumps and putting in electric vehicles. Those are the two key things. 

Matt:  So demand? 

Melanie:  Yeah, I think that is the Distribution System Operator angle but from the householder angle, it’s all about optimising behind the meter and what you can do in terms of batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles and demand side response, aggregation and getting everything into your smartphone and being able to measure and change things at the touch of a swipe. 

Matt:  So creating headroom to connect this demand which is absolutely imperative. We’re going to electrify everything. Well, some people would suggest we need to electrify our heat and transport. Louise, the project you’re involved with, how might that change my life or yours in the home or the workplace? 

Louise:  I think for the more industrial side and for the wider-system side, it’s really about integrating the system. I think a lot of the solutions that exist at the moment are great on their own but cannot really be developed on their own because they are reliant on other things in the system existing or happening. So if you think about transport and heating, for example, as Mel just said, then that’s great to electrify that but if we electrify everything at once and don’t actually think about the fact that we’re doing both the heating and the transport, then there’s a risk that one will hinder the other in the development that is required. It is about taking that step back and having that system thinking.

In terms of how it will change, I think the communities that these Smart Local Energy Systems are developed in, it’s really about involving the community with energy. Until now, energy was something that just wasn’t really thought about. It was just always there and it was in the plug. What we found, talking with a lot of people in the communities, is that when you asked them what was behind that and how that actually arrived, the main answer was, ‘The power station that used to be here.’ But actually, the system is so much more complex and if people understand that complexity and acknowledge it, I think there are a lot of things they can benefit from. It’s about first understanding and then benefiting but also seeing what could be an issue if it’s not thought about properly at the beginning. 

Rebecca:  Fraser is nodding along vigorously as you talk about engaging people in new ways [laughter]. 

Fraser:  Yeah, I’m going to say that I’ve got my question in bold capital letters for later in the conversation but... Becky. 

Rebecca:  I think it’s great. Mel, when you were chatting, I had this vision pop into my head, and it’s not the first time it has, of the Jetsons’ home of the future [laughter] if you think way back. I don’t even know when the Jetsons came out but it still comes to my mind as what life could be like.

I guess whichever route we’re talking about, and these are clearly very different projects but both really driving forward with quite exciting and substantial changes in the energy system, what does this mean for how they are delivered? Do we need to see people bringing new skills? Do we need to see entirely different jobs coming to the table?

Mel, you mentioned collaboration being a big thing and working together. I think, typically, we see a lot of siloed work in this space. So how are the changes in these projects bringing new sorts of requirements for how we run these systems? 

Melanie:  For me, it goes into two different areas. There’s the skills piece and there’s what I call the general energy skills and general energy knowledge which, as part of Project LEO, we have really worked hard at. To start off with, that was something that was a little bit of a barrier but as we moved through the project, we were able to start to speak a more common language. We did have a glossary for a while to help everyone understand some of the slightly more technical terms. We are, as an industry, not very good in terms of acronyms and we use far too many and so making sure that they are all well-understood along with the basics of electricity and how it flows and how it works. That’s not something that is in everyone’s repertoire.

So really building up that knowledge across the community groups, the councils and some of the other partners that we had was really important to start off with. That’s that kind of general upskilling, specifically with the councils I would say because it’s not their first port of call. They’ve got a lot of other things to be thinking about unless they’re large enough to have a specific energy department. That is some work that definitely needs to be upskilled.

We then have the side that is looking at actually participating in these flexibility markets and that level of understanding of the whole electricity system and energy system needs to be increased as well so that when, say, an aggregator goes to engage on providing flexibility, they have that basic level of knowledge to be able to actually understand what it is that the aggregator is after. That’s the kind of general knowledge of the energy industry that needs to be across a lot more of the population and to be fair, from the start of LEO till the end of LEO, that has increased massively.

Four years ago, you wouldn’t have had people sitting in the pub talking about electric vehicles and saying, ‘When are you getting an electric vehicle? Have you got your charge point? How many hours do you get on your battery?’ That wouldn’t really have been a conversation. Whereas, at the end of LEO, four years later, that is the sort of conversation that people are having. That is already happening. Those are the sorts of general skills and then we have the more specific skills.

In order for us to run the network in a smart way, we need to have a lot of data and digital skills, so we need to make sure that we are gathering information on the network with greater monitoring but then we also need to be able to analyse that in a much more sophisticated way using probabilistic forecasting and other very tricky mathematical techniques. We run quite a few programmes. We’ve started a data and digital apprentice programme. We have a programme that is run in conjunction with the IET (Institute of Engineering and Technology) which is fast-tracking engineers and putting them onto summer placements. We have another programme which takes people who are maybe not first and foremost electrical engineers but can, with a little bit of tuition, then go on to do some of the more electrical engineering skills. That’s our way of tackling that skills gap at the moment. 

Rebecca:  Wow! That’s a lot. As you were saying about the electric vehicles, I was thinking, ‘I actually don’t know what mine uses and I probably should be able to participate in that conversation.’ [Laughter] It is a changing space and there are a lot of really interesting skills there.

Louise, you mentioned at the start that, in Rugeley, you’ve seen a shift away from the coal-powered station and into something quite different. Does the fact that there used to be that coal-powered station there, with the history of what jobs and employment in the region looked like, have an impact on your project? What are you seeing in terms of these new jobs and new skills and I think, more importantly, appetite in the community to engage with those? 

Louise:  Yeah, it’s a pretty unique place because of that power station that there used to be. I think there are a lot of skills that could be tapped into and that really just require upskilling basically. So the basic knowledge remains the same but the specific technology will change and, therefore, there is some training around that that is required and that currently isn’t being done and isn’t being promoted by the businesses that are in the area because of lack of policies and security around pipeline and things like that.

Just going back to your question, I think there’s definitely a requirement for upskilling on all of the things that Mel already mentioned around the community, the council and the more high-level skills but also in terms of boots on the ground, we really see that there is a huge problem. If we were to actually scale up and deliver the solution, we would start having a real problem implementing anything. The supply chains are completely overrun and everyone has already committed to SHDF or the like. 

Rebecca:  Break that acronym down for us.  

Louise:  Sorry, yes. Social Housing Decarbonisation... 

Fraser:  Fund, yeah [laughter]. 

Louise:  ...Fund [laughter]. Sorry, I’m so used to the acronyms. So the supply chain is already committed to working on that for the next two years because that’s kind of the best commitment they can get right now. There is no other commitment. There isn’t any kind of 30-year ‘we’re going there, we’re retrofitting that many houses, there’s the money and how we’re going to get that.’ It doesn’t exist.

It’s the same thing for EV charge points. Right now, it’s driven really by private companies that put them onto their parking lots to attract specific customers but really, the local authority... as much as they’re trying to understand where they would put those charge points and which ones are the right ones, how do they actually engage? Do they have enough capacity on the grid in Rugeley? Probably not.  

Matt:  I can feel my anxiety levels kind of rising as we talk [laughter] because I think, on the one hand, the UK is facing a skills crisis in general, and I’m talking beyond net zero, but given the scope of net zero when we’re talking about almost any sector where there’s a skills shortage, it’s probably going to be in the crosshairs of net zero and then we’re starting to talk about sectors which are very much within the confines of the stable of energy. You’ve mentioned this quite clearly.

What I’m wondering is is this a problem that’s been growing for many, many years, that is unique to energy and we just don’t have the pipeline of skills or is this something that’s occurred more recently as we’ve seen skills dry up more generally? I guess I’m trying to say is this an energy thing or an economy thing? Have you any sense of that or, even worse, is it both? [Laughter]  

Louise:  I would say it’s both [laughter]. I would say it’s both. I think what we’ve seen are a lot of recessions and the way government has run the recovery from the recessions has pushed a lot of people out of that workforce that we are now really desperately needing. The top management that would be able to train new people and new apprenticeships just don’t exist. They’ve left the sector. They’ve left the country. They’ve changed careers. They haven’t made those kinds of skills that we now need attractive enough and the career paths behind that clear enough. As that happens, I think between the people leaving and the people going into different sectors and years and years of recessions and recoveries that were poorly managed, I would say it’s everywhere. 

Matt:  Mel, are you of the same mind? 

Melanie:  Okay, I’m going to come in on a positive note here [laughter]. 

Matt:  Oh, good. That’s good. Thank you [laughter]. 

Melanie:  I think that with the drive to net zero and all the climate change challenges that we are seeing now, the energy sector is the place to be. I think we are seeing a lot more talented people wanting to come and work in energy who, potentially, before wouldn’t have seen it as somewhere they wanted to go and work. From that point of view, I think there’s definitely a way of recruiting people but I think they are interested in energy in its broadest sense rather than the actual technical detail of, say, running an electricity network.

It’s really, for me, thinking a little bit wider out of the box in terms of the skills and the degrees that you actually need, what you can work with and then train to do what you actually need to do. It is definitely a combination of both and the economy has certainly not helped but I am pretty buoyant about the future with the number of graduates that we are recruiting at the moment and how energised and involved they want to be. They’ve really got a great purpose in terms of wanting to work in the energy industries. 

Matt:  Well, given that we are or at least I am... Fraser and Becky have flown the nest but as an academic, we’re always very interested to see where our graduates move to and what happens there. I don’t want to refer to my students as small birds but as the canary down the coal mine of that net-zero pipeline and skills, what are we seeing? Are you seeing the types of graduates that you want with the types of skills or not? I guess if they’re not coming through now, then we’ve got a real problem in five, ten or fifteen years. 

Melanie:  Yeah, I think probably to emphasise there are lots of different routes in as well; graduates one of them but there are lots of others as well [laughter]. We have technical trainees, apprenticeships and all sorts of different ways into the industry and people who want a career change and all of that sort of thing. The graduates have their technical ability and they are usually more academic and so that’s always useful but we need a broad spread of people really to make sure that we’re getting all that diversity of thought that you need to make the right sorts of decisions. 

Rebecca:  That’s really heartening. That’s really heartening to hear. 

Matt:  I can see you nodding, Fraser, about the non-technicals. I wasn’t trying to say it’s exclusively graduates who are going to save planet Earth. That’s nonsense but it needs a blend. Fraser, I know you’ve talked a lot about those kinds of pathways for non-graduate upskilling for net zero. 

Fraser:  Yeah, I think that’s important. I think Becky touched on it earlier and I think Mel touched on some of it there just now. Sticking with the optimism for a second, in terms of the skills required for Smart Local Energy Systems and for net zero more broadly... they’re not necessarily specific, although some of them are but there are lots of opportunities across the board in anything from industry trade fitters and installers which require their own incentives and their own support through to project managers with expertise in the energy system, to data and digital and... I don’t want to say soft skills but those more sorts of communications, engagement, convening and those skills across the board here that are required and opportunities, I would say.

When Louise talks about a community like the one that she’s been working with in Rugeley and I know communities that I’ve worked with separately from different PFER work, it’s not just for graduates. I think you’re spot on, Matt, and I know that’s not what you were trying to say but there are other opportunities there. What we lack just now is that wider spread and that longer-term pipeline that Louise was talking about there. I guess it’s recognition of that opportunity in action is a nice way to put it. 

Melanie:  Yeah, I think also not forgetting the entrepreneurs [laughter] and risk-takers as well. Not everyone’s idea is to go into a nice big company graduate job. There needs to be people who are prepared to really stake everything on their idea and absolutely think it is the right thing to do. We’ve seen a bit of that on the project with some of the start-ups that we’ve had involved with things like aggregators and people putting their own platforms out there. That is really important in terms of some of those gaps that are not going to be filled by the larger companies and so we also need people who are entrepreneurs and risk-takers who are going to be able to do that sort of thing as well. 

Rebecca:  Just on that, I think it’s really interesting to hear what’s happening, Mel, particularly in SSEN and perhaps the electricity network sector where you are talking about quite big companies and providing these different diverse career paths in. Interestingly, we talked a bit about the fact that a lot of this is going to see changes on the demand side for people and for a lot of those technologies. When you start to look at those smaller-scale technologies, like heat pumps and the like and perhaps even retrofit that has to underpin some of those changes, that industry seems to be made up of a different nature to the networks. We see a lot of smaller businesses like SMEs and so on. How are they reacting?

Louise, the project you’re involved in is quite diverse and there’s a lot of engagement with that end community. Are you seeing a challenge in that kind of smaller industry space? If so, what do we need to be doing differently to make sure that there’s a diverse career pathway in the same way that we’re starting to see it emerge in those electricity networks? 

Louise:  I think it comes back to that pipeline where the SMEs really need to invest in upskilling their workforce to be able to understand all of the new technologies and to collaborate, as Mel said at the beginning, with other partners that are normally siloed out. Those people currently aren’t being trained because there isn’t an idea of a long-term need for that kind of skill set. I think that large companies can have more facility for investing in innovation without necessarily seeing the pipeline because the business model is just different. Whereas, SMEs really need that turnaround permanently of making sure that every investment needs to be revenue-backed on a longer-term, seven-year cycle or whatever it is.

Everyone talks about net zero but I mean BEIS shut down yesterday, so where is the security in anything anymore? 

Matt:  Without sounding like I’m doing too much market research for the business school I work for because these are the kinds of things we’re thinking about and how we can tool businesses up to do this... Louise and Mel, what kind of support do these companies need? We have a relatively short period of time to skill people up and to inform companies to make the right decisions about net zero. We’ve got one shot at this to avoid climate breakdown, so we need to be in the best position possible. What kind of support would you like to see out there? 

Louise:  I think there is quite a lot of support out there for SMEs. There’s a lot of free training that is available for specific regions or there is still a lot of support through EURO DF to help SMEs transition. So they’re the ones that need to transition themselves and the ones that have the workforce that needs to upskill or change its ways of working. The problem is really that in that support, it’s not necessarily thought about that SMEs don’t have time to send their staff on a week’s training. How do you incentivise? I don’t have a solution. I wish I did. How do you incentivise SMEs and how do you enable them to get that training that they actually desperately need with that transition that could enable them?

We’ve put out some training, for example, to get people upskilled and three companies did reach out but all of these companies are already a bit in that sector. They’re basically going to benefit from growing on that which is absolutely great but some other SMEs we reached out to, where there was grant money available to do some work, most companies just didn’t come back to us because they’re aware that they’re going to need to spend a day explaining to us their operations and all of that. They then lose that day, even though in the end they will get a solar panel or whatever it is that will save them their bills but they are not able to make those decisions because there’s not enough money in the system. 

Fraser:  Louise, you talked right at the very beginning about the importance of engagement and working with communities and supporting communities to take the lead and this has shaken out across all of the PFER work that we’ve looked into and we chatted about. How critical are those engagement and those capacity-building skills for developing these projects at scale, appreciating that these are changes to how people are expected to use the energy system and get around their towns and cities, etcetera? How crucial are these engagement and community-facing skills? 

Louise:  I think it’s critical [laughter]. You said that already. How critical? All the way up critical. Without the communities, the solutions won’t be adequate and won’t be picked up and if they don’t pick them up, then we might as well not. Quite frankly, there are so many initiatives that have been tried.

After National Grid put out that call to say, ‘You can get paid to not use your electricity,’ I went on to their Twitter and had a look. It was all about saying, ‘The system is unfair.’ It was just about a lack of understanding about the opportunity of that system and about the tariffs. So it’s essential that we bring in the communities and that the solution is fit for the community and not for the designer that sits somewhere completely different and doesn’t understand the context and the background of those communities. 

Fraser:  Mel, any final thoughts on that? 

Melanie:  Having worked on LEO with lots of different groups, be they community groups or local authorities, it is absolutely key that there is an understanding of the way that these energy markets work and it isn’t very easy to understand at the moment. We really have worked well with them to be able to bring that knowledge up and without the people onboard, then we’re not really going to be able to deliver what we need. That is a really important point when it comes to engagement. 

[Music flourish] 

Matt:  I’d like normally wrap things up by asking you to summarise some of the key thoughts that you’ve had in just a few words. The question I’d like to put, initially to Mel, please... in no more than 10-15 words, if you were asking our new minister, what would be your number one plea in terms of making sure that we’re net-zero fit in terms of skills and supply chain? If you had one ask, what would you be asking? 

Melanie:  I’d be asking to make sure that we have the right number of places for people to go and study the technology-type subjects that we’re going to need; not just engineering but all your data and digital as well and making sure that we’ve got a really strong cohort of those skills coming up through our universities. 

Matt:  Wonderful... and very clear and very valuable Thank you. Louise, you’ve got one policy ask and only one. 

Louise:  That’s really difficult [laughter]. I think I would ask for a defined pipeline and programme to be created with a ringfenced finance piece behind it that enables that delivery of net zero. 

[Music flourish] 

Matt:  Lovely. Well, I want to thank you, Louise. Thank you, Mel, very much for your insights. It’s been a pleasure having you along and we look forward to hearing more about your respective projects. Thank you. 

Melanie:  That’s great. Thank you. 

[Music flourish] 

Matt:  You’ve been listening to Local Zero. Remember to join us next week for our next PFER special episode on impact and engagement. If you haven’t already, go and subscribe to the pod wherever you get your podcasts. Find and follow us @LocalZeroPod on Twitter and also, we’re trending on Mastodon at #LocalZeroPod or if you want a longer form email, LocalZeroPod@gmail.com. There you can share some longer thoughts. 

Fraser:  If you do have one spare minute, please leave a review if you can and help us climb our way up the podcast charts but for now, thank you very much and goodbye. 

Matt:  Bye-bye. 

Rebecca:  Bye. 

Fraser:  Bye, bye, bye. 

[Music flourish]