62: Prospering From the Energy Revolution 4 - Impact and Engagement
Concluding our four-part mini-series focusing on the work of Innovate UK's Prospering From the Energy Revolution (PFER) Programme, Matt and Fraser chat with Eva Goudouneix from Repowering London and Jamie Rea from the Electric Storage Company. This week: how to engage the public with energy projects and technology.
Episode Transcript:
[Music flourish]
Matt: Hello and welcome to Local Zero. 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. Energy-smart places bring together energy supply, demand, people and infrastructure locally in a really smart way.
Fraser: This is the fourth and final weekly episode of our mini-series, covering some of the very exciting findings from smart local energy projects that have been funded through the UK Government’s Prospering From the Energy Revolution programme or PFER for short. All three of our previous chats on policy, finance and skills are available now wherever you get your pods.
Matt: This week, we’ll be focusing on how these cutting-edge projects have impacted and engaged with citizens and communities. Joining us later are Eva Goudouneix from Repowering London and Jamie Rea from the Electric Storage Company, so more from them later on.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: As ever, if you’re a fan of Local Zero, do take a couple of quick seconds to subscribe and follow us on Twitter @LocalZeroPod. If you’re on Mastodon, then you can reach us at #LocalZeroPod. You can also find us on our website, LocalZeroPod.com or send questions to our email at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com
Matt: No stone unturned there, Fraser [laughter]. Plenty of ways to contact us if you need us.
Fraser: We’re extremely well-branded [laughter].
Matt: So how are you? How are you getting on?
Fraser: I’m good, Matt. How have things been with you?
Matt: Good, yes. This has been something of a marathon of episodes. We’ve been churning these out weekly. I don’t know about you but I feel punchdrunk from getting all these out but I have to say, it’s been excellent fun and we’ve learnt a tremendous amount. I’m just glad we recorded it to play it back to ourselves [laughter] to remind us what we should know.
Fraser: Absolutely, absolutely. I think one of the key takeaways from all of this is that even doing weekly episodes just isn’t enough time to get into all of the exciting things happening in this space; all the work that’s been going on, all the lessons that have been learnt and all the impacts and all the things happening going forward. It’s massive but it is exciting. That’s the key word I think.
Matt: And just how quickly this space is moving forward in terms of what our homes and our workplaces might look like, not just in the distant future but within the next few years because this is what this programme is set up to do is to provide proof of concept; not just proof of concept but actually getting this in people’s homes and workplaces and to show this works, this can save people money, this can bring emissions down and, ultimately, and this is the big one, make your life a little bit better.
Fraser: Absolutely. The amount of work and the sheer scale of work, when you think about it, and even with our three – this will be four – little episodes about Prospering From the Energy Revolution programme which is one of a few spaces where innovation here is happening and the main space where innovation on Local Energy Systems is happening, the scale of that work from these episodes with the topics we’ve covered and the projects that we’ve covered from the GreenSCIES project in London to the project in Oxford in Oxfordshire, to Orkney... the amount of ground is massive.
Matt: UK-wide and that’s really important to demonstrate. This isn’t just concentrated in one...
Fraser: It is, it is.
Matt: ...borough or region. This is something that all UK citizens can benefit from and, I guess, the value of today’s episode is how we engage with these citizens. How do we articulate the types of impacts that they’ll feel? How do we encourage them to sign up? Because, ultimately, this is going to go from what is a grant-funded programme where individuals, households and companies are being asked to sign up for some kind of benefit but, ultimately, to generate knowledge and being part of the experiment. This is going to be on the open market in due course. In fact, many of these systems are already. We’ve got to encourage them to think differently and to actually put their money where their mouth is.
Fraser: This is crucial. This is crucial. This isn’t a nice-to-have. This isn’t a distant, faraway concept. This is in terms of ways that we can fully address the climate emergency. Bearing in mind that’s our primary concern, it’s about addressing that and supporting a just transition in the energy system. The opportunity from Smart Local Energy Systems is massive and the demonstration from initiatives like this has brought us forward leaps and bounds. I think that point on citizens and communities came out of our previous episode with Louise Alter from Equans, who has been on a few different projects, and she raised this element of the impact on citizens and communities and how you engage with people within this process is so, so fundamental. Ultimately, this is how you heat your home. This is how you interact, whether that’s with your bills or with your local community and how you get around your town or your city. All of these things have an impact directly on you and doing it at that local level, with those lessons, we can bring that even closer to people which is why it’s so crucial to make sure that we’re doing all we can to bring people everywhere on board and not just those who can afford it as well.
Matt: I’ve been rather inspired by what we’ve heard over the last few episodes and I have actually put my name forward to become – I shouldn’t say guinea pig – a guinea pig in one of these projects and I’m rather excited. I haven’t been selected yet, I might say, but it’s for the Energy Systems Catapult’s Living Lab. I put my name forward to be part of their Tado trial. It’s for smart thermostats and smart radiators. Some people will get excited by that; some people may be hitting the snooze button [laughter] but if you can think about something that’s going to shave 10-20% off your gas bill, that becomes exciting. If you’re maybe in a larger house or even not a particularly big one but you’ve got a spare room or whatever, you can remotely control these and turn them off and turn them back on when you need them. Anyway, watch this space. I’m going to potentially have somebody in tearing up carpets and putting in all sorts of gizmos and gadgets [laughter]. Yeah, I could be very excited about that. From a learning experience, we’ll see how these individuals and how these citizens feel firsthand because they’re putting their trust in these projects to make sure that they’re looking after them but they’re going to be treated well and positively impacted.
Fraser: That’s super exciting. It’s super, super exciting. I don’t want to sound like I’ve just discovered innovation but it’s happening all the time and it’s around us all the time. There’s a lot more happening just now in terms of innovation with people in their homes and how you interact with the energy system. We’ve covered before the big turndown and the work with National Grid to get people to reduce the demand at peak times and things like Smart Local Energy Systems. I find that really, really fascinating in terms of the process of innovation and some of the key opportunities from that but how you engage people within that process, I’ve always found it fascinating. So I look forward, Matt, to hearing about your experience on that.
Matt: Well, yeah, and hopefully, positive but either way, you’ll hear from me [laughter] because that’s what we’re here for. I think what I’d say about that engagement piece is we’re facing energy bills going up again on 1st April and people will be thinking, ‘Oh, no! Not again.’ It’s not really being publicised in the way I’d like to see it. For everybody, this will effectively be – or for most people, this will effectively be a 43% rise. It will be a 20% rise on the Energy Price Guarantee, plus you’re losing your £400 grant. For the average dual-fuel direct debit bill payer, that’s going up from £2,100 to £3,000 on 1st April. Hopefully, your jaws haven’t hit the floor entirely at that point. On that engagement piece, I think that’s what really, for me, spurred on the public’s appetite to engage with these new technologies, new services and new tariffs because how else are you going to crunch these bills? Lord knows I’ve tried to do it myself but trying to take a leaky, old, 1920s house – 100 years old – and crank up that efficiency, you can’t do that overnight. Actually, some of these things are potentially a much quicker hit. Yeah, it’s been a horrible period for the country but I am positive about what this might mean for people’s mindset going forward; an appetite for this kind of stuff.
Fraser: I’ve been asked the question a few times. Are people more literate with energy these days? Do people understand it more? I think, to a massive degree, yes but to a larger degree, people are questioning it more and asking where the solutions are. What can we do differently? We talk a lot, on this pod, about ourselves and people that we know who might have their own solar panels or batteries or who might be more smart tech-inclined or innovation-inclined and able to afford or are willing to find a way to afford those kinds of things. I’ve found that in work that I’ve been doing recently in community centres... I was at a community climate assembly event a couple of weeks ago in Aberdeen but even just regular conversations with my friends and family and people everywhere. This isn’t just the purview of the middle classes who might be able to afford it and have the roof space. People everywhere understand that change is happening, that change needs to happen and that there’s a potential benefit on offer. What we need to do, as an industry, sector or however we define ourselves, is figure out how best to capture that and channel it for something much bigger; for everyone’s benefit, for the planet’s benefit and all that good stuff.
Matt: Yeah, that literacy is a really interesting point. I’m going to show my true colours here and just how sad and potentially middle class I actually am. I ended up having about a 20-minute conversation with my mum on the phone about the best time to put on your dishwasher or your slow cooker. That’s seriously [laughter] scrapping the bottom of the barrel in terms of conversations. Getting into this, it was about saving money, still retaining that quality of life and doing things slightly differently. She was teaching me stuff [laughter]. I’ve been around the block on this subject for quite a while and she was saying, ‘Did you know this? Did you know that?’ So maybe there is something in this crisis in terms of driving that literacy but, as you say, a lot of it boils down to whether you have the autonomy. Do you have the disposable income to make those interventions?
Fraser: This is a critical issue as well and something that actually delivering energy more locally provides new opportunities for because part of doing this fairly is ensuring that people are engaged with, brought into the process meaningfully and that they have an ongoing role within that process, as well as the ability to benefit. That speaks really, really neatly to the topic of our session today. So I think without any further ado, let’s bring in the guests.
[Music flourish]
Jamie: Hi there, my name is Jamie Rea. I’m the Operations Director for the Electric Storage Company. I was responsible for delivering Project Girona in Coleraine, Northern Ireland.
Eva: Hi, everyone. My name is Eva and I work for a community energy development organisation called Repowering London. I’m here to talk about a project that we worked on recently called GreenSCIES in the North of London in Islington.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Eva and Jamie, lovely to have you along. It’s an absolute pleasure. Today, we’re talking very much about citizen and community impacts of Smart Local Energy Systems but also how we engage communities but before we get into the weeds on this, I was hoping that each of you could tell us a little bit more about your respective organisations and some of the Prospering From the Energy Revolution programme projects that you’ve been involved with, particularly what’s different about them, what’s exciting about them and, ultimately, what kinds of changes they might mean down the line for people. I wonder, Eva, if we might begin with you.
Eva: Sure. Thank you, Matt. I’m happy to be here. I work for an organisation called Repowering London and what do is we support communities in London to create renewable energy projects. These renewable energy projects can take multiple forms. So far, they’ve been mostly solar panel projects but we also do a lot around supporting people in fuel poverty. Our vision is really to try and build a greener and fairer energy system that works for everyone and that belongs to people. I’m the Community Engagement Programme Manager and so I’m involved in everything that is community-facing. Yes, the PFER project that we worked on is called GreenSCIES. It’s in Islington. The last phase of this project was to produce a detailed design for a Smart Local Energy System in Islington. I thought what was super exciting about it was that the project was around heating, cooling, solar, EV and smart control; so this integration of loads of different elements. The coolest thing was that for the heating part, the idea was to reuse waste heat from a local data centre.
Matt: It really brings that local place focus...
Eva: Exactly.
Matt: ...right into the heart of that design because you’re looking around you and saying, ‘What are the sources of heat and how can we utilise that?’
Eva: Exactly.
Matt: Fantastic. Jamie, over to you, please.
Jamie: The Electric Storage Company won UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) funding to deliver a detailed design called Project Girona, named after the famous Spanish galleon that foundered off the north coast of Ireland. It was basically to demonstrate that renewable generation coupled with behind-the-meter storage with intelligent management would have a positive impact on the local community, local businesses and charities, agriculture, etcetera, and also have a positive impact on the local electricity infrastructure and network in the surrounding area so we can reduce infrastructure costs. Really, this all comes back to one of our co-founders, Eddie McGoldrick, who worked in the electricity industry for 30 years and always found that it was very opaque. You got what you were given. He wanted to empower people and businesses, etcetera, and the way he went about doing that was to put the control in their hands in terms of the technology, storage and generation but also the data. The data is the key thing for us. What am I generating? What am I consuming? What am I exporting? What am I doing with my electricity?
Fraser: Excellent. Thanks, Jamie. We’ve been speaking about these projects and projects around them as part of the PFER programme for the last few weeks and something that we keep coming back to every time is this citizens’ and communities’ piece. Eva, I was wondering if you could set out for us why... for you, for Repowering London and for GreenSCIES, why putting citizens and communities at the heart of our thinking on this is so important.
Eva: Yeah, sure. I mean at Repowering London, that’s the core of what we do; putting people at the heart of designing the future of energy. The reason why we think it’s so important is that we’ve built an energy system that doesn’t work for the planet and doesn’t really work for the people either as we can see with what’s happening now. So if we want to build something that works for the future, we believe that it’s extremely important to put people at the centre of it, especially people who have been most disadvantaged by the design of the current system. What’s really important for us is working with communities that have been underserved in the current system and really getting them to support the design of the future. I think that’s why we’ve been called to work on GreenSCIES because, as you say, it’s a very place-based approach and so it was very important for the other stakeholders working on the project that Islington residents would be at the centre of designing this system.
Fraser: Jamie, the same question for you.
Jamie: For us, one of the aspects of the Girona project aims was to demonstrate the benefits of local generation and storage with intelligent management on the local electricity network. All our project participants were connected to a single substation called Loguestown. Loguestown serves a particularly deprived of Northern Ireland called the Ballysally Estate with a lot of social housing and very low employment. We were really driven by helping the local residents with putting generation and storage devices into their properties. They’re getting them for free and they have them for free in perpetuity to help them out but also, it was about what effect we could have in the local area as well. The nice thing about that was to see, once the local population started to understand the benefits that this would bring to them and to the local area, how quickly the uptake started to come through. We really struggled at the start with that. One of the issues we had with the project was convincing people they were going to get £14,000 worth of kit and equipment put in their homes. They all thought it was too good to be true. We then got our first participant who decided to go with us. He was an electrician and he knew exactly what it was all about and after that, it just snowballed. Again, it comes down to how little people understand about this technology, what it can do and the benefits it can bring. I’m not talking about your average Joe or Josephine on the road. We’re talking about councils. We’re talking about social housing landlords and the commercial sector, etcetera.
Eva: Just to add something that definitely resonates with what Jamie is talking about, I also think that because people have so much distrust towards the current energy system and have such low understanding of the different actors and what’s going on, engaging citizens on energy projects is a complex thing to do and that’s been a challenge for us as well because our engagement has been very much focused on residents living on the estates which were part of this heating, cooling and solar system. Engaging residents on these topics is difficult but these topics are associated with a lot of fear. It’s a big thing which is why we specialise in that.
Matt: So how do you overcome that?
Eva: There are loads of things and that’s the expertise that we’ve been building for the past ten years. For me, when I started working on that specific project, what I really noticed was that when you’ve got loads of energy experts working on something, it’s so easy to end up putting together communication materials that are really hard for people to understand. Even for me, when I started working on it and having studied energy, there was so much I didn’t get because it was a complex project and the terms that we use are just so technical. That’s a general thing that I feel strongly about is that we are making energy too technical very often but if we want these projects to be approachable and accessible for most people, we need to steer away a bit from this technical jargon. One of my first things, when I started working on it, was trying to really break down the terms and make everything much, much simpler.
Matt: I completely take that on and I think that’s part and parcel of what we try and do on this pod is to translate many of these complex issues into a language people understand. That communication element is very important. What, though, are you looking to communicate with them about? Are there certain issues that you’re wanting to engage with them about that you find you get more traction on? I guess whilst you’re not actually selling them anything... although, in a sense, you’re trying to get buy-in rather than a purchase, you’re still trying to sell them a vision.
Eva: An idea, yeah.
Matt: So what kind of values are they looking for?
Eva: Yeah, sure. One of the big things about this project, GreenSCIES, was that we wanted this system to be co-designed with residents. The reason for that is a new system like a heating network, which was the big thing of this project, implies more infrastructure. It implies building an energy centre next to people’s estates and so we wanted these energy centres to be co-designed with residents. We needed to talk about this project and we needed people to understand the project so that then they could feed into the design and do this with the experts together. It was not only about the buy-in but we actually wanted people to actively participate in designing this thing.
Jamie: There are a couple of things there. I would agree totally with what Eva is saying. We found this in our own project team. We were all immersed in this project, we knew what it was about and we knew what the detail was. We were producing content and flyers, etcetera, that really, for your average person, they didn’t quite get and it didn’t land with them. We rapidly understood. We kicked the project off as the first lockdown came in which frustrated us somewhat as well [laughter] because we couldn’t go face-to-face with people. That aside, we ended up with a very simple A4 flipchart. We walked people through our project and said, ‘This is what it looks like. This is what the battery looks like.’ People thought it was going to be a car battery under their sink and not a 10 kWh hour battery which is the same sort of dimensions as a fridge freezer (not quite as deep) going into their home. The one lesson that we really learnt from people was to say, ‘What do you want? What are your requirements from your electricity?’ It was about asking them that question and that was a very easy way to engage with them and then for them to engage with us because they could put it in their own words that we could then translate into slightly more technical terms for the installation team, etcetera. It was very simple what we were doing. It was roughly the same model going into each property but we still had to have the tenant or the owner buy-in to do this and they had to understand it. We referred to solar panels as PVs but they didn’t know what that was and we had to change our language. They thought their whole roof was going to have to come off and that this was going to be six weeks’ work to get the battery and the PV system in; whereas, at our height, we were doing it in about three-quarters of a day – in and out, done. The great thing about our project, and I’m sure, Eva, you’ve had it with your projects as well, was getting positive feedback from our customers and our participants. We had a social housing tenant and we brought their landlords up to see them and to visit the installation so that they could see what was going into their property. They asked the owner what she thought of it and she reached into her back pocket, pulled out her phone and said, ‘There is my consumption. There is my generation. That’s how much I’ve got in the battery. I can now make a decision about whether I can put the washing machine on right now. Can I put the heating on right now?’ She was better informed. In Northern Ireland, we don’t have smart metering over here and so that’s really, really important for our participants and it was really novel and empowered them as well.
Fraser: I love that principle of not just securing buy-in but trying to support more meaningful engagement throughout and helping to shape it. Putting more colour to the picture, within your respective projects, what does that engagement look like? How have people actually shaped the design of your respective projects and how have they kept on shaping that, if that’s been the case?
Eva: For us, in different ways, one of the ways was co-designing these energy centres. We’ve literally shown drawings to people and together we’ve decided it could go here next to the estate on this side or on this side. There could be plants and maybe we could use the space to do a barbecue on top of the energy centre. There was loads of stuff that residents were proposing and that we included in design options and so there was this aspect. As Jamie was saying, I think for us, this project was an opportunity to try and solve some issues that residents were having anyway because it was an infrastructure project and it meant going into people’s houses and doing some work. When you go to an estate like that, there are probably some things that people want to get sorted and this project was an opportunity for that. There was also that co-design but we did talk a lot with residents about their current issues, whether it was about their heating, hot water, general maintenance and things like that, that GreenSCIES could help solve. I would say these were the two main elements that residents really had an influence on.
Jamie: For Girona, we always took feedback from our project participants and that was interesting. Once the system was in, it was in. There wasn’t a great deal more that they could really do with it, except report back to us about what worked and what didn’t. Where we did get some really interesting feedback was from the DNO which is NEI Networks in Northern Ireland and the utility regulator which is our equivalent of Ofgem. The engagement we got from both of these organisations was significant. One of the project team said that they’d seen lightbulb moments with what this technology was actually doing and how we were providing them hard data which they could plan on. For instance, we were talking about if we were to scale Girona into a large town or city, what would that mean? The fact was that we could play back to them 24 months’ worth of data and say, ‘Actually, this is the effect it’s having on your local network.’ One of the lightbulb moments they had was when they said, ‘Actually, the wear and tear on the local network is not going to be as high and, therefore, we’re not digging up roads. Whereas, if you had a straight-out solar panel PV system there, there may be the odd sunny day that we have in Northern Ireland and a huge export which can cause significant wear and tear on the network. Actually, if you put a battery in front of that with smart management and optimisation, that reduces that significantly and that peak at 6 o’clock in the morning or 6 o’clock in the evening when we all get up, go to work and we all come back and flick the kettle on, that’s levelled out.’ It’s not just the participants but our stakeholders who were really getting a lot of good information and data out of this that they’re starting to look at using and informing future planning, the next five to eight-year planning rounds.
Matt: There are a couple of things happening here. Jamie, what you’re pointing at there primarily is about having insight and data to be able to make better decisions around design which can then inform maybe a little bit more about what Eva was talking about there which is about bringing the community into that co-design and that participatory process. Eva, what I’d like to maybe just press you on a bit further is that I was really taken with your point about some of the community wanting to engage with the design of these projects because there was other stuff that wasn’t necessarily energy-related but they just wanted to get dealt with. This is something that I’ve certainly seen from some of the research we’ve looked at in terms of retrofitting tenement buildings in Glasgow or Victorian mansion blocks, essentially, and often, it’s about repairing these buildings rather than making them more energy efficient but there’s an opportunity for intervention. I just wanted to ask you, what were some of the common things that came up time and time again that really mattered to the community? It might not necessarily be energy-related but just... ‘Oh, we’ve heard that before.’
Eva: As part of this network that we were designing, we chose estates that had a communal heating system because it was then relatively easy to change the heating source when there is communal heating for the whole building. People were talking about the lack of flexibility of the communal heating system and the fact that sometimes, the heating was on for too long or too short. They were talking about the history of maintenance and repairs around the system and some dissatisfactions that they’d had in the past. There was loads of stuff about the current communal heating system. That was one of the big things that we ended up talking about and then the other big thing really was around cost. What was quite hard with engagement on this project was that we were talking about the very early stages of a project and we were designing something. We were just making plans and we wanted to talk to people about these plans but obviously, people are very focused on how much it was going to cost and what it would mean for their bills. We didn’t even really know that yet because we were at such an early stage that it was very hard to say, especially when you’re working with council estates which have their own billing system for the communal heating. It’s all really complex and then you want to engage people.
Matt: Yeah, and quite place-specific. I remember my sister living in the South of London in an old Victorian mansion block with a district heating system. Goodness knows how old it was but the service charge just to keep that thing running... it was all bills in but I think it goes back to a really important that value is relative and it’s benchmarked against what you currently have. I think that’s really interesting that you were asking those questions. Jamie, is there something that came up with the communities you were dealing with time and time again? What were the top three things that bothered them and they wanted to be dealt with or opportunities?
Jamie: The first thing that hit us straight off the bat, and I’m sure any smart electricity system that’s going in, and I’ve got no doubt, Eva, your projects will be the same, there has to be some sort of broadband connection for the thing to work. It was absolutely heartbreaking when you’d go to some of these tenants and say, ‘Are you happy for this to go in?’ They’re saying, ‘Yeah, we’d love to,’ but they couldn’t afford broadband. We couldn’t put the system in because our solution did not have a 2G or GPRS signal note. As I mentioned, our project kicked off just as the first pandemic lockdown kicked in. You’re lucky if these households have one device in there that three or four children are getting homeschooled from but they don’t have a broadband connection. We engaged with the local council and local charities in the area to see if we could do something about that but it’s a perennial problem. I’m not saying they were rolling their eyes. They weren’t rolling their eyes but you could see they’d been around this buoy a few times before in terms of this is a problem that we need to sort out. For some of those properties and some of those households that we would have dearly loved to have deployed our kit and equipment in and they would have benefited massively from them, we just couldn’t do it because the solution just would not work. We’ve looked at products out there that we can have and if the social landlord will fund it, they will have a 3G or a GPRS-linked inverter so we can do that. There were other issues that they just didn’t know about. For instance, one of the community centres that had a foodbank in it didn’t have a three-phase supply, already had an electric fire and had looped services going into it. It was just a nightmare and we had to sort all that out before we got our kit and equipment in. We had to deal with the landlord and the local DNO to do all that. Apart from the savings in terms of CO2 and pounds, shillings and pence, they ended up with a better property at the end of it or a better location.
Matt: For me, time and time again, these offerings are not positioned as a package of value. It’s not just about emissions or bills. As you say, it’s about a better home, connectivity, telephony and being able to connect remotely to the wider world. Eva, your point around maintenance and upkeep of your property... you started to talk about civic infrastructure like a barbecue on top of an energy centre. For me, that’s the way into these communities and to talk about their lives in the round. I’ll pause there because I can see Fraser is looking very pensive and this is where he normally says something [laughter].
Fraser: It was on this entirely. I’ll be quick. I come from the Northeast of Scotland, as listeners know, and we were facilitating an event around this; a kind of co-design event or citizens’ assembly style thing. It was in quite a rundown area in Aberdeen and it was looking into what a Local Energy System or even just some kind of retrofit efficiency service might look like in the area. That rings really, really true; tying it to the local issues and issues that have been dealing with the longest, longest time. I come from a community like that and invariably, it’s building from those initial issues to then understanding the opportunity or applicability. I’m not sure what the right word is in that case. What I want to come in on is whether we have to be thinking differently depending on who we’re engaging or where we’re engaging. We talked a lot about making sure engagement is meaningful and talked a lot about co-design but does engagement look different to you for different communities or do you think we have a way to do these fundamental principles that we can apply anywhere? I appreciate that’s a big question.
Eva: Yeah, a big question [laughter]. I mean there are fundamental principles that we can apply anywhere but I definitely think that you need to adapt. Who you are talking to is very important and at Repowering, when we do community engagement, we take very much a local approach. As you say, each area has its own history, issues and opportunities and it’s super important to base your engagement on that. You can’t just use the same template everywhere. You’ve really got to work with what’s going on in the area.
Fraser: Yeah, and Jamie, is this an advantage of a more local approach to energy?
Jamie: Yeah, and no one likes stuff being done to them. If you have the community with you, they will support it. We did an awful lot of outreach beforehand and we did the individual engagement with local community leaders, the local council and their community teams and charities in the area. We were doing an awful lot of work around that and asking, ‘What are the key drivers for the local residents?’ Just because that’s a key driver for Area A and Area B, it may be something completely different or something similar. We worked very, very hard to build that confidence. I think whenever we first arrived on site, people viewed us very much as double-glazing salesmen and that’s something we worked hard to get away from [laughter]. The other thing is the education piece and the awareness. What we were proposing, no one had ever really discussed this with anyone before and what it meant to them. Whenever you’re engaging with communities or with individuals in a community that you’re targeting, good questions to ask are, ‘What do you want? What is it you’d really like from this?’ Because then it’s a psychological step for them to open up to say, ‘I want to reduce my electricity bill. I want to have a better understanding of what’s going on with my electricity.’ That’s when you say, ‘We can do this. We can do that.’ Basically, one of the things we wanted to get across to our participants was to say, ‘You don’t have to do a thing. Yes, this may seem to you a complex solution going in but we’re going to make it easy for you. You’ll get this data. You can see it and you can make informed decisions off the back of it.’
[Music flourish]
Matt: I just had a question here about the costs and benefits and distributing these in a fair and just fashion. Something that we often talk about on this show is a just transition and obviously, certain communities or members of communities are going to be more or less able to afford these types of systems and then also, some may be better positioned to benefit from them. From these projects and the learnings that you’ve had, are there any top tips that you have around ensuring that the costs and also benefits of these systems are apportioned fairly? Is this something that you’ve been having to grapple with?
Eva: What I’ve grappled with is the complexity of this question because with the estates that we were working with, you’ve got leaseholders and tenants and so it means that when there’s a project like this, the leaseholders or tenants are not going to bear the same cost. We realised that when we started talking about cost, pricing and bills, sometimes the council, for instance, had a pooling system where it was pooling all the costs and then billing people the same amount. Do you have to change that and make it proportionate to the service of the flats or do you actually have to use a metering system? Do you have to do it depending on their income? These are such big questions and we didn’t know at the time because it’s complex and it’s something that you also really need to involve the local authorities in.
Matt: Goodness! That is complex [laughter]... size of the property or income.
Eva: Sorry.
Matt: No, these are the things you’ve got to grapple with. Jamie, is there anything you’d like to add there?
Jamie: For Girona, it was artificial. The tenants and the owner occupiers didn’t have to pay for a thing. We were giving them this for free and it’s amazing how many people said, ‘I don’t want solar panels on my roof.’
Fraser: Really?
Jamie: [Laughter] Do you know what the technology is going to do behind that? It’s purely down to the aesthetics? I think those people are now probably kicking themselves now that electricity prices have skyrocketed. To answer your question, exactly the same as Eva, around dealing with landlords. We stayed clear of private landlords because they were just a nightmare to deal with. Social housing landlords were completely different and they were bought in. Actually, we had the major one in Northern Ireland as one of our stakeholders. It’s quite a difficult question to answer if I’m honest with you, Matt, because each location is different. The drivers in each location are different. We were going into a large housing estate of 775 properties that, from the outside, all looked the same but as soon as you walked into them, they were all different. They’d been knocked around. They’d had walls removed and they’d walls put it. Some had lifts put inside them for people with disabilities. No two were ever the same and so it was always different.
Matt: For me, there’s an element here when you start to progress beyond these design and demonstration projects when you’re entering that free-market environment where you’re having to ask questions like how are we financing this, what kind of legal structures and governance structures are needed. Particularly, Eva, with some of the projects that you’re talking about on housing estates, do you have a residents’ committee? In terms of finance, is it one vote per share or one vote per shareholder? These raise some prickly issues which you have to manage when you’re incorporating these things.
Eva: Definitely. At Repowering London, we do community energy and so they’re energy projects owned by people. With Smart Local Energy Systems, it’s like a new area and these systems are going to be bigger and more expensive. How do we add some community ownership elements to this? What governance structures are needed, knowing that the local authority is going to also want maybe a partnership with a company? You’ve then got a community local authority company. We’re going to figure it out but it just takes time because it’s also new territory.
Jamie: I also think there’s better awareness of this technology which can help with that. I know, Fraser, that in Scotland, if you’re looking to upgrade your own home to insulate it against price rises or heat loss, there’s a free service there that the Scottish Government provide that you can phone and they can advise you and say, ‘You can get a grant for this,’ or ‘You qualify for that.’ That’s there for if you’re on Universal Credit or you’re a dentist or whatever it is. It’s there. That’s where I think we have a failing in the other nations in the United Kingdom. There’s no one-stop-shop and it’s something that we’ve been working on with the Assembly in Northern Ireland to say, ‘We know we’ve got a climate emergency. We know people want to do stuff. How can you make this information easily available and easily understandable?’
Fraser: This comes up for us all the time. We do a lot of work around, like we said, just transition and fuel poverty as well with the Scottish Government. Jamie, in particular, this isn’t just about engagement but also about impacts. In the trial that Girona ran, what have the impacts been for citizens and for the wider community?
Jamie: With Girona, we installed 60 batteries in various different properties: two community centres, three dairy farms, one commercial basis and the rest was a mixture of residential, both social housing and privately owned. Over a 12-month period, Girona saved, on average, 55% in terms of electricity bills. We generated 171 megawatt hours of green electricity and 31 megawatt hours were exported. We would prefer that our participants held on to as much of that electricity as possible because if you’re paying 28p a unit from the grid or from your retailer, you’re going to say that if you have it in your battery and you use it later, it’s worth 28p per unit. There’s that aspect. We saved 40.2 tons of CO2 which is the equivalent of taking 19 family cars off the road for a year. Those were the savings from the project but we also enabled our participants to earn. We had the FLEX project which was network services running at the same time by NIE Networks which Girona was part of. I think there were 28 participants on the FLEX project who got renumerated to about £25 per household or per installation because they were providing network services back onto the electricity network in that area. This is a first for Ireland where behind-the-meter storage has been used in that respect. That’s what we’re saying to people; not only can you save with this technology and our energy management platform but you can also earn. We’re looking to go further with that on the commercial side where we’re actually looking at things like energy trading and working with the Day-Ahead Energy Market. If you’ve got enough people in a community or a business with enough storage, they can sell and buy electricity wholesale so that they can take advantage of those peaks and troughs. Actually, if you have someone like the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, the largest social housing landlord in Europe with over 86,000 units, suddenly that becomes an interesting prospect for them because part of your tenants’ rent is going to be their electricity as well all lumped in. They’re not paying a retailer for that. The Housing Executive could potentially provide that for them as a standard charge, say £40 a month or whatever it is up to a certain level. These are the possibilities that we’re exploring because if you have this technology en masse, these opportunities start to become more and more of a reality.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Thank you so much for all of your insights. Normally, we end each episode by giving you the opportunity to summarise all that you know in just 10-15 words, so no pressure. But what we’d really like to hear... imagine you’re pitching to the new Minister of DESNZ (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero). Is that what we’re going with now, Fraser?
Fraser: DESNZ.
Matt: Okay, the new Minister of DESNZ or at least the old Minister of BEIS (Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy). I know this is increasingly on their agenda about community engagement to maximise positive impact. Just in a few words, what would be the number one thing you’d be telling them to do?
Eva: Okay, sure. I think something that I’ve learnt over the past years working on community engagement for energy projects is that you can’t just talk to people about the energy future without talking about the problems of the present. You can’t just sell a dream and ignore what’s going on right now and that’s really important in everything that you do when you talk to people about energy or really anything else.
Matt: Brilliant. I feel like we’ve got a new tagline for the department. There we go [laughter]. Thank you. Jamie?
Jamie: For me, it’s dead simple. Just educate, educate, educate. People need to know this technology is out there and the benefits it can bring not only on an individual basis and a household basis but on a regional and national level. I think it’s crazy that in 2021, the island of Ireland had 41% of its electricity provided by renewables. We don’t talk about that. People don’t really care about it but people need to understand this. Going back to Eva’s point at the start, we can’t have a bunch of engineers talking about engineering solutions. It needs to be in plain speak so that people understand how easy it is to actually do this because the more people understand it, the more market pressure will be out there and we all know that governments listen to market pressures. That’s probably the best way to put it.
Matt: Good. You’re essentially calling for more episodes of Local Zero, Jamie, and that I wholeheartedly support [laughter]. So thank you, Jamie. Thank you, Eva. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Eva: Thank you both.
Jamie: Thank you very much.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: You’ve been listening to Local Zero. We hope you’ve enjoyed these special episodes on the Prospering From the Energy Revolution programme and that we’ve been popping into your devices weekly rather than fortnightly. We will be back to an episode, we regret to say, every two weeks from now on.
Matt: A polite reminder once more that if you haven’t already, please, please, please subscribe to the pod wherever you get your podcasts from. Find and follow us @LocalZeroPod on Twitter or email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you want to share some longer thoughts. If you have one spare minute, please leave us a review if you can and help us climb our way up the podcast charts but for now, thank you for listening and goodbye.
Fraser: Bye, bye, bye, bye.
[Music flourish]
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