80: Making our homes smarter and fairer

Fraser is back, just in time to discuss the recent party conferences - before the team welcome Rachel Mills from Citizens Advice, and Mairi Brookes from Low Carbon Hub, to discuss how soon we can make our homes smarter and faster.

Episode Transcript:

Matt:  Hello, it’s Matt and Becky here from Local Zero. Just a quick note to say, before the episode starts, that from April 2024 Local Zero will be looking for some new funding to keep it going. 

Rebecca:  We never imagined, when we started three years ago, that we’d rack up tens of thousands of listens across 130 countries and with a website hosting over 80 episodes.  

Matt:  We’ve also met and worked with some incredible people, including Chris Stark, Hannah Ritchie, Jim Skea, Hugo Tagholm and so many more. We’ve been able to showcase so many amazing local climate initiatives from all over the UK and far beyond. 

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Rebecca:  So please help us continue the fight against climate change and bring local climate action to doorsteps across the world. Thanks for listening and now back to the pod. 

[Music flourish] 

Hello and welcome to Local Zero with Matt, Becky and Fraser. 

Fraser:  This is a very timely episode. Fairness in the net-zero transition is higher on the agenda than it ever has been before. Now this is something that we’ve championed a lot on the Local Zero podcast and new evidence from Citizens Advice has shown how we could go about making sure that the transition to cleaner, smarter energy in our homes and communities truly works for everyone. 

Rebecca:  Today, we’re joined by Rachel Mills from Citizens Advice to discuss this further. We are also joined by Mairi Brookes from the Low Carbon Hub to share some insights into what they’ve been doing to promote smarter and fairer neighbourhoods in Oxfordshire. 

[Music flourish] 

Matt:  And whether you’re a loyal listener or you’re finding us for the very first time, please make sure you have subscribed to Local Zero wherever you get your podcasts from. Check out our website LocalZeroPod.com and follow us on X (or Twitter) @LocalZeroPod. 

Rebecca:  Exciting stuff. Fraser, you’re back today after a very brief hiatus away. Looking a lot older [laughter]. 

Matt:  Very grey, very grey. Barely a whisp of hair on your head. 

Fraser:  [Laughter] You know everywhere I go people say, ‘Oh, you look quite tired.’ Do you know something? I felt great until I started speaking to other people saying, ‘You look just terrible.’ [Laughter] I’m back! It was quite a long hiatus actually. That was two months I think since I’ve done an episode. 

Rebecca:  Wow! 

Matt:  Yeah, you’ve been sorely missed. I imagine you have all sorts to say to us now that is absolutely not baby-related. 

Fraser:  [Laughter] No, I have nothing. For the listeners, I have had a baby and that’s where I’ve been just for anyone who doesn’t have that context. I was laughing because, Becky, I don’t know if I said this to you but you were my first call back at work after six weeks of paternity leave which was lovely. It was such an amazing time with my wife and I bubbled up with the baby. It was great but Becky was my first call back and we had a brainstorming session. I think there was a moment ten minutes in when I said, ‘Becky, I need maybe two more weeks before we have this type of conversation.’ I was just doing nappies, feeding schedules and just trying to sleep every now and then [laughter]. 

Matt:  The good news is, Fraser, you haven’t missed anything at all in relation to energy and the climate [laughter]. 

Fraser:  No, nothing has happened [laughter]. Nothing has happened. 

Matt:  Not a jot! Nothing has happened. 

Rebecca:  It’s all been quiet. 

Matt:  It’s the same as it ever was. 

Fraser:  It seems like it. I even took the full six weeks off social media and I’ll tell you that nothing will make you regret bringing new life into the world like visiting Twitter after six weeks [laughter]. 

Matt:  I’m afraid to say you have missed a tremendous amount and Becky and I have done our best to kind of wrap our heads around it. As we speak, it is the Labour Party Conference. We had the Conservative Party Conference last week and prior to that and during it, we had a slew of news but none of it was particularly good if you are pro-climate action. Have you been able to follow any of it? 

Fraser:  Yeah, I’m mostly up to speed. The Conservative conference was a bit of a rollercoaster as well. It was a governing party conference that very much felt like someone preparing for opposition as much as anything I thought. It was not great for net zero and following the trend of Conservative messaging on net zero recently. Matt, I believe you called this a little while ago about that kind of net-zero culture war in the run-up to whenever the next election might be. We’re in it. 

Matt:  I’d love to take credit for it but I was simply quoting Chris Stark on our pod back in... I want to say January 2021 I think, Becky, wasn’t it? 

Rebecca:  That was a long while ago. 

Matt:  He said exactly that. His fear was that net zero was going to be the next focus of the culture wars. Once we’d moved through Europe and we’d moved through immigration, the next big wedge issue would be net zero and here we are. Yeah, his prophecy has come to pass. But the silver lining, we hope, is that that leaves a lot of space for other parties to fill that void and to present themselves as the answer for climate action. As we’re speaking, there is news literally trickling through. We’ll have to do something on this in a week or two’s time once we’ve digested it but Labour, at present, seem to be trying to occupy some of that space and is owning that net-zero badge. For example, they’re looking to reinstate that 2030 ban on internal combustion engines but there’s a lot of devil in the details. We can’t really speak to that yet but fingers crossed that one of the parties has a hold on this. 

Fraser:  I think so and I think it’s that while this has been the messaging from the Conservatives, if you look at even the most recent polling in the last week or so, it’s not cutting through in the way that I think they hoped it would. It might galvanise a few people that are very anti-net zero but it’s not cutting through generally. I think this is such a big opportunity and such a big open goal for Labour to take that kind of transformation and Green New Deal by the horns with the big opportunity of social and economic transformation. We know that the energy transition necessitates that if we want to get it done and do it well. I think there’s a big open goal there and I’m ever, ever hopeful that that’s the way we go. Also, something that has happened within that, Becky, is something close to you as well which is the topic of fairness that is higher up the agenda than it ever has been before. 

Rebecca:  It is and I find it such an interesting space, particularly around how a lot of these issues are framed. I think back to the episode we did a few episodes ago looking at water and clean water. We had Hugo Tagholm on the show and he was talking about how, when you talk to anybody, everybody is in favour of this. This is just an issue that doesn’t seem to be divisive in the same way. I think when it actually comes down to it and you talk to people, actually, fairness comes through as something that everybody seems to want. That came out very strongly from the previous climate assembly work back in... was that back in 2020? It was a wee while ago anyway now. Also in the citizens’ juries that we’ve seen since, fairness comes across consistently as a key theme. A lot of the ultimate ambitions of where net zero could take us is something, again, that’s very popular. Nobody doesn’t want better jobs. Nobody doesn’t want cleaner air... addressing a lot of the things that we’re trying to deliver but it feels like we just get stuck on some of the details of how we get there. It feels like it’s just become a bit of a mechanism to bash the other side with rather than looking at what, ultimately, everybody I think is trying to work towards. 

Matt:  I’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking about this and my sense is about whether you can squeeze a policy through the prism of whether it meets four aims: 1) cut carbon emissions 2) cut costs 3) create jobs 4) improve security. There are a fair few policies out there that do this and the really, really obvious one that meets all of these criteria is around domestic energy retrofit and improving the efficiency of our homes. It can cut emissions. It can cut energy bills and by extension, potentially, system costs and the waste of energy there. It can create jobs. We need every single street in the UK to be retrofitted, give or take, and to improve energy security because if we’re using less, we’re less on the hook for imports as a nation that... not prides itself but is, unfortunately, a net importer of energy. I’m hoping, as we follow this Labour conference throughout this week, that there is stuff there because was completely absent really from the Conservative conference and they could have hit all four of those and probably still met many of the key criteria of your average centre-right voter actually. Watch this space I guess [laughter]. I’m hoping common sense prevails somewhere along the line. 

Rebecca:  No, I think that’s very far off [laughter]. 

Matt:  Yeah, call it as it is but there has also been other news. Becky, you’ve noted here a report by the UK Energy Research Centre on low-carbon technology uptake and issues around fairness and demographics. Is there anything you wanted to note? Obviously, the theme of today is bang on for that. 

Rebecca:  Yeah, absolutely. Fraser brought it up... we talk about net zero and so much of the transition and the successes that we’ve seen have happened a little bit behind closed doors for a lot of people. We’ve actually done a brilliant job at decarbonising our power system but most of that, people may not be hugely aware of. A lot of people might be aware of the wind turbines off in the distance but ultimately, a lot of that has happened at quite a large scale. The transition that we’re looking to see moving forward... and this brings a lot more things closer to home and we’ve talked about it on the show before about the switch to electric vehicles, the shift to clean heating and the need to retrofit our homes and a lot of this relies on the uptake of these low-carbon technologies that encompass the changes that we need to make. Of course, thinking that through, it’s really important to understand how that’s going to happen across the UK. You can’t just have that happen amongst a small group of households. This is something that needs to happen in a widespread way. The UK Energy Research Centre has just done some new work really showing that there’s quite a lot of unfairness in the way that these technologies have been taken up. Fraser, you’ll be more than familiar with this because you looked at this in a lot of detail for your PhD about solar. This report looks at a broader array of technologies and it seems, again, that you tend to see adoption focus by white people, by people who are more highly educated, people who have higher incomes and there are issues, again, around age, gender and ethnicity. At the moment, the policies that we have are not supporting that equitable uptake and I think that’s something that we really need to think quite seriously about if this is going to happen at large. How do we need to see those policies evolving to support that? 

Matt:  I feel like you’ve got to say something on this, Fraser, [laughter] given that you’ve built your entire PhD on it [laughter]. 

Fraser:  Yeah, my PTSD... my PhD [laughter] looked into this a lot but towards the latter stages, it was informed by work that we’d done, the three of us collectively with Stephen Knox, and also work that you’ve done separately, Matt, I believe with UKERC as well around the social dimensions of retrofitting in particular but it’s relevant right across the board. The way that we’ve predominantly tried to get people to install solar panels, heat pumps or whatever has been with grants and subsidies so far which is all well and good but invariably, that means that people who are familiar with accessing grants and subsidies and with those kinds of policy processes and people who own their homes are straight away advantaged. You see it with solar panels. We saw with the Renewable Heat Incentive as well that there tends to be a big socio-economic gap between the people who benefit from these types of policies and the people who don’t. As Becky mentions, the key thing here is as we’re now getting to crunch time on net zero, it’s not enough to just assume that the middle classes will borrow or buy us out of the climate crisis. We’re thinking much more about how we get everyone along on that transition, accepting that there is a role for people who can afford it and who are minded to uptake as far as possible and start to bring those cost curves down because heat pumps are still expensive. The price is like solar in the 2010s and prices are starting to plummet. We’re starting to hit that point but we’re still not quite there yet. What that means is we really need to wrestle with this idea of fairness, who benefits and how we can get everyone involved in this transition so that people, ultimately, aren’t left behind resenting the net-zero transition. 

Matt:  I’d agree and I think maybe the only thing for me to add is, in terms of wealth, which demographic we’re looking at here. You have those relatively well-off, middle-class, owner-occupier band who are the first movers and pride themselves on having the EV, the Time of Use tariff and the solar on the roof. They have the tenure to be able to do and they have the money in their pockets to be able to either pay for most of it upfront or the credit rating to be able to get the loan. On the other end of the extreme, you have those who are maybe eligible for support grants. They may be living in social housing but there are funds out there available to put solar on council housing. There are opportunities and pots of money for that. It’s that band in between that I think is ripe for policy focus. I think Theresa May referred to them as the JAMs (the Just About Managings) if we remember that. That band there, who are above that threshold for targeted subsidy support but below that threshold for being able to reach into their own pockets or be financed from elsewhere... that’s what I would really like to see from the next government or, indeed, this to actually support the Just About Managings and to enable this type of technology to be available to them. 

Rebecca:  I think I’d extend that as well because as we’re looking forward, it’s not just going to be about those technologies but also about how they are used. You don’t use a heat pump the same way that you would use a traditional gas boiler. If you start to have storage in your home or solar, you’re going to start to need to be operating in a slightly different way by maybe using energy more flexibly, maybe starting to engage in some of demand side response. Last year, we saw a huge trial looking at whether customers could reduce their energy use in certain time periods in response to financial incentives. That sort of thing is going to become a lot more prevalent in the future and this notion of Smart. How do we use energy in a smarter way at home and more flexibly at home? People have a different role to play and I think that’s an area where we also really need to think about those who might struggle with that. If I start to think about grandparents... I could barely use the app to control when my EV charged up [laughter] and I like to think that I’m relatively technologically competent. I do think that we run the risk of a huge amount of exclusion not just around where people sit in regard to their finances but also their capacity to engage in that digital world. I guess that’s what today is all about... 

Matt:  Absolutely. 

Rebecca:  ...and what we’re going to hear more about from our guests. 

Matt:  I think at that point, Becky, no better segue than let’s bring them in. 

Mairi:  Hi, I’m Mairi Brookes and I am the Smart Energy Systems Director at Low Carbon Hub. 

Rachel:  I’m Rachel Mills and I’m the Senior Policy Researcher at Citizens Advice. 

[Music flourish] 

Rebecca:  I’m so excited that we’ve got you both here today for a topic that I think is very close to all of our hearts talking about the energy system, how it’s changing and particularly, this shift towards smarter energy, smarter homes, smarter neighbourhoods and more local energy. It would be great if we could just kick off by talking about why there’s so much attention here at the moment, what we really mean when we’re talking flexibility and smarter and why we really need it now. Perhaps, Rachel, you could kick us off with that. 

Rachel:  I think, at the moment, what’s really at the forefront of a lot of people’s minds is the price of energy and how that’s changed over the last couple of years. Right now, it’s reaching a sort of crunch point and, for households, what that really means is wanting to lower your bills. It’s about getting to net zero at the lowest cost. I think what we mean by Smart is your home being able to do more things that automatically take into account what the grid needs and what the household needs in a way that benefits both. 

Rebecca:  Mairi, you’ve obviously had quite a lot of experience looking at this over the past few years, particularly some of the innovation projects you’ve been involved in. How is this playing out when you’re looking at things happening in Oxfordshire? 

Mairi:  We just touched there on what we mean by Smart and one of the first things that we really discovered at Low Carbon Hub when we were working in this area was how difficult it is to communicate about that meaningfully. Aside from looking at technical things and what switches on when or switches off and coordinating your generation consumption storage of energy, actually, just talking to people about what it means is quite hard. I still don’t think we’ve quite got that right even at Low Carbon Hub but we are getting there. 

Rebecca:  Just to follow up on that, when you’ve been talking to people, what seems to be coming across? Do you talk to people about how things are going to change for them and what things are actually going to look like on the ground? What is this meaningfully be like for them? How do you find it’s most successful to get these ideas across to people who might not be familiar with them? 

Mairi:  Yeah, if I could come on that, I think what we’ve found is using really tangible examples helps and obviously, that’s hard right at the beginning because they don’t really exist yet. We had a lot of success with community, deep-dive, placed-based projects where we basically said to communities that we knew, ‘What are your challenges?’ and ‘Would you like to work with us to find out how all this new technology and flexibility might be able to help?’ The difficulty was that it was quite wide open, so we didn’t necessarily know exactly where we were going when we started which made it hard to talk about but actually, where we got to were some really clear, tangible examples and case studies of what we’d done. We’ll take two of them. One was maybe, certainly in the energy sector, what people would immediately think when they’re thinking about what a Smart home might look like was that we were putting solar panels on roofs, batteries in a house and having those work in tandem to optimise the energy consumption of those households. We were also trying to explore the extent to which if you’ve got solar panels on one house but not on another, you might be able to optimise that across those two households and have that shared benefit, whether it was financially between the households or trying to find a way you could put little, small pennies that add up across the system into a community pot or something like that. That was one way where we were trying to translate it. Another example was when we had a group of people who were living in a block of flats that were owned by Oxford City Council. Oxford City Council put solar panels on the rooftop but the benefit of those solar panels, even though, in reality, if the residents were using power during the day while they were generating, power would come from those solar panels but they weren’t getting the benefit on their bills. We investigated a way in which we could provide incentives for the people in that block of flats to use power more during the day and then give them a reward. It was a little bit artificial but actually, it’s the kind of thing that you could then make much more automatic with the right kind of electricity pricing and taking into account that the solar panels were there. Actually, we got a great response from the residents in that block of flats and we got to a point where they were able to talk about what that meant to them better than we were. 

Rebecca:  Rachel, is this reflected in the work that you’ve been doing with Citizens Advice? You’ve looked quite a lot at this sort of journey that people have been going through. 

Rachel:  Yeah, absolutely. We’ve really looked at it as an overarching consumer journey but with a lot of different journeys underneath that. We’ve carried out research with people from groups that tend to miss out on benefits in the energy system and the energy market. We spoke to people with young children in the household, disabled people, people with English as an additional language, various groups and the private rented sector as well. In this qualitative research, we just found that the overarching finding was the diversity of what this means to people, what the benefits are to them and so on. It was really clear that some people can more easily benefit than others. I think a key challenge will be broadening participation in Smart energy and helping those with barriers to benefit from lower prices and getting involved in flexibility offers. 

Mairi:  I think that’s so, so true and I’m not surprised what would come out of research like that. There’s probably a starting point that’s accessible to a lot of the people who work in the energy sector on Smart technologies or Smart homes that is all about solar panels, electric vehicles and access to technology that costs money. It’s a particular kind of use case for that which is fine because there are those people that will do that and often, they’re the kind of people who will take part and sign themselves up for pilots of things and get going really quickly with it. What that means is that as we’re designing products and services, we might be biasing them to that particular audience. Coming back to the first question about why it’s important now is because we’re going to have such a huge physical transformation of the energy system in terms of having more renewable energy distributed across the whole of the physical network instead of concentrated in a smaller number of places and so with that change in the physical system, we’ve got an opportunity to reconfigure all of the business model systems, the way that people are charged and the way that people can access technology that can benefit them at the same time, so we can make it a lot fairer. It’s as hard to do two really complicated things as it is to do one. 

Matt:  We’re talking about Smart and fair. Are there examples of certain groups of people who are less able to participate in this smarter, low-carbon world in our homes? Are there any key groups that we really need to attend to? I’m particularly interested in what the barriers are to them adopting these technologies. We will hear from some examples later on but I wonder if we can begin with you, Rachel, about some of the barriers that you’ve come across. 

Rachel:  We saw, at each stage of the consumer journey, there’s a range of barriers. What we did was we used the COMBI model. That’s a behavioural framework that’s used in a lot of analysis. We categorised them under support barriers, opportunity barriers and motivation barriers. The reason we changed the first one, capability to support, was because we think it’s more about problems and a lack of support in society rather than someone’s capability. That was the reason for that. We saw a whole range of barriers. While many of them were motivation-related and about actually wanting to get involved with this and being able to see the benefits, many of them were about a lack of support and a lack of opportunity to be involved. For example, in the private rented sector, there’s an opportunity barrier there. For a lot of people in the privately rented sector, their energy tariff is controlled by their landlord or it’s set up in one way, they don’t have a Smart meter, they don’t want to ask for one and there are all those inherent barriers so it creates a hurdle upfront. 

Mairi:  I think, from our point of view, because we had to curate our trials to places where we had communities that were ready to go, we didn’t necessarily see those sorts of barriers playing out and we weren’t testing across lots of different sections of society to be fair. That was a limitation of what we could do. Interestingly, on that Smart meter point, in order to run trials with households, we did need to have access to their data and there are a whole load of different ways you can go about doing that, either via their supplier or you can put in an additional metering device that allows you to access that information. The barrier there is having to go and work with a particular supplier when what you want to do is start working with people and maybe they’ve all got different suppliers. Another barrier was that by putting in an additional metering device, you then put an extra step into the journey and someone has to go into that person’s home. Even just at that level, you’re creating extra steps in the chain to do something that then trials whether you can actually do something well. Yeah, it’s just adding steps. The other thing I would say though that came out of our trials was that, as Low Carbon Hub and as a partner on this project, we went in and we really strongly wanted to do things that started in specific places, look at what the benefits could be for communities, ask those sorts of open questions and explore which is what we did. Actually, a lot of the mandate for the wider project for partners and for our local network operator was to test what are called flexibility services which is very similar to what we saw last winter run at a national grid scale where people could be rewarded for turning down their energy when they were called upon to do it. Usually, it was weekday evenings. It was similar to that but instead of it being addressing something at a national level, it was about addressing something at a local level that the local part of the network operator needed to deal with. There was an underlying assumption in the way that that much wider project was set up that this was going to be the mechanism by which you could provide a financial reward to somebody to do something and that, from there, would flow all the benefits. I think there are two problems with that. One is that, certainly, at the current level with where we are with early technologies, people not being used to it and the transaction costs are really, really high, you don’t really get very much in terms of being able to reward somebody with some money off their bill. It’s pennies. Nonetheless, people wanted to take part because they were interested in it. That was okay and we found other ways to make sure that it was ethical what we were doing in terms of a trial. The other thing is that, like the national scale, it was based on people having the opportunity to reduce their energy use. If you already have minimised your energy use because you can’t afford it and obviously, with the current situation, there’s a huge amount of fuel poverty and there’s a crisis around pricing, then you don’t get the benefit because you’re being measured against your normal usage. You’re not being measured against the amount of usage the network operator has to assume you might use. You’re actually doing them a favour all day long every day but not getting rewarded for that. Call it a barrier or an opportunity but there’s definitely a gap there in how we’re describing the value and what our reference point is for it. 

Fraser:  That’s a really interesting point, Mairi, and it’s something that we’ve heard so many times before is that reduction and efficiency just isn’t valued in markets as it stands at any real level just now and surely that’s got to change. The question that I had was around the Smart meters point which we’ve kind of skirted around a little bit. Something that we hear more when we do community-focused work and I hear it when I talk to friends and family is around trust in Smart meters. I think the rollout of Smart meters, we could mostly agree, was a little bit fumbled at the time but trust in Smart meters is pretty low. Trust in energy suppliers and the energy industry generally is really, really low. So in terms of getting people to uptake these new services and new technologies, is this something that you’re hearing as an issue as well in your work around trust and how do we go about overcoming that? 

Rachel:  Yeah, that’s a huge thing that came out of our research as well. On the surface level as well, just the whole concept of energy flexibility, Time of Use tariffs and the concept of a company asking you to make these changes, turn down energy and be financially incentivised to do that, that felt incredibly new to people as a broad concept. There was also, unfortunately, a lot of people being quite doubtful of whether they’d actually see the return and trust problems, especially when perhaps they’d had a bad experience of having a Smart meter installation for example, One of the things that we’re asking for is a national information campaign backed up with independent and impartial advice. We see that as being really important for getting the word out about what flexibility is and what net zero means for people but also backing that up with trusted sources of information. 

Rebecca:  Thinking through some of those challenges that you talked about, particularly around understanding what to do, trusting the people that you’re learning about this from and seeing the benefits, if I think about my own life... I realise I’m like an N of 1 and this is not a massive experiment [laughter] but I trust my next-door neighbours (or some of them), I trust my friends and I trust my family and I’m very conscious of the importance of that peer communication. Mairi, particularly thinking through some of the work... Low Carbon Hub is embedded in the community and you are engaging with communities, so do you see that as being a big part of what we need in the future? Do you see there being a huge role for community organisations or doing things locally and not just to maybe get the messages out there and support the learning and the understanding but do you think that could also help make this fairer as well? 

Mairi:  I’d probably be a bit cautious about saying that I think there has to be a huge community role in total. Not everywhere is set up to do that necessarily and we need to make sure that there are lots of different ways to roll out, make this transition happen and make sure it’s fair and there are benefits more widely. We are privileged in Oxfordshire that we’ve got Low Carbon Hub and I love working for Low Carbon Hub because of what we can do but not everywhere has got that setup. Actually, one of the things that we want to look at with some of our future innovation projects is how we’re describing the various things that we think we need to do in Oxfordshire, not just Low Carbon Hub but including us, and then assess how they might translate to other areas where you don’t have exactly the same organisations or you don’t have the exact same local authority setup. The institutions and their relationships look different but from an energy system perspective, how can they fulfil those functions in their own way? With that said, we have really seen a lot of ways in which we can play a role that I think will be crucial for making this transition happen, making the innovation happen and, therefore, demonstrating what can be done and hopefully, to build that trust beyond just the immediate communities that we work with. We have an existing trusted relationship with communities but part of what we did in the last four years as we were designing these trials was to think through, quite deliberately, what the ethics of that was to make sure that we weren’t going to be doing any harm and we weren’t bringing people into an experimental world where suddenly they would be left worse off. We rest on that trust we’ve got with communities and we can sit in between them and a network operator or a supplier. We’re all holding each other to account but we do play quite an important role in the middle where we can go in and put our community hat on and say, ‘No, that’s not okay because this is the perspective of those communities,’ when we’re in a room that they won’t necessarily get into or not so easily. We want to make sure that we’re involving as many different groups and people as possible so, again, we need to make sure that that’s done with some care and not done to people. 

Rachel:  Yeah, I would agree that there is this need to just start doing the doing and that’s really where the value of these innovation trials comes in. I think it’s a really fine balance between protecting people and it is more difficult to get these products right for them but also involving them in a way that means we can learn and not exclude them from the offshoot. 

Matt:  In your mind, do local, grassroots, community-led organisations or a local council with a combination of other local stakeholders have a key role to play in actually delivering, financing and operating these projects more so than, potentially, we’ve seen so far from renewables in the UK? At the moment, it feels like it’s still extremely niche if these local organisations and communities are organising themselves around renewables projects. In my mind, I still can’t quite work out whether Smart has a bigger or smaller role in facilitating that galvanising of a community and local people. 

Mairi:  It’s a really tough question because it’s quite a leap from where we are I think to having a much greater scale as in a larger number of local-led initiatives. Do we really expect that that’s going to suddenly pop up and flourish in lots of places? You touched on the fact that it could be, say, a local authority or someone like that that’s perhaps galvanising things or taking on some sort of facilitating or convening role. I think there is definitely a need for that kind of facilitation. We know that Local Area Energy Planning is something that is coming the way of local authorities and many of them are very actively looking to get into that space. Probably, some could have been better prepared than others no doubt but there’s been a lot of talk around that and no one quite knows what it means exactly yet [laughter] but there is something happening there. 

Matt:  From the outside looking in, it feels like Smart is being framed very much in a way that micro-renewables were in the past or still in the present that it’s something that kind of happens at the household and then there’s a big skip to that distribution network operator at that level and kind of potentially misses out that local level. It feels like Smart is an opportunity for more of a local footprint but my sense of it is that it’s being... I’m not saying this is right or wrong per se but it’s being adopted very much by the energy utilities like Octopus and OVO. It’s at the granular level of the household, aggregating those together and then presenting that as flexibility to the grid and milking value from that. It’s kind of missing out really some opportunities, whether these are micro-grids or, as you say, grouping together households and making them think about balancing that grid at that level. 

Mairi:  Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s definitely where the opportunity is that we see. That’s not to say there aren’t opportunities with the more nationally-aggregated services. It seems unlikely that they would get into or target that local scale balancing because you need to have a critical number of customers all signed up with you from a supplier perspective for those approaches to work. However, if you’re in a community and you want to decarbonise faster than perhaps national targets or just at that pace, then I think Smart is incredibly important because we’ve got a real challenge in terms of how we are going to have a network that is fit for purpose as we electrify transport and as we electrify heating. That is going to increase the amount of energy that’s consumed and used right at the very edge of the network in terms of electricity compared to what we have right now. So overall energy use goes down because we’re electrifying things and it’s more efficient but electricity use goes up because we’re using more electricity to cover lots of different parts of our energy system. Whereas now, obviously, transport is largely fossil fuels and heating is largely gas, fossil fuels. So a community may want to say, ‘Great, let’s go. We want to decarbonise and do our bit,’ or even better, ‘We’ve got the ability to go fast and, therefore, go faster and harder than some other places maybe can so we’ll crack on and do that.’ What that involves, if you are switching to heat pumps and switching to electric vehicles, is you’re going to increase the amount of electricity that you need in your little bit of the network and the network might not be ready to send you all that power from somewhere else. So if you can generate locally, happy days. You can generate locally and you can use the power locally but then we come back to your exact point, Matt, that those things have to be balanced. They have to be balanced within your little bit of the electricity network because there are points in the network at transformers, sub-stations they’re called, where you basically will have a bottleneck and you can’t get enough power through or you might be generating too much locally, you’re not using it at exactly the right time, you can’t get that power back out and that’s what breaks the system. Smart is the answer to that problem and it would allow pockets or islands within our electricity network of cables to decarbonise faster than they would if they waited for that to be upgraded by somebody else. It also saves money on the network because you can reduce the cost of upgrading those network points or you can defer the time so it can happen later which also reduces the cost. 

Rachel:  Agreed on my side as well that there’s a real opportunity for local groups and local coordination of some of these benefits is really helpful. It’s a lot more tangible for someone to realise the benefits and conceptualise them in the first place if it’s in terms of the wind farm that they can see off the coast. To have it sold to them as coming from there and using the flexibility that they supply to the grid then gives them that benefit straight away. That is a lot more tangible to people I think. The more that we can harness that, the better. I think we have to also think about the context of changes coming in the next few years in terms of how energy is priced across the country. That’s all up in the air at the moment and whether there’s a move towards more locational pricing which could create a big incentive for local communities to start doing these projects or something similar. We don’t know yet but there are big changes, potentially, on the horizon which could make it all a lot easier. 

Mairi:  Just to come back quickly on that, it’s made me think of something else and kind of wrapping back around to a point we touched on earlier which was about that barrier of support. Something that emerged in all of the trials that we did was a need for a supporting role for communities. So even where those communities were quite engaged and up for doing things, actually, they needed an organisation to step into a coordination role to help translate energy system things to them or to help join up or find the right people to talk to, whether it was local authority people or someone within the network operation side. That’s something we really want to explore further because I think maybe the jury is out on whether that’s a function that we would need forever in the energy system but I think, as part of this transition, our experience certainly says that you do need some kind of coordinator role to help galvanise that, to enable that to happen and, in particular, to translate things like regional carbon targets or even the national ones down to a much smaller area; not just to translate those down but to turn that into real action. If you want to use Smart, does that mean you need a community battery? How do you even go about understanding what that means and how you might do it? It is a whole-systems challenge as we know and it really wraps back around to some of those other points that we talked about at the beginning. 

Rebecca:  There’s so much that we could keep talking about. I think it’s such an important conversation and clearly, there is a lot that we still don’t know about the right way of doing this but there is a lot that we’re learning along the way. I just want to thank you both so much for explaining and sharing some of your insights. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. You are both welcome back anytime. 

Mairi:  Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. 

Rachel:  Yeah, thank you. It’s been a pleasure and really interesting. 

[Music flourish] 

Rebecca:  What a great chat with Rachel and Mairi but before we go, we thought we’d give the last word to a couple of people who Citizens Advice has been talking to as part of their research. So here are some thoughts from Lisa and Robert. 

Lisa:  I think it’s being able to sort of control things via your voice or the app when you’re on the go. So if you do need your heating on but you’re not at home, you can just set it and it’s there for when you do get in. I just like the ease of things I think. It’s voice-controlled and if you can control it via an Echo or something, then that’s even better because you can tell it what to do and it will just do it for you like making sure things are turned off, shut down correctly or whatever because the device has done it for you. 

Robert:  I’ve got Asperger’s Syndrome so that makes it even harder for me to actually understand how to set up Smart technology or a router. It makes it that much more difficult, that much more daunting and that much more offputting. I feel kind of excluded. It’s all confusing and I feel somewhat alone and isolated when it comes to new technologies and Smart technology. 

Rebecca:  Powerful stuff there. You’ve been listening to Local Zero. 

Matt:  If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please do suggest us to people you think might like it as word of mouth is a very powerful tool.  

Fraser:  And if you’re feeling generous and you listen on Spotify as I do, please take a second to rate our podcast five stars, of course, and if you listen on Apple, please leave a review. This helps Local Zero climb the charts. 

Rebecca:  If you haven’t already, do take a minute to find and follow us on X at @LocalZeroPod to get involved with the discussions there. Also, check out our website LocalZeroPod.com and listen to our back catalogue. You can also email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you want to share some longer thoughts. 

Matt:  Finally, remember to get in touch with us to say why you enjoy Local Zero and how you’ve used it in your work or life as we strive to secure funding to keep everybody’s favourite local climate action pod going but for now, thank you and goodbye. 

Rebecca:  Bye. 

Fraser:  Bye, bye, bye, bye. 

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