9: A supply chain and workforce for zero-carbon homes

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Delivering UK net zero requires a massive switch to carbonless heat and power in all our buildings - but the tools and systems to make that switch don't currently exist. The team look at the scale of that challenge, and ask what can be done, particularly in jobs, skills and supply chains. They are joined by Jo Patterson from Cardiff University's Welsh School of Architecture, and Nigel Banks from zero-carbon housing developer Ilke Homes. Fraser chats with Nathan Gambling, a leading trainer of heating engineers.

Episode transcript

[Music flourish]

Matt:  Hello, I’m Dr Matt Hannon.

Rebecca:  And I’m Dr Rebecca Ford. Welcome to Local Zero. In our last episode, we looked at how we can make the heating systems in our homes and businesses zero-carbon and we talked about the technologies and mindset changes that are needed to do that. Today, we’ll flow on from there looking at the jobs, skills and supply chains that will be needed to make that change.

Matt:  This is an absolutely crucial part of the net zero puzzle. If we don’t have the tools and systems to deliver zero-carbon buildings, we simply won’t reach the UK’s net zero goals. It’s as simple as that.

Rebecca:  So it’s vital to understand why the industry we have today isn’t fit for the future, where the gaps are that need filling and how we can develop the skills and supply chains for zero-carbon homes.

Later, we’ll hear from Nathan Gambling on training the next generation of heating engineers.

Nathan:  One of the best ways we learn is from each other – peer learning. Just sitting people in classrooms and listening to instructions and listening to a lecture doesn’t work. There’s evidence that never has worked and yet that’s, unfortunately, what my industry always seems to do.

Matt:  We’ve also got Dr Jo Patterson, a Senior Research Fellow at the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University focused on developing sustainable homes.

Jo:  In the budget now, there’s a flexi-job apprenticeship which enables people to work across different roles and I think that is kind of the thing that we need to look at is training the electricians to know what plumbers and plumbers to know what IT does and a really cross-sharing of knowledge.

Rebecca:  We’ll also hear from Nigel Banks, a Special Projects Director at Ilke Homes where they design, build and install ultra-modern, zero-carbon homes.

Nigel:  A high-performing home can be much more comfortable and a much more enjoyable place to live in and spend time in and much better for your health as well. We’ve seen the health impacts and the impacts on people’s lives have been enormous.

[Music flourish]

Matt:  You’re listening to Local Zero. If you’re wanting to contact us or ask any questions on social media, please contact us @EnergyREV_UK and use the hashtag #LocalZero.

Rebecca:  As always, we’ve got Fraser with us, so welcome, Fraser.

Fraser:  What’s happening everybody? How are we all doing?

Matt:  Doing well, doing well. How about yourself?

Fraser:  Ah, hanging in. Yeah, hanging in. The days are getting longer. It’s always nice.

Matt:  We’re certainly enjoying the warmer weather and I’m personally enjoying the kids being back at school or at nursery. That’s been a massive change. I know, Becky, we’ve already been comparing notes but they are all back in business which is good news. Hence why there’s a bit more prep for this episode than in previous weeks.

Rebecca:  Yeah, I wasn’t sure that that was actually possible after our last episode but you’ve excelled yourself, Matt. 

Matt:  I have. Well, more like Microsoft Worded myself [laughter]. (Terrible joke).

Fraser:  I honestly thought, Becky, in the last episode... I wondered if we maybe weren’t doing enough preparation.

Rebecca:  I thought that too [laughter]. Now I know I’m not [laughter].

Matt:  You’re making it sound like I haven’t got any pals [laughter] with better things to do.

Rebecca:  It’s brilliant. I mean...

Fraser:  It is incredible.

Matt:  Well, anyway, I’ve done my homework. I won’t get my knuckles rapped this week.

Fraser:  You’ve done everyone else’s homework [laughter].

Rebecca:  I feel like Fraser and I need to be interviewing you as well, Matt [laughter].

Matt:  Yeah, I did kind of pause and think, ‘Actually, we’re getting the experts on for them to answer the questions.’ [Laughter]

Rebecca:  I love also that it’s all highlighted in yellow because I usually use highlighting as ‘this is a key point – bring this up.’ [Laughter]

Matt:  I think this is because I’ve become institutionalised [laughter]. Originally, a few episodes back, it was just highlighted yellow but now I’ve kind of stuck with it. I can’t seem to imbibe any of this information [laughter] unless it’s in a kind of horrific yellow [laughter]. Well, my notes mostly are about the Budget and so before we get stuck in, what are your hot takes on Dishy Rishi’s Budget?

Fraser:  Dishy Rishi? Oh, dear [laughter]. Did you see the BBC segment on him of a little two-minute clip that they put together? It was a proper swooning ad campaign about Rishi and his big strong arms before he put the Budget out. It was so, so hilarious. From the headlines, I thought the Budget was interesting but digging into the figures, I feel a little more sceptical and a little more cynical about it now. It sounded really, really nice and more positive than I guess anyone expected on the back of the pandemic and everything like that but I think in terms of the things that we’re interested in in this podcast specifically, I think it left a little bit to be desired. What did you think, Becky?

Rebecca:  Yeah, I agree. I felt like at the high level and when I first saw some of the bigger statements and various people’s responses to it, I was quite heartened but, as you say, once you start to dig into the detail, it felt like there were just some gaps in there. While there might be funding going in and money going into certain areas, it wasn’t clear that we were actually going to be able to deliver everything that needed to be delivered and that the building blocks weren’t all in there.

Matt:  For me, some of the key headlines about the Green Homes Grant, which we’ve talked a lot about in previous episodes, wasn’t culled. There were big questions about whether it would go or it wouldn’t. It’s stayed there but it’s...

Rebecca:  It wasn’t mentioned, right?

Matt:  Well, yes. Almost no news was the good news [laughter] but that’s tempered with the bad news that none of the money from 2021, i.e. any of the money from this financial year that wasn’t spent (which was a lot – £1bn plus) isn’t going to be rolled over. So we’ve got a watered-down scheme. What we also have, which I guess are some pieces of good news, is apprenticeships. Sunak was clear about doubling things like the employer apprentice bonus and if you tie this into other incentives that were on offer, the conditions look quite good for small companies to bring people on and train them up. Other things [laughter], as you two were saying, people weren’t so happy about are questions around whether the money from the Green Investment Bank 2.0, which is this new national infrastructure bank, will actually go into green projects and support green supply chains. It’s a big question and it’s the same with the super-deduction mechanism which I won’t go into here but google it. It sounds exciting [laughter] as it is but it’s basically being able to write off some of your taxes. The other point to say is Aberdeen got a mention. Aberdeen was identified for £27m of investment into the Aberdeen Energy Transition Zone. Whilst it’s not specific about buildings which this episode is about, it’s all about supporting the transition away from oil and gas and a big part of that will be jobs and skills.

Rebecca:  It will be. I think I’m a little tentative and a little nervous about some of the jobs and skills and perhaps the Budget isn’t the place where this needs to be considered but I do think it needs to be considered somewhere and that is the broader context of these jobs and skills; so looking at the jobs that people will be transitioning out of and what they’ll be transitioning into and whether we’re looking at the same sort of unionisation, whether there are the same career progression opportunities and whether there are the same sorts of skills training and qualifications. We need to be thinking about that in the long term. We need to be looking at what’s the career pathway for a lot of people as this is transitioning rather than just a short-term fix, I guess.

Matt:  I think that’s a really important point. From our last episode with Richard Lowes, he made the point that roughly, heat pumps are going to demand twice the labour that a boiler will, so we’re looking at twice the jobs in a very crude sense. There are all sorts of numbers which we can get into in a moment around the expected uplift in jobs. I mean 200,000 for buildings is what the CCC was reporting on and so we know it’s a growth area and it has to be for net zero but as you say, what about a career path? What does that look like? Where’s the first rung of the ladder and where would you be in 10, 15 or 20 years after that? We’re not even anywhere near the beginning of that discussion.

Rebecca:  No, but we have to get there because ultimately, what you’re asking people to do is to buy into this new way of life. We’ve seen in other countries around the world that if workers are not engaged and bought into what this transition could look like, it’s going to fail before it even starts. So while we might be talking about something that’s happening in 5, 10 or 15 years’ time, unless we get on the right path now, we might not see people engaging with this transition in the way that they’re going to need to engage to actually make it happen.

Matt:  So a question for you two, another quiz question, is how many jobs do you think are given over to the energy efficiency sector? Now I don’t quite know what this captures because it’s from the government’s Build Back Better report which went alongside the Budget. Let’s assume that energy efficiency involves making your homes cleaner and greener. Have a guess. How many jobs in the UK?

Rebecca:  Right now or how many jobs do we need?

Matt:  Today.

Rebecca:  Half a million?

Matt:  Way lower.

Fraser:  Yeah, I instinctively went lower. Maybe 150,000?

Matt:  It’s 114,000 according to the government’s numbers. I should set this in the context that the ONS (Office for National Statistics) says there are about 225,000 people in low-carbon and renewable energy jobs, so it’s about half the jobs in the low-carbon sector. But if you think about 114,000 jobs on the one hand and the CCC pointing to other numbers saying that we’ve got to see a 200,000 increase, you’re looking at these numbers tripling within ten years.

Rebecca:  So what we really need to do is look at actually, what do those jobs need to do? What are our buildings of the future? We’re talking about energy efficiency and a huge amount of that is going to be thinking about buildings. What do they look like? What are the skills and the supply chains to deliver them going to require? Hopefully, that’s something that we uncover on today’s show.

Matt:  So coming up, we’re going to speak to two guests to learn a little bit more about how we can decarbonise our homes and buildings and the types of skills, jobs and supply chains that we require to do that.

[Music flourish]

Nigel:  Hi, I’m Nigel Banks and a director and a developer and manufacturer of high-performing modular homes. I’ve previously worked extensively in the design, build and operation of sustainable buildings.

Jo:  Hi, I’m Dr Jo Patterson. I’m a Senior Research Fellow at the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University.

[Music flourish]

It’s very busy at the moment. I mean obviously, energy is a huge sub-topic that’s prominent in the news and it’s in the Budget. It’s something that’s really being focused on generally at the moment and so there is an awful lot of work going on. We’re also spending an awful lot of time in our houses and so, again, housing and homes is also a huge consideration and it’s changing, so that’s really important and it’s creating a lot of work for people like ourselves at the moment.

Matt:  We’re going to talk in this episode a lot more about skills, jobs and supply chains but that really all leads to changing our building stock. So what does our building stock look like in 10-20 years and how different will that be compared to today?

Nigel:  There are a few things that I hope we’ll be getting right and that we probably don’t do as well as we should do today and that’s around the fundamentals of any building which should be safe,  healthy and affordable. I think we’ve got some real challenges in doing the basics right but clearly, we need to move to much more sustainable housing and that’s probably the new fourth fundamental of every new home and building we create; so zero greenhouse gas emissions and hopefully, lower or even zero-embodied carbon, no waste and also long-lasting buildings. I think some of the buildings that were built not that long ago are being knocked down and so they need to be flexible and attractive. I think we have a lot of the technologies to do what we need to do and we’re doing a little bit at a small scale. What we need to do is really massively scale that up.

Rebecca:  And Jo, you do a lot of work really looking at what that would actually look like and what that means on the ground for people that might be living in these homes and people that might be working to deliver them. For me and my household, what does that mean? How is that actually going to feel different, that home of the future?

Jo:  Well, like Nigel has alluded to, we do need to try and keep our homes as homes and be able to live in them comfortably, be able to feel comfortable maintaining those homes and be able to control any new technologies that come into their homes and are installed in their homes. They need to have confidence that they can use those homes in the way that they’ve been designed. That runs right through from anything to do with renewable energy to any storage and any heating systems. The occupants and residents need to be the first consideration in designing the combinations of low-carbon solutions in their homes.

Rebecca:  Is that not happening right now?

Jo:  I think there is a bit of a lack of communication and collaboration to a certain extent. I think it is happening, obviously, in certain projects but I think that quite often, particularly funding streams, can target certain solutions but those solutions can be individual solutions rather than a whole-systems approach. I think by bringing that whole-systems approach together, then the controls and the systems can work a lot more effectively and better for the residents that are living in those homes.

Rebecca:  So tell us a little bit more, Joe, about what you mean by this ‘whole-systems approach.’ What doesn’t work together today? How will it work together differently in the future? Does that have any implications on what that means for the industry?

Jo:  Sure. So at Cardiff University, we’ve done a lot of research on whole-house retrofits. Obviously, to achieve net zero carbon emissions, we need to combine solutions. We need to be looking at demand reduction, improving fabric and using appropriate and affordable heating systems but that needs to be combined with renewable energy supply and also battery storage as well. From our research, we found that the only way that we can get anywhere near low carbon is to combine those technologies together. Obviously, people across the skill sector need to collaborate to enable those to be installed correctly and appropriately to work the best for the residents.

Matt:  So, Jo, I’m going to just reflect back on a chat that you had recently with Kevin McCloud I think that was hosted in Cardiff which was really, really interesting and a great listen. I’ve sadly been rewatching all the Grand Designs recently for reasons I won’t bore you with. I thought he neatly captured what good architecture was which was ‘it makes living easier’ or at least you have to think less about living in the space. I’m going to ask you first, Jo, and we’ll come on to you in a moment, Nigel. Can zero-carbon homes be better places to live and should they? I guess it’s not just about emissions. Can we make these better places to live?

Jo:  Absolutely. I mean, like you’ve just said, it’s not all about emissions at all. From all of the research on retrofit and new-build housing that we’ve worked on, thinking about carbon emissions and reduced energy use together really helps the resident to be able to save money. If the systems are installed properly and if they’re commissioned properly in the whole design, planning and construction processes and they’re all carried out as they should be, then the built environment conditions, like temperature, humidity and all of those live-in conditions, will be improved.

Matt:  Excellent and Nigel, your view. Can these be better places to live in?

Nigel:  Absolutely they can and I’ve personally experienced that in the homes that I’ve retrofitted, built and lived in as well as seen that on large-scale social housing projects. A high-performing home can be much more comfortable and a much more enjoyable place to live in, spend time in and be much better for your health as well. On some of these social housing refurbishment projects I’ve been involved in, like the fuel poverty schemes, the health impacts and the impacts on people’s lives have been enormous. Hopefully, that will help address some of the skills challenges. We need some inspirational projects and some inspirational showcases and case studies to inspire people to do this work but also inspire people to want to get involved in this industry. I think some of those technologies coming together and the outcomes that you’re delivering really can inspire a new generation of people to come into this industry.

Rebecca:  So, Nigel, tell us a little bit more about your history through this industry because you mentioned, at the beginning, that you’re now working around modular homes. So first of all, you’re going to have to unpack that for us and tell us what do you mean by modular homes.

Nigel:  We have a factory of 500 people in North Yorkshire and we’re growing further still and employing more people this year. That’s a very different setup from a traditional construction site. We directly employ almost all the staff; whereas, the construction industry is mostly 40% self-employed. We manufacture, basically, whole floors of a house, so a whole ground floor and kitchen are installed and the external finish of the bricks on the outside in the factory. We transport them to site, crane them on at four or six houses a day and complete the site from foundations to people moving in in a couple of weeks. We’ve very much taken a manufacturing approach in bringing that into construction because the construction industry really hasn’t changed for a long time and it’s not very good at R&D, continuous improvement and doing the things that most other industries that have moved on have done. If you think of a car from the 1970s to a car today, it’s transformed. A house from the 1970s to a house today hasn’t changed very much.

Rebecca:  That’s absolutely fascinating and that’s, presumably, thinking very much about new-build. I know, Jo, you’ve worked a lot more on the retrofit side of things and so, by default, you’re kind of working in existing homes and having to bring together different parts of the construction industry. How are you finding that working in terms of bringing those different people together that might not usually be working together?

Jo:  People love to work together. I think, generally, we’ve found that people really enjoy working together. They really enjoy learning from each other in their different trades as well but I think one of the key skills to enable that to happen is the project management role and someone who has communication skills and is able to enable the communication to happen at the different stages of the retrofit process. I mean it’s really important that projects are planned very carefully, that they’re designed very carefully and then they’re constructed and operated... and there is a certain management and communication role there that needs to happen to enable that to happen across the whole process. But from our experience, people really want a change and it’s having those management roles to make it change.

Nigel:  I’ve seen that before and in my previous role, I worked at a main contractor that was delivering new-build and refurbishing contracts largely in social housing but also in private housing. There was a dedicated role of a liaison officer, who was the Client/Customer Liaison Officer and who was very much a communicator. Have a cup of team, walk you through the process, resolve any issues and be the interface with the construction team. We’ve then got this new role of Retrofit Coordinator which is going to come in and help design and bring the jigsaw together because, as Jo has said, a lot of the industry is fragmented into their skill set and they know their bit of the jigsaw. You need someone to help bring that together because if it’s done well, they’ll work together and give you a really great building. If it’s done badly, you can have some negative, adverse consequences leading to dampness, mould or poor ventilation if that’s not been considered.

Jo:  This is a huge change for the sector as a whole really. I mean if you imagine up until... well, even now really, the majority of houses have gas central heating systems. So a plumber might turn up and knows exactly what they’re going to be faced with and what equipment they need to take with them; whereas, this is going to change as our heating systems change and become more diverse. So that knowledge and understanding across the sector really need to broaden to enable people to feel confident in their own homes.

Rebecca:  I love that you mentioned that, Jo. I love that you mentioned plumbers coming along and fitting gas central heating because my boiler went over the Christmas period and I had to get it refitted. The only option that I was provided with was a like-for-like replacement. You’re right, that’s not going to get us anywhere near where we need to be for net zero, so how far away from this kind of vision of the future are we now? What are we going to need to actually make that happen?  What are we going to need to make sure that every plumber that comes around to your home to fit you a new boiler when yours blows on a Sunday evening the day before Christmas or whatever... how are we going to make sure that everybody is offering these solutions that are compatible, not just with net zero but with this far more integrated home of the future?

Jo:  I think the developing apprentices and the young people coming through are going to be critical for that to happen. Just that general plumber or electrician role is not seen as how it has been in the past because it won’t be the same as it was in the past. We also need people to train those people and I think the biggest gap for me is who is going to train those apprentices. In the Budget now, there’s a flexi-job apprenticeship which enables people to work across different roles and I think the thing that we need to look at is training electricians to know what plumbers and plumbers to know what IT does and really, a cross-sharing of knowledge to understand what the next person is coming in to do or the person that’s been in before them has done so that they can align their works together.

[Music flourish]

Fraser:  With the chat coming around to workforce and the mammoth task of training up all the people that will be needed to install zero-carbon heat systems in our homes and industry, it’s a good spot in the show to drop in to a chat that I recorded earlier in the week with Nathan Gambling. Nathan has got his own renewable energy, low-carbon podcast called BetaTalk. He’s extremely passionate about heat solutions and particularly, about training the workforce around this area. He says he was born into it. His grandfather was one of Europe’s leading oil combustion heat experts, so I wanted to get his thoughts on how we train up more engineers with the skills that are needed for zero-carbon homes and heating.

[Music flourish]

Nathan:  Heating is the most complex system in someone’s home. As my cousin likes to say, ‘It’s not rocket science. It’s a lot more complex than that.’ [Laughter]. One of the biggest challenges I see is that actually, we don’t really understand, in this industry, how to train people effectively. If you were to actually ask my industry or the retrofit industry whether they actually use evidence-based practice, they don’t and that’s a big, big problem. We’re training people to be qualified rather than competent and there’s a big difference.

Fraser:  So how do we encourage people to use the evidence base in their training rather than the alternative just now as it were?

Nathan:  So that’s one of my jobs really. I go around and I talk with the associations and the organisations involved in all this big discourse about how you can use evidence-based practice. One of the best ways we learn is from each other and peer learning. Just sitting people in classrooms and listening to instructions and listening to a lecture doesn’t work. There’s evidence that that has never worked and yet that’s, unfortunately, what my industry always seems to do.  I use some of the best engineers there are in the UK in my industry. I’ve never once asked them to see a certificate. What we tend to do... the best in the industry know who the best are and they’ve been engaging with each other. We now live in a world of social media. They’re in WhatsApp groups. They’re in Facebook groups. They are standardising themselves. I mean we’ve got this other strange notion that you get some experts together and you spend months and months writing standards and you then develop a course for that. You sit someone down for three days and they’re supposed to learn in three days what experts took months to write. Learning doesn’t happen like that. It really doesn’t. I mean learning is like breathing. It’s the role of the learner. We can’t do it for them. We can just provide them with experiences and resources. We can’t do it for them. Education is something that’s done to us but learning is something we do for ourselves and we need to inspire and encourage engineers to realise that or anyone involved in the whole retrofit thing because it is a complex industry. It’s a very complex industry and I think we’re only now starting to realise that. Some of us in the industry did already know that but... you know, boilers are very forgiving but heat pumps aren’t. You need to get it right and you need to get the fabric right. Heat, air and moisture movement within a home is critically important and it is complex.

Fraser:  Do you find that, generally, your average on-site engineer is excited about this prospect? Do you think there’s a wide demand for retraining or upskilling, for want of a better word? Is this something that you find a lot of excitement about or is there any pushback to that?

Nathan:  That’s a very interesting question. You’ll find that the average age of the plumber and heating engineer is going to be around my age and I was 50 last week. The other thing you have to think about in our industry is we’re mainly self-employed. Most people in construction and building services are self-employed. So if they’ve got a good thing going, why would they want to transition to something that might upset the apple cart? I am seeing, though, that there is enthusiasm out there. I think there’s worry as well because they realise that they’ve got a little bit more technical in some ways. So yeah, you kind of see two aspects. You’ll get the sole trader or the SME who won’t probably want to be involved at all. They’ve got a few more years until they retire, for instance. I mean I’m going to be doing some work soon with MCS and OFTEC who are going to try and engage with their 9,000 OFTEC engineers to sort of encourage them not perhaps just to think about themselves but if they have a business that maybe their daughter or son is going to take over, to think about it in terms of them. We can encourage them to start to think... because this transition is coming. It’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened in the industry that I’m in ever [laughter]. So that kind of works with what I do as BetaTeach which is about encouraging people to think about this now, activate them as autonomous learners and to start learning about all this technology and hydronic design because that’s a big problem. The boiler industry was very forgiving. You can just literally hang a boiler on the wall, walk away and it will work basically [laughter] and so most engineers are very low-skilled and they don’t know too much about hydronic design but that’s all doable. Like you say, and it’s a very good question, what can we do to inspire that sort of thinking and that want to actually go out and transition?

Fraser:   Yeah, this is it. It’s how you encourage that action which actually probably could have, in the longer term, a lot of benefit for the engineers as well but it has to be their decision to make. The breathing analogy I thought was brilliant. It has to be their decision and to suit their life as well, what they want to do and what they want to achieve. So moving away from the engineer then and from yourself as well, do you think there are other people who can encourage this kind of retraining and who can promote this kind of retraining maybe in government or in policy? Are there any other actors that you think are going to be important to this?

Nathan:  Without a doubt. I mean the other thing is you’re going to find people from other industries who want to transition. I’ve taught a lot of adults from the Fire Service, the Army and the Police and there are going to be other people that are going to be able to transition quite easily. Also, we’ve got to do more around inclusion. I mean when I used to teach within colleges, I used to say to people, ‘Why aren’t we teaching people in wheelchairs?’ They would say, ‘They can’t be plumbers.’ I said, ‘Well, most of plumbing is actually design.’ A lot of people can go out there and bend a pipe and solder a pipe. I’ve taught thousands of people how to bend a pipe and solder a pipe but when you come to design a hydronic system, anyone could do that within reason. We need to encourage more people from different sectors and be more diverse with inclusion. It’s all possible and that’s when you can start to see where the excitement is, capture that excitement and work out who really is eager to learn. Like I say, one of the problems in my industry is we do put people on courses. It’s very easy to go and sit on that course, get your ticket, go out there and then make loads of money [laughter].

Fraser:  Do you think that’s something that we should be thinking about building more into modern apprenticeships and into those kinds of programmes where we’re training people straight out of school?

Nathan:  Oh, apprenticeships, they’re so complex. Apprenticeships are very complex. What most people don’t realise is that if you walked into a college, possibly one out of every ten people on a plumbing course or a bricklaying course is an apprentice. The rest have not got work. We teach hundreds of thousands of people. They enrol on these courses but they never get the work because, once again, we’re a self-employed industry. Self-employed people only tend to take on their daughters, their nieces or their sons, etcetera. To solve the apprenticeship problem, you need to actually now encourage people to give them a job. That’s the big problem because all the funding is going to colleges and awarding bodies. I campaign and say, ‘Why do we need a certificate? We live in a smartphone world. Why are we using this ancient system of certificates still?’ Hundreds of thousands of City & Guild certificates are handed out every year and they’re useless because they’ve never been on the job, so that’s one of the problems. How do you get those people back into the industry and say, ‘Look, you’ve done the theory.’ I mean don’t get me wrong; you’re only taught to pass an exam. It’s not great theory. ‘Come back into the industry. We’ll train you a little bit better with some people.’ You need to be trained with the employers and so you need to support and fund the employers really and maybe train employers how to empathise with an apprentice and encourage them in how to develop learning skills. We have to completely rethink this whole paradigm of training. It’s not just courses. It really isn’t.

[Music flourish]

Fraser:  Great stuff. Cheers again to Nathan Gambling of the BetaTalk podcast for taking the time to talk about the challenges around upskilling and training the next generation of heat engineers. Back now to Becky and Matt and the rest of the conversation with Jo and Nigel.

[Music flourish]

Matt:  So you’ve both outlined different supply chains before. Nigel, you were mentioning new modular housing and Jo, a little bit more retrofit and we’re just starting to move this discussion into where the training and skills are most needed. So for you, what are the big gaps? Where do we need to train people across these different supply chains? On the other side of that coin is maybe where is our skill base deepest and we’re best placed today.

Nigel:  For me, the construction industry has got the capabilities to do the work that’s there and we have the technologies. The difficult problem is it’s a small set of people and we need to try and expand that out. We don’t need to do that overnight. If your gas boiler goes and it’s an emergency response, you’ll need another gas boiler because it will take some time to fit larger radiators, potentially find a cylinder and get that fitted for an air-source heat pump. What we do need is to move the industry on. For me, there are two key sectors that can help that happen. One is social housing which does replace lots of boilers. They’ve got lots of engineers and lots of companies working in that space. They can start upskilling their workforce to do other technologies and they will then be able to do both. The other is in new-build housing. The government has set an ambition of 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 and I think they think half of those will be fitted in new-build housing at that point. So new-build housing has the potential to upskill and we saw that in the past. Ten years ago, the eco-homes were fitting solar panels and then when the Feed-In Tariff came along in 2012/13, a lot of those installers who had been involved in that upskilled, grew their businesses, took on apprentices and were able to expand into the other sectors. That really helps us unlock that. I think it’s about providing the environment for the people who have got those capabilities and skills to upskill, retrain and develop into other areas of the market and understand how to use those different skills.

Jo:  I also think that we also need some sort of consistency as well because a lot of people who work in the construction sector are from SMEs or are self-employed. For them, if you are a self-employed plumber or a gas fitter, at the moment, where do you go? What do you train to do going forward? Because there is so much uncertainty as to where we’re heading. I was in exactly the same position as Becky and my boiler packed up as well recently. I spoke to the plumber that attended our house and asked him whether he’d installed any air-source heat pumps and he said, ‘I’m not interested. The network is going to be hydrogen, so why should I bother?’ If you are an SME, you haven’t got the time to invest in spending weeks or months training to train for something that might not be the thing that goes forward.

Rebecca:  So what do we need? Do we need a lot more direction from government? Do we need intervention at that level to direct the industry and make sure everyone is moving in the same pattern?

Nigel:  Yeah, so fundamental to businesses growing into new markets and reskilling is around confidence. If you’re a small business, you’ll only reskill in a new trade or a new technology if you think there’s lots of work and you can get good rates doing that work. If you’re a big company, you’ll only take on direct labour if you can see a strong, long-term, low-risk market that’s going to be there. That requires confidence in government policy and that’s been significantly eroded over the last ten years and, for want of a better phrase, a strong and stable policy that has a clear view of a five-year marketplace that’s going to be underpinned and money not pulled away is absolutely critical to unlocking that investment of time as well as money from businesses.

Rebecca:  So Nigel, was that one of the big challenges or big issues that we saw with the Green Homes Grant and why we just haven’t seen the level of uptake as we might hope?

Nigel:  I think a lot of people were waiting to see if this policy does stick around and unfortunately, it hasn’t and so that is a real issue. We saw this in the past. If people look back to 2011/12, when I was heavily involved in the retrofit industry, we were lagging over a million lofts a year. We were doing tens of thousands of external wall insulations a year and that market got pulled in 2014/15. A lot of those people have now moved into other parts of the industry or have left the industry and it takes time for those businesses to rebuild back up into those spaces. I think people will go back into that space if there’s good money to be made and that money is seen that it’s going to stay there and it’s a commitment, the industry will come back. I guess you guys are up in Scotland and I think the Scottish market has had a better policy environment and has had better funding and hopefully, is seeing the rewards of that. In England, it’s been a lot more difficult.

Matt:  So if I’m a gas engineer at the moment, let’s say, and I’m working for British Gas, how would it work out in terms of being retrained? Who would tap on my shoulder and say, ‘Listen, have you thought about this? Have you thought about becoming a heat pump engineer?’ Let’s say I’m in a totally different trade like a joiner, ‘Have you thought about learning how to do external wall cladding?’ How is this happening today and how does it need to happen tomorrow?

Nigel:  It’s interesting. I’ve just had some solar panels fitted on my roof and a battery. Where the inverter was going, I wanted to get some insulation put on that same wall. So I’ve got the solar panel company doing the external wall insulation and their roofers have been upskilled into fitting insulation with a bit of support from the manufacturer, the supplier and a bit of direction from myself. They’ve done a great job. The people in the industry are very good at learning things quickly and picking things up. The challenge is making sure that they continue to learn, understand and develop. I think some of the technologies are easier than others. Designing air-source heat pumps and air-source heat pump systems for existing homes, which could have a whole variety of different systems in the home, is quite a skill and quite a challenge. External wall insulation, loft insulation, cavity wall insulation and some of those other technologies are more straightforward.

Matt:  I guess it’s not just about having people in jobs. It’s not just about having installs. It’s making sure that we have the right people who are skilled enough to deliver this stuff at a high quality. So I guess accreditation is going to be critical here. Jo, I can see you nodding. Is this something that you’ve come across in your work?

Jo:  Absolutely. In Wales, we had a large retrofit programme called Arbed which was run over a very short period of time with a lot of funding and the market was flooded with people [laughter]. Some of those people were obviously very well-qualified and did good jobs. As the programme went on, more and more companies were joining the sector and the quality of the work wasn’t as good as it should have been really. So I think there is a danger that asking for too much in too short a period of time can create issues and so the accreditation, the commissioning process and all of those things are necessary but I also think it’s reliant on careful planning and design. If that doesn’t happen and we are told that there are billions of pounds to be spent by the end of next year, you’re going to end up with problems because you haven’t got the skills to fulfil the role.

Rebecca:  How important do you think local action is going to be to deliver some of this, whether it’s specific accreditation programmes that are appropriate for specific contexts or whether it’s about local action building local supply chains and creating local skills development programmes? Do you think that this is going to be something that can happen like blanket across the national level? Do you think it needs to happen in devolved government or do you think that local action could actually have a really important role to play here?

Jo:  I think there is a role for local action because I think it all comes down to having knowledge and good case studies can really stimulate an expansion or scaling up of projects because people can go and see demonstration projects. They can learn from things that are happening around them, then the supply chain develops and there can be a sort of growth out from a local scale. But I think there is a need for top-down devolved government, national level and UK government level as well to ensure that those regulations are appropriate. You don’t want to push people to achieve too much that frightens them off from doing anything. You want to encourage and enable people to make that change in smaller steps rather than pushing them to do things and, in the end, they don’t do anything because it’s just too frightening for them.

Nigel:  Fundamentally, I think you need the government policy and the government money to underpin it but you need local delivery. Interestingly, although the main Green Homes Grant for householders hasn’t been rolled over, the Local Authority Delivery programmes are really only just kicking in. There’s some innovation in the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund projects that, again, are being led locally by local authorities and coordinated by the regional energy hubs in England. So I do think that those projects will help drive some local action. I think, historically, if you look back though, some local authorities were really proactive and had the resources and geared up and delivered very well but some areas didn’t do that and were left behind. Interestingly, what you are starting to see is local communities and even villages coming together to do ground source heat pumps that connect the whole village. You are seeing some of those local groups coming together and driving some action. Again, I think a really important thing, if you’re interested in engaging in this space, is not only to act for yourself but try and encourage others and help others around you to do more and then hopefully, that snowball impact will roll out and we’ll start to get more scale.

Jo:  It’s a huge change in the interest of local authorities over the last few years to really learn and expand their knowledge in the energy sector and low-carbon retrofitting. They really are keen to develop their understanding. I think one of the hindrances for them at the moment is that they tend to only have the traditional energy manager role in the local authority. They tend to only look at things like SAP ratings, tracking EPCs and a bit of the old-fashioned, standard way of understanding their building stock. I think, going forward, there’s a need for roles in local authorities and it could be younger people or apprentices having holistic knowledge of the low-carbon opportunities that the local authority can develop for themselves and put them into context for their local authority and even engage between different local authorities and share knowledge. Local authorities, I think, are in a really good place because they understand what they’ve got in their areas.

Rebecca:  Brilliant. Well, thank you so much Jo and thank you so much, Nigel. You’ve really shone a light on some of these very complex issues for us. I think we’re going to move on to talk about Future or Fiction? I know, Nigel, that’s something you’ve been particularly looking forward to [laughter].

Nigel:  Yeah, I’ve been listening in and I’ve been very excited to play a part.

Fraser:  If we’re being honest, this is a Future or Fiction? podcast with a little bit of local climate action thrown in. This is what everyone comes on here for [laughter].

[Music flourish]

So for the uninitiated and for anyone listening who isn’t familiar, Future or Fiction? is a game whereby I present our guests and our hosts with a brand new, exciting technology usually themed around energy and you have to work out if it’s a genuine technological innovation, i.e. if it’s the future, or if I’ve just completely made it up, in which case, it is fiction. So this episode’s creation is called Crypto Thermal.

[Music flourish with low, steady beat]

Mining for cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, uses huge amounts of computational power which requires huge amounts of energy and, in turn, generates huge amounts of waste heat. To put this to better use, Bitcoin geeks have devised a system that recycles some of this heat to heat local buildings and homes. Through the recycled heat, they can power boilers and the like, reducing bills for their neighbours considerably. Do we think that the cryptocurrency geeks have designed local heating systems using waste heat from their big warehouses? Do we think it’s the future or do we think it’s fiction?

[Music flourish]

Matt:  I think you’ve been watching too many of these superhero films, Fraser [laughter]. Crypto Thermal, I’m pretty sure I saw that in the last Guardians of the Galaxy [laughter]. Guys, what do we think?

Nigel:  I’ve had some experience of something similar but not quite the way that Fraser described it. I’ve seen a French company looking at basically taking the servers out of a big data centre and putting the server in your bedroom as like a radiator. There is a solution that sounds similar, so I’m not quite sure if this is an energy centre and piping the heat waste away or if this is a local server but I think this is the future.

Jo:  I agree. I’ve heard similar things from data centres too, so I’m going to go with the future as well for that one.

Rebecca:  I know that one of the Prospering from the Energy Revolution projects, the one based in Islington called Green Skies, is looking at creating heat networks using waste heat from data centres but you didn’t talk about data centres. You talked about cryptocurrency and that has thrown me because I kind of know nothing about cryptocurrency. Are we talking about a data centre here or are we talking about something that is inherently distributed in the ether of the magic of the internet?

Matt:  I thought this was, essentially, just somebody who doesn’t see the light of day much [laughter] sitting in a dark room somewhere with two or three really high-powered laptops and just running them indefinitely rather than a massive data centre. Now that might be my warped perception of this and maybe it’s a much more professional outfit.

Fraser:  Mining for Bitcoin and widely, for cryptocurrencies. So it’s not just Bitcoin. There are so many others these days that have popped up. It’s a big operation. It isn’t just laptops in bedrooms. You are talking data centre size.

Matt:  But you would have to have quite an established outfit doing this to then build some kind of heating system off that. I don’t know. I’m less sure about this one.

Rebecca:  Hang on a second, mining? What do we mean by mining because it’s not something physical we can dig out of the ground? Come on, you’re going to have to explain this a bit more [laughter].

Fraser:  I was really, really hoping that question wouldn’t come up [laughter]. Now please, if anyone knows more about this than me, please jump in but my understanding of it is mining for things like cryptocurrency is where you have computers that are effectively solving equations. They’re cracking these codes to unlock whatever the coins are underneath it. Coins aren’t physical, right? It’s not physical stuff but it’s computers that solve equations. Does anyone know any more about this than me that can put this better than I can? No, okay [laughter].

Matt:  I think you’ve done a good enough job there, Fraser.

Fraser:  Thank you.

Matt:  It captures what this is about. So I’m going to lay my cards on the table. If we were talking about a server and this was Apple, Google or whatever, I think this has already been done but I don’t think for Bitcoin mining.

Fraser:  Why is that? Do you think Bitcoin miners are just bad people?

Matt:  [Laughter] No, I just think the process is too informal and too underground for it to be established as a kind of district heating system.

Fraser:  Okay. This is what I was hoping for. This is exactly what I was hoping for.

Matt:  But I’m fringe here. Jo is firmly a yes. I think Nigel is. Jo?

Jo:  Yeah, I’m sticking with future, definitely.

Matt:  Nigel?

Nigel:  I’m sticking with the future. Certainly, I’ve seen it centrally and locally. I’m not sure with Bitcoin but I think that was Fraser there trying to throw us off path.

Matt:  Yeah, Fraser is like that. Becky?

Rebecca:  I think that this is something that Fraser couldn’t have made up, so I’m going with future [laughter].

Matt:  What? Is it intellectually beyond him? [Laughter] That was just mean [laughter]. I’m saying I don’t think it’s true.

Fraser:  You’re staying on the contrary. Okay, the answer is... the future and not because I’m not capable of making it up [laughter]. But yes, that’s right, Crypto Thermal is the future. A Canadian start-up, Heat Mine, has been trialling heat recycling systems tailored for Bitcoin warehouses specifically to put some of the huge amounts of wasted energy to better use. For scale and for reference, Matt, emissions from mining Bitcoin around the world are the same size as the annual emissions of Argentina.

Rebecca:  Wow!

Matt:  Yeah, that’s bonkers.

Fraser:  The emissions are enormous and a lot of them are concentrated in these enormous data warehouses.

Rebecca:  Matt, maybe you could make us a graph of that for next time [laughter].

Matt:  I’m sure I can. You know what? It puts a whole new slant on a project we’ve just put in which is about mine water geothermal which is about taking heat out of old coal mines [laughter]. Fraser, there’s a very weird analogy here for Bitcoin mining.

[Music flourish]

Rebecca:  I think all that remains is to say thank you again to Nigel and to Jo and Fraser for a fabulous Future or Fiction? as always. Remember to check us out on social media. Tweet us @EnergyREV_UK. Use our hashtag #LocalZero and join the conversation. Ask us any questions you want us to get to in future episodes and we’ll do our best but for now, bye.

Nigel:  Very good.

Matt:  Bye-bye.

Jo:  Bye.

Fraser:  Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.

[Music flourish]

Matt:  Thank you all.

Fraser:  I hate when that happens. Nigel, Chris Stark did the same thing. I suggested something and he goes, ‘Oh well, I know about this already, so it’s future.’ I was like, ‘For f**k sake!’ [Laughter].

Matt:  This is the problem about getting experts on.

Jo:  You’ve got to put more effort in, Fraser [laughter]. Definitely more effort [laughter].

Rebecca:  Well, you did the one from the Black Panther film, although let’s be honest, that’s where the inspiration came from and caught me out [laughter].

Matt:  And caught you out, yeah. It’s not that you’re keeping a tally with Fraser [laughter].

Rebecca:  No [laughter].

Fraser:  I haven’t worked on research in about six months [laughter].

Rebecca:  Don’t tell me that. I’m your advisor [laughter].

[Music flourish]

  

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