24: Retrofit for the future: Jobs, skills and training for zero-carbon homes
What jobs, skills and training are needed to deliver smart zero-carbon home heating? How big is the skills-gap? (Spoiler: It's quite big). Matt and Becky are joined by Cardiff University's Dr Jo Patterson, and Adam Chapman, director of Heat Geek, while Fraser's been chatting about retrofitting and the just transition with Carbon Co-op co-founder Jonathan Atkinson. Tweet us @LocalZeroPod, or email localzeropod@gmail.com - we always love to hear from you.
Essential Reading:
Episode Transcript:
Rebecca: Hello, I’m Dr Rebecca Ford.
Matt: Hi, and I’m Dr Matt Hannon and welcome to Local Zero.
[Music flourish]
In this episode, we’re talking about jobs, skills and training to deliver net-zero homes that are fit for the future.
Rebecca: We’ll be joined by Dr Jo Patterson, a Senior Research Fellow at Cardiff University. Jo is a friend of the pod and we’ve talked to her earlier in the series about how we heat our homes. Today though, Jo will share her thoughts about the sorts of skills and jobs the UK will need to develop as we start to decarbonise our buildings and integrate them into smarter energy networks.
Jo: We can’t all be expected to know everything. It’s not possible but I think if people understand why the changes are needed, I think that really helps. If they know why they’re doing something different to what they were doing before, it helps them to deliver the project better and it helps them to operate what they’re using better.
Matt: We’re also going to be joined by Adam Chapman, Director of Heat Geek. Heat Geek was created to give expert advice on all aspects of the heating industry to both end users and industry professionals. It’s a one-stop shop to find out everything from how to bleed a radiator to selecting the right heat pump.
Adam: Historically, they put all the onus on the back-office end because that’s where the shirt and ties are and the installer will just plug the pipes together. No, the most important part of that process is the last person putting the pipes together.
Rebecca: It’s a real bumper episode because that’s not all. Fraser has also been chatting with Jonathan Atkinson, co-founder of Carbon Co-op, all about retrofitting houses and the just transition.
Jonathan: The energy transition is taking place. There’s no argument about that. That is happening now. For us, it’s about how that transition takes place and how citizens, people and communities are involved in that transition.
[Music flourish]
Matt: As always, you can reach out to us on our dedicated Twitter handle @LocalZeroPod to get involved with discussions over there and also you can email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you want to share some longer thoughts.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: So this feels like a bit of an unusual episode of Local Zero because we don’t have Fraser here with us today.
Matt: No, I’m very upset about that but he is alive and well. He’s doing just fine. He is otherwise engaged today. He’s taken a wee break. So it’s Becky and I today but that just gives us a bit more air time to discuss the key issues. He’ll be back soon. Don’t fear.
Rebecca: So polite, Matt – ‘to discuss the key issues.’ I feel like actually, it’s more of a rant, especially if we start to think about... [laughter]
Matt: Sorry, rant. That was the right word. Yeah, to rant around the key issues.
Rebecca: Absolutely.
Matt: There are plenty to discuss. We’re going to do our good, the bad and the ugly again this week. We did have quite a lot of bad and ugly [laughter] and so Becky and I have had to be very Local Zero and be very optimistic and look for the good news of which there is some. We’ll come to the bad and the ugly shortly but one of the good news stories that I certainly picked out was around the government’s Contracts for Difference, Becky. They’ve just announced, basically, the pots of money that they’re going to make available. For the first time in a long time, we’re starting to see technologies come back into play for subsidy. Onshore wind and ground-mount solar, which are the mainstay of many community and local energy projects, are back.
Rebecca: Yeah, and I mean that’s massive because these technologies, until recently, have been quite heavily subsidised through various mechanisms. The Feed-In Tariff was obviously a massive support system and with that dropping away, it’s been a little bit harder, particularly for smaller players, to get involved. So this is quite exciting news that there is this kind of new opportunity opening up.
Matt: Absolutely, yeah. We’ve basically got a £10 million pot for what they call established technologies which are onshore wind, solar and hydro. You look across Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, many of the community and local projects rely on these technologies. Something like onshore wind was facing, essentially, a de facto planning ban as well alongside this drop away of subsidy and so it’s big, big news and really positive news. Just a little side story to that and drilling into the ethos of Fraser’s Future or Fiction? he did floating offshore wind the other day. Floating offshore wind is actually in this and it’s been ringfenced for a full £24 million and so hopefully, there will be some more projects to be seen out at sea. That was the good news [laughter].
Rebecca: That is exciting. That is good news. £10 million may not be as ambitious as we had hoped for but it’s certainly a good start to really kickstart the industry and get some more jobs going in that area as well. Hopefully, it will breathe a bit of life into it but tell us the bad news, Matt.
Matt: Okay, well, before we get to the ugly, let’s start with the bad news. Again, it’s always difficult to know whether to put this in bad or ugly but one thing that caught my eye was a response from the GMB union in relation to the proposed ban on new gas boilers. This is something that if you ever have the opportunity of listening to the Committee on Climate Change and about what they recommend needs to happen with discussions around banning gas boilers in the 2030s... we don’t quite know if and when this will happen but obviously, there’s a strong lobby out there that are invested in gas. It was just a surprise to me to see such a large union come out and say, ‘This is really bad news. We want to desperately avoid this.’ Now I appreciate they represent various gas engineers and the employees of the gas industry but the whole tone of this open letter that they wrote was ‘this will damage the welfare of our workers.’ We’re going to talk more about the just transition in a minute, Becky, because I know you’ve covered the report. Granted, if there aren’t jobs to move into, that is a problem and it will immediately damage the welfare of these workers but, of course, the welfare of these workers will be even more damaged if they’re living in a world which is 1.50-20 warmer and the catastrophic implications of that.
Rebecca: For me, this really opens up what I think are some of the underlying issues, one of which is that there is just right now not a very good alternative to a gas boiler. We don’t have any real security around whether we’re going for hydrogen or if we’re using our heat networks for something else. We don’t really know if we’re shifting towards much more localised forms of district heating or, indeed, if we’re moving towards heat pumps and we don’t really have the industries developed around that. I’ve got a lot of people I know who have installed heat pumps and the installation process has been great. They found somebody that’s retrained and reskilled and they’ve moved on but when something goes wrong, there’s not often the support there or there’s not the understanding there. In the GMB’s letter, they talk about the unproven heat pump technology. I think large aspects of the technology are proven but I think that there are probably challenges in getting it implemented and operational.
Matt: Absolutely. This whole pod is about skills, jobs and training and so how on earth are we going to get that supply chain up to speed and ready to deliver millions of heat pumps if the unions aren’t going to support that move? I’d like there to be a more nuanced debate rather than we’re on or off gas; there’s a ban or there’s not a ban. The unions, I would like to think, are going to look at this and say that things are changing. Things need to change and they’re either at the front of that change and supporting a just transition and they require this, this and this from government to do that or they’ll be the laggards that hold things back. Easy for me to say when I’m not a gas engineer I note. I appreciate that but we are dealing with an existential threat are we not?
Rebecca: Absolutely and hopefully, we’ll start to dig into that a little bit more in today’s show later on with our guests who are certainly much closer to this than either of us, Matt.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. So ugly... what’s been ugly this week? [Laughter]
Rebecca: I read a news story on the BBC earlier this week and so it will be a couple of weeks by the time the pod is released. It was about the UK cutting our climate pledges in order to clinch a trade deal with Australia. It’s not entirely clear what that actually links to. It looks as though they’re less stringent measures to address global warming. For me, this is just despicable, particularly as we’re less than two months to COP and the eyes of the world are on us. We’re supposed to be setting the bar really, really high for what can be happening and really pushing on this and all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Well, if we can’t have our trade deal, let’s just go back on what we’ve said we’ll do in order to address carbon emissions.’ How can we expect anybody else, whether you’re talking about other nations around the world or whether you’re talking about local government, communities and households, to take these big steps if our government is not leading from the front?
Matt: It’s the precedent it sets, especially just before COP, isn’t it? It’s an ugly precedent to set. I couldn’t agree more and also you’ve been doing some homework, I guess, on some other recent releases. We’re moving now more into the subject matter of today and moving away from the good, the bad and the ugly but the just transition report was released from the Scottish Government a few days ago, so it will be about 10 or 11 days after this pod is out. Job and skills are front and centre of this, so what did you learn?
Rebecca: Absolutely. Well, a couple of months ago now, the Scottish Just Transition Commission submitted its recommendations in a final report to government and the Scottish Government have now come back with its response to the Just Transition Commission which addresses the national mission of a Fairer, Greener Scotland which is nice. I really like the way that this actually doesn’t just address jobs and skills. It’s not just about, say, the transition from oil, gas and coal to renewables. They take a much broader focus. I really, really commend that, both from the commission and also the Scottish Government’s response. I think that they’ve addressed all of the points really nicely, both around how to support that kind of transition of the industry as well as how to engage workers and frontline communities in that transition more effectively. As part of what they’re doing, they have developed or rather they’re developing a National Just Transition Planning Framework and, as they outline, no one else has done this. This is the first of its kind, so we can’t expect it to be perfect but I think it sets us in the right direction. What they try to do is to say as they’re looking at various planning and development in the future, they will be looking at these various policies alongside the impact it has on people, citizens, communities and places. They will be looking at how it intertwines with jobs, skills and education. They’ll be looking at it in terms of how costs and benefits are distributed. They’ll be looking at it in terms of how it affects businesses and the economy and impacts on adaptation and how resilient Scotland can be to support itself as well as a broader environmental take; remembering climate change and carbon emissions are key but it’s bigger than that as well.
Matt: Somebody’s inbox is very full then is what you’re telling me and that £500 million Just Transition Fund has got to go a long way.
Rebecca: Absolutely.
Matt: Brilliant. Well, it’s front and centre of what Scottish Government is looking to do in terms of policy and we’ll hear it time and time again over COP26 I’m quite sure. Just before we bring in our guests, who know a tremendous amount about the issues around skills, jobs and training, I was at a conference just in the last few days...
Rebecca: In person, Matt, right? You actually physically saw other people [laughter].
Matt: In person. I was physically there.
Rebecca: Wow!
Matt: I was physically surrounded by other physical people [laughter]. There was no Teams or Zoom. It was wonderful. I sat through a really interesting presentation by somebody called Rob Murphy from Energy & Utility Skills. They’d done a survey of different skills and the demographic make-up of the energy sector and what hit me, in the context of a just transition, was how little diversity there was: ethnic diversity; gender diversity; age diversity. This is the electricity sector, I should say. There really aren’t that many young people. There really aren’t that many women and there really, really aren’t that many from ethnic minorities or, I should say, with physical and learning disabilities as well. So it was a really interesting subject. I just watched it and I thought, ‘Wow! If there’s ever a sector that needs to have a big dollop of diversity to emboss that justice dimension, it’s the electricity and energy sector.’ Yeah, I really enjoyed that and a big hat tip to Rob and I look forward to seeing more from them on that.
Rebecca: For me, this also ties in with some of the points raised in the Scottish Government’s response that we were just talking about where they talk about co-designing and co-delivering policies and projects moving forwards. I think that this idea of thinking about how you are more inclusive and how you encourage more participation is really great and exciting but I think we need to also be moving away from just this idea of more innovative forms of consultation or citizens’ juries and start to think about actually bringing a more diverse group of people into the workforce. Let’s not go out to these communities and ask them to volunteer their time and tell us what to do. Let’s actually integrate them into doing it and delivering it and, as you say, diversifying and seeing very different perspectives that are actually involved in setting that agenda.
Matt: Agreed and I’m hoping we can hear a little bit more from Jo and Adam on exactly that and so without further ado, shall we bring them in?
[Music flourish]
Jo: I’m Dr Jo Patterson. I’m a Senior Research Fellow at the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University. For the last 12 years, I’ve been installing whole-house energy systems into buildings; so that’s combining renewables, demand reduction technologies, internal wall insulation, external wall insulation, loft insulation and then combining that with renewables, PVs and battery storage as well to try and reduce carbon emissions but also improve the building stock for the residents and to reduce energy bills. It’s working a lot with social housing companies to try and replicate the systems across different types of housing stock.
Adam: My name is Adam Chapman. I’m predominantly an installer of renewable products. We have a showroom over in Surrey with various things on display but more recently, I’m the founder or co-founder of Heat Geek which is an online training academy for engineers to move into the renewable space and also to inform consumers as well as installers on YouTube of any potential pitfalls and to just make up for the vast lack of knowledge there is in this space.
[Music flourish]
Matt: So Jo and Adam, welcome to Local Zero. Thank you for making the time. I think we begin very much with the question around the types of skills we need to deliver net zero and smart homes. We know that there’s a big challenge out there in terms of getting our homes fighting fit to tackle climate change but the question is what kinds of skills and what kind of professions we need to do that. It’s probably going to be quite a long answer because there are a lot of people involved. Maybe Jo, if we can begin with you.
Jo: Sure. Through our experiences at the Welsh School of Architecture and installing technologies into the built environment, we’ve kind of identified a six-stage process that’s involved with the whole implementation of energy systems. You need to design the system accordingly and appropriately for the particular building or group of buildings and you need to plan it as well, so the planning and design are critical. Obviously, you need skills at that point and that tends to be engineers, architects and people with professional skills. There’s a procurement process then which is also critical to ensure that that design is transferred into the installation and implementation point because if there are elements that are missed from that design stage in the procurement, then huge problems can occur. Obviously, you’ve got the installation stage which is the stage that everybody thinks about which is the electricians, plumbers and those people on the ground that are working and are usually local. Obviously, you’ve got your maintenance and operational stage as well and again, those electricians, plumbers and technical staff are involved in that final step. There is a huge, broad range of skills and that’s increasing as the system becomes more complex. All of these people really need to work together to ensure that everything is done as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Matt: Excellent. Adam, anything to add there in terms of the types of skills and people we need to do the job?
Adam: Yeah, sure. My angle is more from the heat pump installation perspective and historically, we’ve obviously had combination boilers which you can go into a house, plop it on the wall, plug it in and it will work. You don’t really have to know anything and pretty much anyone could just walk into that space and become a combination boiler installer. With what’s set to replace boilers, that’s just not going to work. You need to actually size the pipes and you need to understand mass flow rate. You need to understand the volume of the system and how that affects things like cycling and all of these tweaks and little adjustments are all the things that you can do to take a heat pump installation from a COP of 1.5 up to a COP of 5.5.
Rebecca: You’re going to have to explain that. You’re going to have to dig into that for us [laughter].
Matt: Do you hear the jargon alarm? [Laughter]
Adam: If you have a COP of 2, it means if you put in 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity, you get out 2 kilowatt-hours of heat. The COP is the amount of kilowatts you can output for every 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity in. The basic problem we have is with combination boilers or any normal condensing boiler, you’re going to end up with a COP of 0.9 which is an efficiency of 90%. With a heat pump, you literally have 150% efficiency, which is a COP of 1.5 or up to a COP of 6 in some scenarios. There are two ways this is going to reflect in our industry. There’s one good thing where good reputable installers can prove their work. They’ve got a track record of their history and you can bring back their previous customers to ask what their COP was or it’s going to just highlight that no one really knew what they were doing [laughter] and we’ve failed miserably which is what Heat Geek is about. We’ve got training to help people tweak these tiny bits to build up this COP. It’s not outside the reach of normal human beings and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist but just the information wasn’t out there historically. The information that is out there is written in an academic format and it’s not an accessible or attainable way for general installers to be able to consume. That’s kind of where the idea of Heat Geek came from. We’ve read a few CIBSE (Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers) journals in our time and things like that and we know that that could be relayed in a much more simple, easy-to-understand way to consumers and installers.
Rebecca: You’re bringing up a lot of really interesting points. What I’m hearing from both of you is that first of all, it’s not just one thing but there are like six different functions and then within that, you’ve got multiple different technologies. I know, Jo, you talked about various forms of insulation, generation storage and so on. If we just dig into one single technology, which is how we heat our homes, there’s a huge amount of complexity and a huge difference in what we’ve got today and what we need going forward and that knowledge is just, perhaps, not there or not there in the right form. We need to learn a lot more to install these things but it’s not just about getting the installation in. I know quite a few people that have had heat pumps installed and they’ve been so excited. We could probably say they’re energy geeks or climate geeks and they really wanted to go down this path. They’ve had a heat pump installed and it’s worked for a bit. It stopped working and no one knows why. They can’t figure out what the problem is. They can figure out some workarounds but it’s a big challenge in this kind of ongoing way. I’m just wondering if you’re seeing this follow through because to me, some of the issues that are coming out say to me that it’s not even about having the right skills. We don’t even have the supply chains. We don’t have a solid enough industry to support this technological change through the journey of a home. I’m just wondering how you’re seeing that play out as well. Do we have weak points? Are there particular strengths that we can build on? Adam, with your training, are you just focusing on the installation or is this broader longevity aspect built into it?
Adam: The government have set a target of 600,000 heat pumps to be installed every year and there are currently 1,900 registered heat pump installers on the MCS database. The numbers kind of speak for themselves. We don’t have enough installers or even anywhere close to what we need to have. With long-term maintenance, it all comes down to the installation. The better it’s installed, the longer things last. It all does point to the same thing and what our training does teach is how to do the installation. It’s also helpful information because when you go and assess a system that’s broken down, you can say, ‘They didn’t size the pipe right here. That’s why they haven’t got the flow right over there.’ Another issue we have is if someone wants to become a heat pump installer, they can be NVQ Level 2 or 3 in heating which means they’re a heating engineer and they can connect pipes together but if they want to move to heat pumps, they go on a two-day BPEC (British Plumbing Employers Council) course which is an attendance course. Some of them are three days. They attend and they might not be conscious for those three days and they get their certificate at the end. If they were conscious, they didn’t learn a lot. They learnt a lot about what’s inside the unit. Now, most heat pumps these days are what are called monobloc. They’re all sealed and it’s one box that you fit outside. All you’re doing is connecting a flow pipe and a return pipe. The most important thing an installer has to do is know how to size those pipes and how to hydraulically lay out the inside to suit that product. That’s not taught on a BPEC course. They just assume we know it and we don’t know it. There isn’t information out there.
Rebecca: This fact about sizing is critical. Jo, once you start to bring in the whole house, particularly if you’re retrofitting and you’re insulating at the same time, you’ve run into countless challenges with that, haven’t you?
Jo: Yeah, we definitely have. With one of the larger heat pump suppliers, we asked for a quote for a heat pump and they didn’t ask us anything about the building apart from its age. They sized the heat pump for the age of the house, regardless of what measures were installed and because it was part of a deep retrofit, they didn’t consider the fact that we were installing external wall insulation, new windows and significantly improving or reducing the heat losses and so the system was massively oversized because they didn’t take geographical location into consideration. They thought it was sea level. It was in Wales [laughter] and it was not sea level. I think there is a huge change that needs to happen within the process of sizing a system by the engineers and the manufacturers to make sure that systems get sized correctly in order to save money. For the price of one heat pump that is way oversized, you could get a couple, so it’s critical really.
Matt: Jo, you mentioned earlier in the list, or the six pinch points, or key points of any install or retrofit and towards the back end, the devil is in the detail of what you said which was around somebody who links all this together and somebody who can connect these different trades at different points and has almost oversight of that retrofit that does things, like you’ve just said, like account for the specific building and not the broad type of building but also the occupants in that building and how it’s used. Do these people exist and if so, how have they trained? What kind of skills do they have?
Jo: You’ve got a retrofit advisor. You’ve got a retrofit assessor and a retrofit coordinator, designer and evaluator and there is training available for each of those different roles within the retrofit. The coordinator role is the most like what you’ve described but the training doesn’t go anywhere near what it needs to be able to fulfil or to achieve the skills that are really needed to deliver a successful retrofit. It needs somebody to be bought into the whole process. They need to be there from the start to the finish. Like you said, they need to be communicating with the residents and they need to have a general overview of what each element is. They don’t need to know the technical... or they need to have a bit of information about the technical. They don’t need to be a technical expert but they need to have that vision that the system works in that building, it also works together, it’s appropriate for where it’s going and who is going to be using it.
Matt: Adam, with your installs, is your company that company that we’ve just been referring to or are you specifically looking at maybe the heating installs, for example, a heat pump, and you’re working with another company who’s bringing all those elements together?
Adam: No, we would be contacted by the consumer directly and it would be specifically because they’ve asked for a heat pump. When you speak to a credible installer about a heat pump, he will, first of all, do a heat loss on your property which may be charged for to size your heat pump. As Jo said earlier on, sizing the heat pump is incredibly important not because the heat pump might be a bit more expensive but because if you overpower your heat pump, your heat pump will cycle. It will flip on and off and when it flips on and off, it loses efficiency. So they’ll go and do this heat loss and as part of that, you’ll be able to work out your emitter sizing which are your radiators and your underfloor. Off the back of that, you’ll find out what temperature you can run this system at. Now, the temperature you run the system at is the most crucial part of a heat pump install and what all listeners or anyone purchasing a heat pump should take in is the most important piece of information. Your installer should be talking to you about what flow temperatures you’re going to run at. As part of that discussion, you obviously naturally talk about insulation. If we want to aim for a flow temperature of 400, for example, in Room A over here, we’re not going to do that with that small radiator and there’s not enough wall space and we’re going to have to look at adding insulation to that room or some other solution. I’m not too sure what other solutions Jo is talking about exactly but that’s kind of our approach. It’s an insulation versus heat pump approach. We’ve got another product right here actually which is a hydrogen fuel cell which maybe I’ll talk to you a bit about at the end which is an alternative solution. We talk about the other solutions but not so much automation though because automation can work against a heat pump which is quite a big topic to go into.
Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. [Laughter] I get a bit scared when we start talking about automation in the house. For Christmas, which feels like it only just happened even though it was quite some months ago, my sister-in-law bought us a little Alexa and it terrifies me how much she’s listening when we don’t even say her name. I then think, ‘She can’t really do that much because she’s not connected up to anything else in my home.’ So the minute you start talking about automation of these technologies that actually fundamentally control the things that keep us warm and keep us alive in our homes, it truly starts to terrify me. But you also bring up a really important point which is regardless of whether it goes in or not, we are starting to see these homes where we have more and more technologies coming together, whether it’s heat pumps or other forms of clean heating, whether we’ve got some form of supply, whether we’ve got some form of storage. We often think about the big batteries but we might have storage, for example, in your water tank. I know that there are a number of companies out there that are looking at how hot water tanks can provide that sort of smart storage. So we’re not only trying to make the home smarter... so I think we’re going beyond and certainly some homes will be just switching out their existing technology for a new technology but really, if we need to do this properly, it’s quite clear that we need to also be looking at the insulation and how those buildings are integrated into our networks. If we just come back and think a bit more holistically, moving from gas boilers to heat pumps puts a huge load on our electricity networks that they have not been designed for and to be able to do that, we need to have some sort of flexibility. There needs to be some sort of smarter control that connects our buildings to the grid and all of a sudden, you don’t have this standalone home anymore but you’ve got something that might be smarter, whether automated or whatever. I just start to think that the training that we’ve been talking about simply to get people to be able to install heat pumps and then if we’re expanding that and saying actually, it’s not just that but it’s all of these other technologies, and it’s connecting the technologies, and it’s then integrating it with the grid... I mean what sort of retraining do we actually need to see here and who needs to be doing it because, Adam, your company can’t be doing everything, right? You’ve got a real deep-dive focus and I know, Jo, you do a lot of work with those kinds of bigger, whole-system projects. Are you seeing any push, whether it’s from Welsh Government or whether it’s from the engineering academies, to support that training? Who’s going to be delivering that?
Jo: It is coming. Just speaking from the Welsh School of Architecture’s point of view, the Royal Institute of British Architects is introducing the Climate Literacy Knowledge Schedule which is going to be coming into all practices in Schools of Architecture, so it is happening. Whether that is going to be integrated enough is still the big question. We can’t all be expected to know everything. It’s not possible but I think if people understand why the changes are needed, I think that really helps. We’ve found through speaking to electricians and plumbers, if residents know why they’re doing something different to what they were doing before, it helps them to deliver the project better and it helps them to operate what they’re using better. It is introducing things like digitalisation and IT but, again, the people who create the data collection processes don’t know how to solve the problems that they’re identifying because they’re not the engineers and so that communication has to happen between experts. One of the really massive skills that has to happen is communication and collaboration because people need to be able to speak to each other. They don’t need to know what they all are experts in but they need to be able to speak to each other in a way that they can understand, share problems and solve them.
Rebecca: I see you nodding along vigorously, Adam.
Adam: Yeah, it’s a bugbear of mine. We’re trying to fix the same problem or similar problems that we’ve always had with an old solution. Technology is moving faster than ever before and it’s only going to continue and I don’t think the regulatory process that we have in heating, building or anything like that can possibly keep up with it anymore. It’s the same with the law. I ride an electric skateboard to work because I don’t want a car and I’m bull [laughter] or I think I am but that’s actually not legal because I can’t insure it and it needs insurance. That’s because the law is not up-to-date. I’m going the cleanest way I can get there. I mean I could run or walk, I suppose, but I don’t want to. I want to go on my electric skateboard but the law isn’t up-to-date. It’s the same with installations in that as stuff changes, you can’t put this regulatory stuff in place to make people do this one thing because before you know it, it will be out of date and that will be working against you. So what we need instead is a living, breathing community of people, as Jo said, that are communicating with each other. This is the basis of Heat Geek. It was people sharing ideas, teaching each other and having a base for this information or bases, i.e. social media, is the best way we can educate and education is the solution not just for the lack of engineers but also for the consumer.
Matt: The question is, and Adam raised this before, about the number of installers that we require. We need 600,000 heat pumps. Adam, you were mentioning that we’ve 1,500, roughly, installers. So how do we get people to train and to tool up with these skills that we need?
Adam: That is the million-dollar question. There are going to be fewer trades available as time moves forward because of automisation. I guess there are going to be people looking for different types of work anyway. I don’t know how we’re going to force people to move into this area.
Jo: I think we have to value the people that are working in the sector a lot more. I think it’s been a traditional thing that if somebody isn’t doing particularly well in school, what do they go and do? They become an electrician, a plumber, a builder or a brickie. I think those trades need to be valued a lot more and to deliver a quality built environment where choices are much wider, those people need to be able to be trained better to be able to make the right decisions across the board, otherwise, we’re not going to reach the carbon savings that we need to.
Matt: So for these professions to be seen, as in a respected profession, as something which is desirable. That test is if someone says, ‘What is it you do?’ and somebody says, ‘I’m a heat pump engineer.’ ‘Wow! Tell me more.’
Jo: Yeah, it’s like what Adam said before. You’d go in, you’d install a gas boiler and it’s kind of very straightforward; whereas now, if you’re going to do a whole-system retrofit which includes the demand reduction... it might include storage and it might include renewables as well, you’ve got to upgrade the electrical system. You’ve got to make sure all the systems are sized correctly. You’ve got to make sure that the external wall insulation is the right thickness. Somebody has got to know what elements work well together or whether you’re going to create an environment that’s humid and if the ventilation isn’t right. People have got to be able to be aware of that and it’s people on the ground that are doing the work who will deliver that.
Adam: Very well put, Jo. We do need to respect the engineers a lot more. It’s an incredible amount of information they need to know and historically, especially with heat pumps, they put all the onus on the back-office end because that’s where the shirt and ties are. The installer, he’ll just plug the pipes together. No, the most important part of that process is the last person putting the pipes together. Here’s another part of the issue. There is a lot less money in installing heat pumps than there is with gas boilers. We make much more installing gas boilers than we do on heat pumps because of the amount of paperwork there is. Typically, if you try to fill a market or something, you have more money in it but we don’t. Installation prices are already too expensive and people are doing it for the love. The reason we install heat pumps is because it’s the right thing to do, so it’s a difficult, difficult question.
Matt: That’s not going to grow an industry, is it? We need something more than that.
Adam: A lot of people say, ‘Perhaps as we do more heat pumps, they’ll get cheaper and cheaper.’ Unfortunately, most of the installation of a heat pump is putting together pipework and hanging radiators on walls. We’ve been doing that for 90 years or something and that’s not getting any cheaper. The actual heat pump bit is only a fraction. The box that you purchase is a fraction of the cost and even if that came down by 50% or anything like that, you’re going to be shaving a total of about 5-10% off the total installation cost. So, unfortunately, it just is an expensive thing. However, once you’ve done that job, it’s incredibly cheap to swap in the future because the infrastructure is already in there. It’s only because it was originally set up for a gas boiler that made it so difficult and this is where the gas boiler industry let us down. In 2005, we had condensing boilers mandated which basically means they extract more heat out of the flue and that condenses down into a liquid. They’re perfect for low-temperature operation. We can get a lot more efficiency out of them. Back in 2005, we should have looked at low-temperature heating then and if we did, instead of just sticking onto the systems we’ve always had, we’d have low-temperature systems everywhere right now and it would just be a plug-and-play process. Instead, we dropped the ball massively and were let down with education. We weren’t educated. There was a big gap here. It’s just a shame because we could just be in a much better position than we are at the moment.
[Music flourish]
Matt: This seems like a good moment to listen in to Fraser’s discussion with Jonathan Atkinson, the co-founder of Carbon Co-op.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: The main thing that we want to talk about is the People Powered Retrofit which is the big project that you guys have got going on just now. For the listeners who don’t know what this is, could you explain what it is that the Carbon Co-op does?
Jonathan: Yeah, sure. Carbon Co-op came out of a few of us, who set the organisation up, and our frustrations with the climate change movement and taking climate change action in particular; the feeling that people on their own feel quite marginalised, quite small and quite limited in what they can do to tackle something so big as climate change. So we came up with the idea of the Carbon Co-op as a way of people working together to take collective action, either in their own homes or in their own communities, on climate change and to make some of the big savings in carbon emissions that we know we need to make those kinds of carbon emission reductions. It focused mostly on domestic energy emissions, retrofitting homes, advocating for more smart-home technologies and that sort of thing but really, it’s a way for people to take collective action on climate change, access technical expertise and be part of a like-minded group of people doing the same thing.
Fraser: So you’ve just launched your big People Powered Retrofit initiative. Can you talk us through what that’s all about?
Jonathan: Yeah, People Powered Retrofit came out of the work we’d been doing on retrofit which has been over maybe ten years now. It’s been around trying to find ways to help people do a deep retrofit on their homes. That’s like multiple measures; insulation of the floors, ceilings, walls, triple-glazed windows and new heating systems like heat pumps, solar PV and the like and really trying to make those big inroads into domestic carbon emissions. We’d done a number of funded projects and got people so far. We’d developed an assessment methodology which enabled people to assess their own homes or for us to send out assessors to assess their homes and see what they could have done and what kind of costs it would amount to but what we found is that that got people so far but they tended to get bogged down. They tended to find the whole thing quite complex. They tended to feel that they were quite a lot of risks involved and had a lot of challenges to find the right kind of technical expertise and also the right kind of contractors as well. So People Powered Retrofit came out of that really; an end-to-end service to help people get all the way from just simply thinking about retrofit all the way through to getting it done.
Fraser: It’s an amazing thing. I’ve been following the media content you’ve been putting out really, really keenly and it seems to be going well. You’ve launched a share offer to back this as part of the Carbon Co-op. Can you explain a bit more why you chose to do it with the cooperative model with people investing in this? Is there a reason behind that?
Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been running People Powered Retrofit for the last couple of years just demonstrating it, testing it and piloting it. The reason we chose community shares as a way to do this is it comes from our organisational form which is a cooperative community benefit society. That’s an organisation not for profit by its very constitution and it’s owned and run by the members on a one-member, one-vote basis. These kinds of organisations and corporate forms have been around since the 1840s, since the start of cooperatives, so we’re part of that very lineage really. How our community share offer works is that you sell member shares in the organisation. People invest, you raise the income and then you have a membership of member investors who co-own the organisation and are bought in not only to the business but also to the mission of that organisation. That’s what really appealed to us about community shares because it’s a way of raising that income and capitalising the organisation but doing so in a way which reflects that collective action on climate change really.
Fraser: Brilliant. We find it as well with Glasgow Community Energy and community energy, in general, historically... and I don’t need to tell you or a lot of the listeners this but it’s that sort of purpose, mission-led kind of investment into it that buys into an idea more than just of making houses better but the bigger, collective action question, isn’t it?
Jonathan: It comes back to what we were discussing about Carbon Co-op and our founding mission. For me, the energy transition is taking place. There’s no argument about that. That is happening now. For us, it’s about how that transition takes place and how citizens, people and communities are involved in that transition. A transition that is run, managed and owned by large corporations, energy suppliers and the Big Six is going to lack legitimacy and it’s also going to be a process where it happens to people rather than people being actively involved with it. With the big changes we’re going to see in people’s homes, people need to be involved in that process. They need to offer consent, they need to participate and they need to own the benefits of that process as well.
Fraser: Bringing it back into people’s homes then, Jonathan, that deals with the collective but bringing it back to the practicalities of the process... because our listeners are very much switched on and they’re very much looking to what we can do about this ourselves or what the challenges and process are. From running the pilots of People Powered Retrofit and from incarnations of this in the past, what do you see as the main sticking points or the main issues in the process in terms of whether that’s training or linking people up with skills? What has your experience been?
Jonathan: Absolutely. The funny thing about retrofit is that it doesn’t require new technologies to be invented or new processes. Everything is there and everything is in place. We know, and we’ve known for many years, how to retrofit a home. That isn’t the sticking point. What certainly is one of the sticking points is the availability of the supply chain. We have hundreds of thousands of very high-quality contractors that work in our homes that come and repair kitchens, convert lofts, build extensions and that sort of thing. What they aren’t tooled with, at the moment, are the skills to retrofit a home. These are relatively new to the average construction worker and the average trade. There’s a job in hand to skill up and train both existing contractors but also people new to the contracting world as well. A lot of the pilot work of People Powered Retrofit has been about creating a service that works for people and people are involved in that and the householders are involved in that process.
Fraser: Yeah, absolutely. Coming back to the skills, we’ve spoken about this separately and you know how excited I get about the idea of the training that you guys do at Carbon Co-op and the work that you do with contractors. Can you talk to the listeners a little bit just about, not necessarily from this incarnation of People Powered Retrofit, the training work that you do and some of the experiences that you’ve had with contractors and people new to the industry alike?
Jonathan: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think there’s a conception of training for construction workers amongst policymakers which is around classrooms, getting people to get pieces of paper and getting them off-site and into a learning environment. Now, all the experience from us but also the expertise in other parts of the world, and we’ve particularly been looking at areas in America around this, shows that the best training for contractors is on-site at their place of work. It’s not taking them out of that. It’s applied learning. It’s peer learning as well, so people are sharing skills within their own companies but also between skill sets as well on the same building sites. So it’s very applied and involved. The classroom-based learning really isn’t that effective and it takes people off-site. It costs them time and it costs them money.
Fraser: That’s it and I think that something you find when you talking about the just transition more broadly and when we talk about the job side of things, not even just retrofit, is that a lot of people, who’ve worked in oil and gas or as contractors on sites, are very much open to a change. It’s just about supporting them to do that, I guess, is the big issue.
Jonathan: Absolutely. I mean my dad was an electrician and worked his whole life as an electrician. He was involved in plumbing as well to a degree. He’s so enthusiastic about heat pumps and solar panels and he’s into the detail of even the electricity meters, gas meters and smart meters. There’s a huge amount of enthusiasm for this. There are opportunities for contractors to create added value basically, to improve the quality of the work they do and to access more resources in doing it. One of the fears that people have, based on things like the solar PV industry that came out overnight and wasn’t particularly good in its terms and conditions, is that these new jobs won’t be unionised, there won’t be decent pay and the conditions will be dodgy. Ensuring a just transition is really important and it is an understandable fear that many people have.
Fraser: Absolutely. It’s not enough to tell people, ‘There’s a job for you,’ if that job isn’t sustainable or if that job isn’t good quality with good conditions and fair work as the rules and the stipulations are here just now as well. One thing that did spring out to me from the People Powered Retrofit, from an article which I believe was yesterday or the day before, was that from this initiative alone, you expect to create in excess of 3,500 jobs potentially that you guys think can be created through People Powered Retrofit and obviously, the benefits for people in their homes. Do you think this model is something that we can start to see replicated and scaled across other places in the UK?
Jonathan: Absolutely. Retrofit, energy efficiency and home improvements are really of great interest to other community energy organisations, such as ourselves, not only in parts of the UK but in other parts of Europe as well. We do a lot of work with REScoop, the European body that represents citizen-led energy co-ops but as well as community energy groups, a lot of local authorities see this as a really big win for them because it’s not only about tackling climate change, tackling home improvements and health but it’s also about local economic factors. What local authorities really would like would be to develop these small-scale markets on a neighbourhood basis where you have houses being retrofitted, tradespeople being trained up and new local economies, new local businesses and circular economies being built in those areas. I’d have to typify the existing approach to retrofit or the traditional approach to retrofit, let’s say, that has been government-led which has been to bring Tier 1, large contractors, like Carillion, into an area to try and blitz retrofit, do it not so well and not to such a high quality, leave the area and leave a scorched ground really, a lack of jobs almost and a lack of expertise in that area because of their employment practices. I think things like People Powered Retrofit offer a very different vision of local economic benefit and development.
Fraser: So a final point, Jonathan, on People Powered Retrofit, is that you’ve got a big share offer open just now that I’m sure our listeners will be very, very interested in. What is it you’re trying to raise and where can they find the share offer?
Jonathan: Thanks, Fraser. [Laughter] Thanks for the plug. Yeah, the share issue is live on the Ethex platform. People Powered Retrofit is easy to find there. We’re aiming to raise £550,000 and the share offer is open until 30th November. People can invest for as little as £250 or upwards from there but all the information, documentation and business plans are on that website.
Fraser: Brilliant. Thanks very much, Jonathan.
Jonathan: Brilliant. Thank you.
[Music flourish]
Matt: It’s great to hear Carbon Co-op’s perspective there. Now back to our chat with Jo and Adam.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: So we’ve got a lot of work to do to get more people into the sector, incentivise it more, value it more and really recognise it. Earlier in the episode, Matt was bringing up some figures for just how undiverse the electricity sector is. I trained as an engineer and I can tell you that was not a particularly diverse classroom either. As we’re trying to grow this sector and target more, do we need to be thinking more about diversity? Should we be trying to reach out to different groups of people? Adam, I’m wondering what are the sorts of people that are coming through your training programme? Is it quite typical of the existing sector? Are you getting more diversity and do you see any opportunities to increase that?
Adam: It’s not should we but we literally have to diversify. If someone wants to get into this industry now, they just should do because there’s a lot of space here to fill. Yes, you’re not going to be the best at the beginning but there is so much room to grow and getting in now would be the best thing to do because you’d be able to grow as the industry grows. The industry is going to grow whether you like it or not. So if this is an advert, that’s what I’d say about it. It’s a great space to be in and if you’ve got an installation company like we have, even finding time for today was difficult but I wanted to do it [laughter]. It is so busy. It is so busy out there.
Rebecca: I can imagine and, Jo, do you ever sit around the table or in these conversations and feel like the odd one out in the room? Is it difficult or do you think that things are changing quite nicely?
Jo: Yes, it is changing. I think people are becoming more respectful of the broader spectrum of people involved in the sector. I think there is still that pigeonholing of people into certain roles. There are 2.7 million people employed in the construction sector as a whole and there’s £85 billion worth of planned investment over the next couple of years and that’s just going to grow. If we deliver on smart local energy systems, and we have to achieve net zero by 2050, somebody has got to deliver that. Well, not just one person obviously [laughter] but there’s a huge raft of people that have to deliver that right across the expertise board. My two kids, who are 13 and 15... I’m trying to push them into the sector because the opportunities are massive and the opportunities are so broad as well. You could literally do anything. You’ve got the environmental coordinators and those involved in carbon calculations and all the way through the whole sector, it’s just massively varied.
Adam: I should just give a quick advert if you don’t mind. We’re actually sponsoring the women’s stand at the Installer Show which is at the end of September. There’s a stand there to help any women trying to move into the installation industry which we’re sponsoring and there will be a ton of information there and a discount from our course.
Matt: Excellent and I think there’s just one very quick follow-up. Often, when people talk about training, in my mind, I’m thinking of a young 16-year-old or 21-year-old which, Jo, you’ve just pointed out and that’s crucial that the younger generation are going to either deliver net zero or they’re not... but there’s retraining. Adam, you were saying that originally, you were a gas engineer and you still are. I’m sure if my boiler breaks down, you’d be able to come around and fix it. How do we get folk who are maybe at the middle or the latter end of their careers to retrain?
Adam: I think that particularly smart individuals could step into this industry and do very well off the bat. The issue I said was the one that I mentioned earlier which is that I don’t think there’s a lot of money in it at the moment [laughter] and I wouldn’t even know where to start addressing that. I guess you guys are aware of the levies placed on electrical costs versus gas. That’s obviously going to do something with the industry but at the moment, we’ve got so much demand and not enough installers and yet the prices are low, so that doesn’t fit with the supply/demand thing. Sorry [laughter] I can’t give you a better answer.
Matt: [Laughter] Well, I’m not sure anybody has the answer unless, Jo, you do.
Jo: We’ve worked on 12 projects, we’ve retrofitted numerous houses and we’ve done a lot of affordable, new build, low-carbon houses as well and everybody seems to want to change and want to learn. It’s just about not knowing where to go to learn the basics and just understanding why the changes are needed. There are also accredited courses which are the things that they have to have going forward, things that are nice to have and then things that they’re just interested in learning. I’ve spoken to 60-plus-year-old electricians that have been in the trade for years and one of them said, ‘This is the best job I’ve ever worked on. I’ve learnt so much. It’s inspired me to keep going.’ I think the desire to be trained is there. It’s just about making sure it fits in with working practices. I think there’s also a thing about changing the culture of training as well and that needs to happen in schools, further education and higher education and that once you’ve gone through those traditional education PAT systems, you need to keep training. That needs to be part of your job going forward rather than thinking, ‘Right, I’ve done my education. I’m trained now and that’s the end of it.’ I think the culture has to change to keep that training going.
Matt: Yeah, like a CPD approach where you’re constantly learning and evolving. Listen, Jo and Adam, thank you so much indeed. I’m hoping you might stick around for the next section. Normally, at this point, I hand over to Fraser and Fraser’s itching to take the microphone and to do his thing which is Future or Fiction? Unfortunately, he’s not here today but we were hoping that we could ask you both, given that his Future or Fiction? thing is normally giving us a question around whether this is an innovation of the future or it’s actually fiction and given that you’re involved in the building sector, engineering and heating, we just wondered if there are any innovations you’ve come across in recent months that have got you very excited and you’ve looked at this and thought, ‘Mmm.’ It might not be a technology. It might be a new business model or it might be a new service but is there anything out there that you think our listeners should know about that could be a key driver of net-zero homes and buildings?
Adam: Actually, I can show you. This is something we’ve actually been installing for quite a while. This is a hydrogen fuel cell.
Matt: I should pause there, Adam, and say to the listeners that what we’re looking at looks like the dashboard of the Star Trek Enterprise.
Rebecca: It does [laughter].
Matt: There is a pulsating purple light. Well, I’ll just shush now but you’ll have to explain what it is [laughter] because it looks pretty space-age.
Adam: The pulsating flashing light was from Amazon [laughter] and it’s an additional thing for our showroom to make it look smart [laughter] but the rest of the box is a hydrogen fuel cell. It’s quite a controversial product and surprisingly, a small amount of people know about it. When we can’t fit a heat pump, because heat pumps just can’t be afforded in some homes because of the amount of insulation needed on their potentially Grade II listed building, etcetera, and perhaps there isn’t enough government funding and there should be because I think heat pumps are the long-term solution... this is the other thing that we suggest to them. This takes in natural gas, so it does use natural gas and it has got a carbon footprint but it’s much lower than the typical power stations that support the grid. It uses steam reformation to separate that into carbon dioxide and hydrogen. It uses the hydrogen in a hydrogen fuel cell process to generate electricity for the home and heat for the home. It generates around about 6,000-kilowatt hours a year which is much better than a typical PV installation and it produces its peak in the winter which is when we use most of our power. PV produces its peak in the summer which is when you need less power which is obviously annoying. That’s my little product.
Matt: It’s look future and if Fraser had pitched that to us, I would have said, ‘I hope that’s true.’ [Laughter] Brilliant. Thank you, Adam. Jo, is there anything that you’ve come across?
Jo: I guess it’s kind of similar and on the same sort of lines as what Adam said really. In quite a lot of our new builds, we’ve used an exhaust-air heat pump. One of the down points of the traditional air-source heat pump is that it has to have quite a cumbersome-looking external air exchange unit; whereas, the exhaust-air heat pump that we’ve installed in our new builds is an all-in-one unit which is about the same size as a fridge freezer. Having a mechanical ventilation and a heat recovery system, which freshens the air, the hot water tank and the heating system all in one place, you don’t need radiators or anything else. The only sort of heating element is the system pipework in the ceilings to provide fresh air. It works really well and it does provide a nice, comfortable living environment which is low-carbon and provides you with fresh air as well. I think it’s the best component of our systems that we’ve found to date but, as Adam said, it’s only applicable in well-insulated homes at the moment.
Matt: And this is where we start getting into the broader discussion which we don’t have time for today which is about how liveable and enjoyable the space is to be in. So if there’s fresh air in your house, then you’re going to be all the happier for it. It’s not just about keeping it at room temperature. But, Jo and Adam, that’s all we have time for. Thank you so much for coming today. It’s been a real blast.
Jonathan: Thanks for having us.
Jo: Thank you.
Rebecca: Yes, thank you, Jo, and thank you, Adam. That was amazing and I’m so inspired to try and do something about my quite old [laughter] and not very well-heated home. You’ve been listening to Local Zero. If you haven’t already, go and find us and follow us on social media @LocalZeroPod and get involved with discussions there. Also remember that you can email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com but now I think all that’s left to say is thank you again to our guests, thanks for listening and bye until next time.
Matt: See you soon, bye.
Rebecca: Bye.
[Music flourish]
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