Eco-Stories: Colin Nolden – UK Energy & Solar Power for Trains

Dr Colin Nolden is a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at University of Bristol Law School, UK, and a Researcher at the Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, UK. His research spans sustainable energy governance at the intersection of climate policy, demand and mobility.

He has worked on energy policy, regulation, business models and markets as a researcher at the Universities of Exeter and Sussex, UK, and as a research consultant for Climate-KIC, Germany, Department of Energy and Climate Change, UK, and Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy, UK. As a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University Bristol, Colin conducts independent research on sustainable city business models, climate markets and Riding Sunbeams, a consortium powering railways with renewable energy.

Colin completed his undergraduate degree in Geography and History at the University College Dublin, Ireland, and both his postgraduate degree in Sustainable Development and his PhD in Geography at the University of Exeter, UK. Between his various positions, Colin has worked for a Geography Department, a Politics Department, a Business School, a School of Management and a Law School. In between, Colin worked as a steelworker, a mussel farmer and an energy efficiency consultant.

This interview was recorded on March 16, 2020.
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Fiona Martin (FM):
Welcome, we're with Dr. Colin Nolden from Bristol. How are you doing this morning Colin?

Colin Nolden (CN):
I'm doing very well. It's actually the afternoon here. It's a sunny day. First day of spring here proper, so very nice day apart from an impending virus.

FM:
Yeah, we're all certainly trying to navigate the Coronavirus right now. We're recording on March 16th and so we're right in the height of it. Just as a quick introduction before we launch into this, Dr. CN is a Vice Chancellors Fellow at the University of Bristol Law School in the UK and a researcher at the Center for Research into Energy Demand Solutions at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, also in the UK. His research spans sustainable energy governance at the intersection of climate policy, demand, and mobility, which sounds very interesting but I would love for you, Colin, if you could introduce yourself further and tell us more about what you do at these institutions and the research that you do.

CN:
My name's Colin and I have a background and it spans various subject areas. Not your typical academic career probably. I have an undergraduate degree in geography and history and a minor in economics. I studied sustainable development, which is based in the geography department at the University of Exeter in the UK. I have a PhD in geography, specializing in energy policy, also from the University of Exeter in the UK. I subsequently worked for the University of Sussex, also in the UK, working for the science policy research unit - SPRU too, which was one of the first institutions to really develop scientific theories about how science is funded and how research and development policy emerges in countries, so long-term economic cycles. I subsequently took a couple years off, went traveling, and worked as a consultant for various organizations including Climate-KIC, which is the largest public private climate innovation institution in Europe. Partly funded through the European Institute of Technology based in Budapest.

I also worked for the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, which nowadays has been merged into the Department of Business Energy and Industry Strategy. I have also worked as a consultant for a management school in Germany, which is at university. Various sorts of bits and pieces. Following two years of working as a consultant I decided to return to academia. I was very fortunate to get this position as a Vice Chancellors Fellow at the University of Bristol, which is an open research position. It allows me to do whatever I want, which is a very fortunate position to be in. No teaching requirements and I'm continuing my work on the energy policy, which I... started in my PhD and I've meandered around energy generation, energy efficiency business models. Now looking at one particular project powering trains directly with solar power and also looking at the bigger picture, looking at how climate markets are emerging, looking at different ways of valuing carbon emission reductions, for example.

FM:
Amazing, it sounds like you have a very wide breadth of experience, and that you have a position now that's hopefully allowing you to bring all of those different experiences together and produce some interesting results. To get started, to lay the groundwork, I'm certainly not an expert in energy systems, so can you tell us a little bit about the energy landscape in the UK? How the majority of the UK is powered and then what direction are they going in?

CN:
Sure, so the UK pioneered steam power from coal really so this is where the Industrial Revolution took place. Initially the UK had a surge in energy production from water, but then once the coal seams, especially in North England around Newcastle, became easily exploitable in the early 19th Century, really sets the Industrial Revolution in motion and quite literally in motion in the case of railways because railways co-evolved with the Industrial Revolution in the UK. Railways were powered by coal, steam, effectively from coal and they were also used initially to move coal around the UK. To encourage more uptake of coal, and this coal dominance really has been the key characteristic of the UK energy system until the late 1980s or the early 1990s, around that time there was a big change in policy but also in natural resource extraction processes,which encouraged what was known as the "dash for gas" in the 1990s when coal reliance was reduced and the energy generation portfolio diversified towards gas.

Gas was more... First a cleaner resource but it also has lots of benefits in that you can switch gas fired power stations on and off much more rapidly than coal fired power stations, which is known as the ramping rate. At gas fired power stations there are very short ramping rates, it's very quick. Whereas coal fired power stations are rates slow to response, and this flexibility was already recognized in the 1980s as a potentially a very valuable property of gas in future energy systems, which is what it is now when we have an increasing share of renewable energy, it makes a lot of sense to have a lot of gas in the system to balance the fluctuation of renewable energy supply.

The UK also has a strong nuclear power tradition. It built the world's first civilian nuclear power station in the 1950s. I think it went online 1956, and it's also linked to the UK's nuclear military defense that the UK has maintained a strong commitment to nuclear power ever since. The UK is planning on building a nuclear power station which will be among the biggest in Europe probably from the mid-2020s onwards, which while it will be constructed will probably be the only nuclear power station constructed in Europe during that time. Which is an indication of the UK's I guess you could call it is a three prong strategy, so there's nuclear power, there's gas, and there's renewable energy moving forward, no coal.

FM:
Interesting, so that's got me thinking. I love the history of how our societies have evolved. As you were talking I was thinking about it. I think it's correct to say the Industrial Revolution started in England, and so that was alongside coal power. Is it correct to say then that as the Industrial Revolution kicked off in other countries like the US, Australia, and exporting across the world that it exported that coal power model? And have other countries, I'm just thinking US and Australia right now because it's easier for me to think of those, have they gone the way of gas as the UK has at the end of the 80s, early 90s, or are we still plowing on with coal?

CN:
This depends a lot on natural resource endowments. The UK has access to natural gas from various sources. It is also traditionally a very strong trading nation, so that's why getting resources from other countries is not considered a huge strategic drawback for the UK. Other countries prefer to be much more reliant on indigenous resources, so that's why Australia for example, which has very accessible, vast coal seams, is heavily reliant on coal more than natural gas. It has a very strong industry behind it. Market liberalization in the UK in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, the same time as Ronald Regan undertook his market liberalization policies in the US, encouraged the closure of a lot of, what were at that point already unprofitable, coal mining businesses in the UK.

There was a certain diversification away from indigenous resources towards foreign resources in the UK from the 1980s onwards. Then gas seemed like the next logical conclusion also because the UK has its own gas reserves and it could be exploited with more modern technology which had their own export potential. The US is a particular case, it has huge gas reserves as well as coal and oil reserves, but a lot of them they were locked away in inaccessible seams and only technological innovation, which has really recently seen the US exploiting these untapped reserves, especially through fracking, which has allowed lots of gas and oil resources to be tapped which previously were deemed economically and physically more or less inaccessible.

FM:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah in the US, fracking is being tossed around. I'm interested a little bit in the perception of fracking in the UK. I mean, my uneducated perception is that it has not been favorable maybe as much in the US. I would say the US populace is neutral when it comes to fracking except for the places where it's actually happening and it's polluting groundwater, but from an outsider point of view it seems that fracking has been maybe received more negatively in the UK. Is that correct?

CN:
Certainly. So the UK is a very densely populated country, so population density in England is around, probably around 400 people per square kilometer. In parts of England it's well over 500 people per square kilometer. The fracking sites that were identified by the government and the main company that wanted to exploit these reserves, Cuadrilla, are close to densely populated areas. Now if you want to exploit any kind of natural resource you're probably well advised not to do that in highly populated areas, and fracking especially is not only linked to groundwater pollution, it's also linked to local seismic activity, so in other words earthquakes.

Several trial rounds of drilling by Cuadrilla have resulted in local earthquakes to the extent that people woke up at night, so local protests then grew into national protests. As a result, fracking has been suspended. It hasn't been entirely called off because it is an indigenous resource that the UK could potentially exploit, but there is very strong opposition to fracking so the government felt like it had no other choice but to suspend fracking. For the moment at least it seems indefinitely.

FM:
Fracking is touted by certain politicians in the US as a transition fuel towards renewables, and this gets a little bit back into the UK's, like you said, this three prong approach of if I have this right, nuclear, gas, and renewables. Do you agree with the point of putting fracking as a transition fuel to renewables or is it... It sounds like with the moratorium in the UK it's not even able to be used in that manner. What I'm trying to get at is to talk a little bit about this three pronged approach, mix, and where it's going because there must be X percentage currently with renewables and that sort of stuff. There must be some sort of targets to move it in another direction or are there targets? I'm not sure.

CN:
Up until very recently the UK was bound, at least to a certain extent, to renewable energy targets from the European Union. Now because the UK is exiting the European Union there's big question marks over these targets. Now the UK, just like other European countries, have often interpreted these targets just as targets, not as obligations to achieve. But still they provided a certainty in the market in terms of the direction where it was going and withdrawing these targets increases uncertainty and increases that risk of investing into, for example, renewable energy technologies.

All of this is also linked to the support and the funding landscape and subsidy landscape that is underlying these technologies. Furthermore explicit funding, for example, feed-in tariffs for renewable energy, some of them are less explicit, hidden away in tax breaks for example for executive limousines for companies, for example, which have very low mileage per gallon for example, which effectively supports the fossil fuel industry. There's lots of ways of looking at various policies in place and to disentangle them and to identify exact targets can be a bit of a difficult task. But there is a strong push by the UK government, for example, to encourage offshore renewable energy development. Offshore wind, for example, in the UK is among the cheapest in the world because the UK has created a very favorable institutional environment for the deployment of offshore wind technology, and if I remember correctly the most recent rounds of competitive tenders for offshore renewable energy development, offshore wind development, reached a low price of less than £40 for installed megawatt.

Now one generally assumes in the UK that a technology can be competitive in the markets if it costs about less than £50 per installed megawatt. If something is below £40 and already applied that is very cost competitive in the market, which implies that it probably can be developed subsidy free. Whereas nuclear power, for example, is guaranteed feed-in tariff of over £100 per megawatt. This will start once the new nuclear power station at Hinckley Point, as its called, will start operating it will received this feed-in tariff for 25 years from that point onwards, which shows that UK government is quite happy to spend more than twice the amount of the market value on nuclear power than it is on conventional and renewable fuel sources. Which is an indication potentially of for the UK's strategic defense priorities lie, potentially also something to do with industrial strategy around nuclear power and potential export potentials and possibly other reasons which we've yet to disentangle from policy decision-making.

FM:
Interesting. A lot is going on there. Yeah, I don't even know how to comment on that. It's good to know. Say for the general populous we're very much not aware of things when it comes to subsidies and power. I mean it's getting thrown around a lot more about the subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, but I think that example that you've used for wind power versus the cost of nuclear power is extremely interesting. I think there is maybe an incorrect assumption that renewable energy is not feasible, it's not going to happen, there's silly stuff our president says that windmills cause cancer for some reason. We have a lot of disinformation out there, but a lot of your work in the renewable energy field is around solar development, so can you talk about the renewable energy landscape for solar? Maybe where it came from because solar panels have been part of the landscape for a while now. I mean I remember seeing them as a child. We certainly see a lot more now and I do have questions as to where that's going in the future, what that future looks like.

CN:
Interestingly solar panels and nuclear power share a common history. They both emerged out of military and industrial innovations. Nuclear power emerged as civilian use of nuclear technology and expertise, which emerged out of the Second World War, and solar power emerged as a civilian technology out of what was originally used for space travel and satellites. To think of the Voyager satellites in the early 1990s... that were shot into space in '77 and they have, for example, very, very expensive solar powers to provide them with energy. But the technology costs of solar power have witnessed one of the most dramatic declines of any technology that we have developed to date.

I'm not quite sure what exactly the cost difference is, but given that nowadays you can pick up solar panels, or rather the price of solar panels now is less than the other technology that you need to provide you with electricity.

FM:
Oh, okay.

CN:
For a household scale installation in the UK, for example, for a four kilowatt system you pay more for your inverter, the cables and so on, and labor than you do for the actual solar panels. This trend is set to continue because the relative ease of which we can access the resources necessary to build solar panels implies that with every... I think there's a certain cost reduction curve which is being called Swanson's Law I think after somebody who came up with this curve. I think for every quadrupling of productive capacity for solar power we've seen a halving in price. That's been fairly continuous over the last 10 years. Solar power's set to become the cheapest form of energy moving forward, which is great news for everyone.

FM:
That is exciting and in the UK does the solar panel... Well let's just say in the US the way it works is... I don't know personally but as I read up on it, the power companies say that they'll give you a discount if you put solar panels on your roof and then it goes directly into the national grid. There's people who are fine with that because they look forward to the cost savings, although their cost savings are actually way far out, they don't see cost savings for maybe a decade. Then there's other people who don't like the aspect of being connected to the grid, they'd rather store their own energy in batteries and then power their house that way. The battery aspect is extremely expensive. Does it work the same way in the UK or is this residential solar landscape a little bit different from that?

CN:
Yeah, so in the UK the residential solar landscape was built more almost entirely on the feed-in tariffs. Feed-in tariff was a policy introduced in the UK in April of 2010 and provided remuneration for every kilowatt hour of electricity fed into the national grid, and it also assumed that a certain amount self-consumption and it provided with an export tariff, which was deemed at around 50% of the power that you would not be consuming yourself. There was an inherent incentive to consume as much power yourself because even if you consumed all your power it was deemed that you'd be exporting to the grid, which means you would save money on not consuming power from the grid and you would earn money from selling electricity to the grid even though you were using it all yourself.

This was to increase the uptake of solar feed in the UK because even though it's at quite a northern... Now let me get this right. Is it latitude or longitude? It's quite a northern latitude and solar radiation levels in the southwest of the UK, for example, are good enough definitely and were sufficient even over 10 years ago to warrant installation of solar panels. Now with the improvement of technology we even find solar panels up in Scotland, which is probably about far north as definitely the Canadian provinces. It even makes sense now economically to install solar panels in somewhere like Scotland because of the decline in price. Initially the government with it's feed-in tariff in place encouraged the uptake of domestic solar panels, but then after several rounds of reviews they realized that what you're creating is a highly dispersed solar generation potential, which was going to entail quite significance expenditure to support local distribution, electricity distribution networks that were originally designed just to enable electricity to flow in one direction, which was from generation sites to consumers, to households.

Suddenly this changed from households being generators and consumers at the same time so it's prosumers, both producers and consumers. Which was causing all sorts of headaches within the UK energy system, within the grid infrastructure. To mitigate this problem of what then emerged as a problem, the UK government has reduced the subsidies, feed-in tariffs to an extent that they've now been completely terminated. Nowadays it only makes sense if you as a domestic household have a decent enough business plan or possibly if you're green and ecologically minded you might still do it, but at the moment the payoff time is probably well in excess of 10 years to deploy solar panels subsidy free on your own roof.

FM:
Wow, so it seems similar to what's going on where I live. We live in South Carolina, we have plenty of sun and the recent state government sessions have removed subsidies for solar panels. I didn't know the details of that so it's like I don't know why they were doing it, but incredibly interesting. You mentioned wind. Well I mean if you're in Scotland wind is always going to be a good choice.

CN:
It's a windy place.

FM:
Yeah, although the sunniest place in the UK is the Isle of Tiree where I grew up in the Western Hebrides so they should do solar panels. Does the UK government plan to do massive solar panel tracts to move forward with solar or is solar, for the time being in limbo as to whether they want to move forward with that for power generation?

CN:
It's a good question. The UK still allows very, very large installations to go ahead. We have to think of the electricity system as divided up into different subsystems. There's a transmission system which is these big overhead cables. They're usually at 440 kilovolts. Then there is a distribution system which is at a smaller scale with lower voltages where you have 33 kilovolt lines, which is usually geographically fairly limited area whereas electricity transmission systems can span continents as is the case in Europe and the US, for example. Distribution systems are definitely local, and it depends on how much capacity there is within a local distribution system that determines whether it is favorable to have more renewable energy fed into the distribution system. But as the name implies, it was designed for distribution, not for transmission of large power loads.

The situation in the UK is that the distribution system in most geographical areas is at the point where it can't take anymore distributive power generation without significant upgrades and costs associated with that. Whereas a transmission system still has the capacity to take in more power, and because a transmission system was developed for transmitting power from huge power stations, sometimes I think Drax power station north of England was originally I think a six gigawatt coal fired power station, one of the biggest in Europe. Because there's still capacity in the transmission system to transmit huge amounts of electricity, what's now happening is that we're increasingly seeing solar generation shifting from household scale to transmission level scale.

There's one particular solar site to the east of London that's currently being developed, which is I think around 350 megawatts, which is about a third of a conventional power station and that's about as big as they get in Europe really.

FM:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), interesting. Do you know if there are infrastructure plans to be able to handle the residential power generation or are they going to go towards larger industrial sites? Or is it in limbo, it sounds like?

CN:
It is in limbo. In future there might be more incentives to encourage people to consume more power themselves and to manage power at a highly distributive level. There's a lot of research and innovation currently at what is known as the grid edge, so which is the household scale or community scale, businesses at substation levels or we think again of... Describe the energy system or the grid infrastructure as a multi-level system, so at the top here you have transmission and you have distribution here in the middle, and then down here you have the final level of distribution, which is usually a substation level down to consumers, businesses, and communities. More and more we've seen innovation happening at this really low substation level, where through quite clever balancing technology and innovative business models we're seeing more and more opportunities arising for grid services to be provided from this bottom level, which traditionally was your ‘dumb’ layer of consumption into a more active layer of service provision upwards.

If there is a frequency response required, for example, in the distribution system, it no longer needs to be entirely provided through tweaking of supply, for example, in the transmission layer, it can also be provided from the bottom upwards. This is happening everywhere in the world at the moment, especially mostly in developed countries wherever there's money to experiment. The UK is probably quite well placed to see a lot of advances in these areas because of it's very congested grid and desire, and the intention also by the government to encourage more distributive generation without having to spend huge amounts of money on expensive grid reinforcements.

FM:
Interesting, so if I heard you correctly at the beginning of that you said that they're encouraging more consumption, is that correct?

CN:
To a certain extent. If you think of the feed-in tariff as subsidies terminating, this implies that it only really makes sense to deploy solar panels now if you know that you're going to use most of the energy yourself. If you're going to use that energy yourself that implies that you probably will require less power from the grid infrastructure. Moving forward if we assume that batteries will become cheaper in the future, which doesn't seem like an unlikely prospect, it might at some point make sense to combine solar panels with batteries. Then you could spread your electricity supply from your battery to tie into when for example you're at home. For most people their supply of electricity from solar panels at home does not coincide with their residence at home, it's usually when they're at work. If we had batteries at home we could possibly release the power that would be generated during daytime in the evening hours when it would be of most use to most people. If that was the case then I think it would be truly revolutionary change to energy systems.

FM:
Yeah, that's super interesting that story, that narrative. I think there's a misconception that greening our consumption is more like reverting backwards, going backwards, less energy use, basically going back to mud huts. I don't believe that that's true. I'd like to think as the smart species that we think we are, that we can change the way many of these systems work to make them more ecologically friendly. It's interesting to hear that there is at some point on the electricity grid promoting consumption. The battery thing I think is very big, especially in the US because we don't have such a tight network, we're much more spread out, and so there are more people who want to do solar plus battery but the battery cost is very high. I would hope with increasing improvements in technology that cost would come down, and as you mentioned that would completely revolutionize the way we view energy and its distribution. Super interesting.

CN:
Yes, at the same time we shouldn't underestimate the value that energy demand reduction has played in the past and will play in the future. Carbon emissions in European countries have declined not because of the diffusion of renewable energy technology but because of reductions in energy demand over the years. We like to think that deploying clever technology is a solution to our environmental problems, but actually that so far has had a very minor effect on reducing our environmental footprint. It is more the absolute reductions in demands that have led to that. But again back to your point that this does not imply that we need to live in mud huts but that we have to become a lot more clever about how we use energy.

With that then the internal combustion engine loses 90% of its energy generated as heat and only 10% is motion power. If it were to, for example, use energy in a combined heat and power system where both the heat and the power can be extracted and used for human use rather than just wasted heat, for example, then we can get efficiencies up to 70%, 80%. Which applied even with conventional fossil fuel technology if we use available resources much more frugally we can get a lot more power out of it with a much smaller environmental footprint.

FM:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), that's something I would like to hope that humans have been doing for centuries as we improve on the steam engine and every other iteration after that. We need to keep moving forward. Speaking of getting smarter with our technology, some of your recent work is focusing on connecting solar photovoltaic panels, which are solar panels? I had to look that word up. It's solar panels, directly to the electrified rail network in the UK, so talk about powering the UK's trains with solar energy.

CN:
The UK has the oldest railway system in the world. Actually the first passenger railway service opened between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830, 190 years ago. Even though the UK was a pioneer in lots of railway technology, it also has all the downsides of the first mover, especially the first mover of particular energy. You'll probably make some mistakes and you'll adopt early versions of technology which then will be succeeded by better versions of technology. So the UK now has lots of ancient tunnels and bridges which date back to... In the UK almost the Victorian Period, the 1850s to 1900. Lots of legacy infrastructure of which is in desperate need for updating.

The UK, for example, has been very slow in electrifying its railway tracks. Lots of European countries have a very high share of electrified railway track and the UK has a significant share of railway track which is served by diesel engines, it's not electrified. The costs in the UK, because of this haphazard approach to electrification, are about two and a half times as much per every mile of track to electrify. So that means electrification in the UK is on the agenda, it's encouraged by governments but the costs are very high, so the UK's been looking at alternative approaches to electrification and one of them is direct wire supply, which is to power trains directly with solar power. Instead of generating power remotely, sending it through the transmission system to a connection point of the rail network and then flowing into the overhead lines and then through the pantograph onto the train and then to power trains. This would be a direct connection to local substations beside the station... Sorry, beside railway lines where it could be powered by wind turbines, solar panels, solar photovoltaic systems, could be placed right up to the railway track and could power trains directly from these substations. That implies that it would be less of a burden on the transmission and distribution network because it would be a direct wire connection to the railway line.

FM:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), are you optimistic in these plans? Do you see any big hurdles or are we heading in the right direction? Is it something to look forward to in the UK?

CN:
Well we have demonstrated that it's technologically viable. Our demonstration site is southwest of London proves that we can do it technologically. Now it's more of a question of whether the commercial and business case stack up.

The UKs railway infrastructure provider, Network Rail, currently has a procurement contract for energy with EDF, which is a French company, Electricite de France. They run most of the UKs nuclear power stations. Currently the railways in the UK run on nuclear power. It is this base load power, which nuclear power stations provide because you can't ramp them up or down, they're an inflexible supply which is quite a good match for railways because you generally on a daily basis you have a fairly constant supply of railway traction demand. At the same time, so as an advocate of powering trains with renewable power, I think providing a more diverse supply to power trains makes a lot of sense. Also if you have solar panels or wind turbines adjacent to railway tracks close to local communities they can be co-owned by commuters or by communities. That means then what we might call the means of productions are not just owned by huge multinational corporations like EDF, but some of the money that's spent on energy can flow into local benefit funds, for example, or straight into local communities through community benefit arrangements.

FM:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), interesting. How much of the UK's rail system currently is electrified?

CN:
That's a good question. I think it's around 45%, but I think in terms of journeys undertaken I think it's up to 60%, 70% just because-

FM:
Is it mostly around London, I imagine?

CN:
Exactly yes. Most of the commuter railway lines are electrified, which is... It's the reason why most trips undertaken in the UK are actually electrified, but it's the more remote areas where electrification doesn't make any economic sense in the current economic circumstances.

FM:
Yeah, I'm thinking of standing in Queen Street Station in Glasgow and I know exactly which ones are diesel powered by when they start up the engine and you get that big puff of black smoke and that's the train that's going to Oban for sure.

CN:
Yes, exactly. There's also a company in Scotland which is trialing direct wire wind supply to power trains. Who knows, in the not too distant future that might be an option, that might be a cheaper way than electrifying lines such as the one from Glasgow to Oban.

FM:
Yeah, so to make the UK rail network powered under renewable energy you've got two parts of it. You have to electrify over 50% of the lines up there, but then you also have to have in place a viable renewable, direct renewable power to the train network, correct?

CN:
Well you could also supply the trains, for example, through the transmission network. But given that there's more and more multi-directional flow within the network, it would certainly reduce the strain on the transmission and distribution networks if more power to power trains was sourced locally through direct wire power supply. It cannot power trains entirely in rainy and overcast countries such as the UK, but on a sunny day probably 15% to 20% of traction energy demand could be supplied by solar power. If we add wind to the equation it could be a much greater percentage.

FM:
If everything went your way and the government signed on to whatever plan, in the best case scenario how long would it take to transform the railway network to a renewable one?

CN:
It probably wouldn't take as long as some people might think. It wouldn't be a multi-generational project. If there was strong government commitment it could be done quite quickly. The first step to green your railway transport energy demands is, at least in Europe, is to buy what are known as renewable energy guarantees of origin, which are tied to renewable energy generators. For example, if you have a large wind farm you get money as a generator from supplying grids with power, secondly you're probably also entitled to a subsidy, and thirdly you can also sell these renewable energy guarantees of origin on secondary markets, which are proofs of origin. A lot of 100% renewable energy electricity offers, for example, for households if your supplier says, "Oh there is a particular household tariff for 100% renewable energy." Doesn't mean necessarily that 100% of your household energy demand would be generated locally. It's probably the case that your electricity supplier is buying in renewable energy guarantees of origin to cover the amount of electricity that you demand. This is one way of at least encouraging money to flow towards renewable energy generators in markets.

For example, in Europe there's the Eurostar, which connects France and the UK through the Channel tunnel and they can claim to be 100% renewable because they buy enough renewable energy guarantees of origin to cover their entire energy demand. Doesn't mean that any moment in time that they are 100% powered by renewable energy, but they have enough of these renewable energy guarantees in origin to at least in theory cover their energy demand. Now if we want to move forward where our energy system has a greater share of renewable energy, and if we actually want to directly power our transport system with renewable energy, not just through some effective price on demand arbitration, we need to look at powering these systems directly. Given that we have proven that it works, in some countries for example, in Germany nowadays you're only allowed to build solar panels within 110 meters of railway tracks or motorways anyway. This is something which is encouraged because they're usually quite unsightly things in the first place, railway tracks and motorways, so why not pave landscape left and right with solar power and finally on the next stage having this solar power powering trains and possibly future cars directly.

FM:
Interesting, and you're advocating for instead of essentially owned... The system we have now of multinationals is to have a community owned renewable energy generation, that's the right word to use?

CN:
Yeah, I mean I'm not suggesting that communities could become large scale renewable energy developers, but if there is community engagement in the planning, decision making, in the development and also if there's some form of co-ownership then all this money, which is currently being effectively leaked out of local economies, can be recycled. I think if we're looking to a future where we need to make a lot more of our money out of renewable and reproductive local economies, this might be a very good first step in that direction.

FM:
Nice, yeah. What can we, as individuals, do to help shape our energy landscape for the positive?

CN:
It's a very tricky question because 10 years ago we were probably told that if we put solar panels on our roof that's a very good contribution to the environment and to reduce our environmental footprint. Now with current issues within our distribution and transmission systems because so much solar has come online, we're probably told that we should wait, possibly postpone, our decision on deploying solar. As an individual the most hassle free way one can contribute to a more sustainable energy system is by choosing a progressive electricity supply company. Some companies, for example... A lot of companies will offer these 100% renewable energy tariffs, but with a little bit of research one could probably figure out whether this is just these renewable energy guarantees of origin that are creating this 100% renewable energy tariff. Or whether they actually have supply contracts in place. There's companies that pride themselves in having supply contracts, with lots of different supply companies ranging from multinationals down to community energy groups.

So through one's electricity bill, one can contribute to the diversification of the energy supply system. There's even some companies, well I won't mention any names, I don't really want to make any advertisement for companies in the UK, but it's one or two companies in the UK that provide flexible time of use tariffs, for example. They will send you a text when the wind is blowing to use as much energy now because it's cheap. That means you can start modeling your energy demand on the supply of electricity, which is increasingly hinging on fluctuating renewable energy supply. If you get a text in the morning it might tell you that the wind will pick up at 2:00 pm then you might set your washing machine for 2:00 pm, then just ride back home and then you’re washing is done and you will have done it on very low carbon footprint wind power rather than setting it at a setting maybe for the evening when everything's run on gas.

FM:
That's super interesting and cool, that's amazing. As a UK citizen or do all UK citizens have the ability to choose their energy provider?

CN:
Yes, in the UK it's very strongly encouraged. Now it has been grown on the back of free markets policies and ideologies, that were really set in the 1980s and then into 1990s as well, and the point is that it has been very confusing. About maybe eight years ago there was a period when there were 4,000 different tariffs that every UK consumer could choose from, and then the energy watchdog clamped down on that because it was decided that that was not really in the interest of the consumer to have too many tariffs there. I mean how can one gain any kind of overview over 4,000 different tariffs, especially as there were only about 10 different companies offering these tariffs.

It was actually creating confusion. Thanks to regulatory intervention the market for these tariffs is definitely improving, is becoming more clear how much money you're spending, and for anyone who's going to for what your rights are to either buy yourself out of your contract, or when your contract terminates. Yes, so now we're seeing increasingly these interesting companies offering time-of-use tariffs entering the market, which in the not too distant future might also have a knock-on effect on more established suppliers that tend to have quite conventional tariffs and rely on people not switching their tariffs and people overpaying essentially for an electricity supply, which they could get for maybe 20% cheaper.

FM:
Interesting, so it sounds like the advice is an individual would be to look into who your energy supplier is, see what their mix of energy is, and make smart decisions on where you want to spend your money. Would that be correct?

CN:
Yes, especially if there's some consumer protection agencies. In the UK there's a company called Which?, so Which? and they regularly scout the markets for the best tariffs and also the most ecologically sound supply company. If there's trusted consumer protection organizations those are the ones to consult for the best tariffs.

FM:
Perfect. I looked a little bit into this in my particular situation in South Carolina and unfortunately we do not have the right to choose our energy supplier. I would say for those of us who live places where we're not allowed to choose, I would hope that we could... This is where the confusion and the murkiness in an industry is removing the power from the consumer and handing it over to whoever the state decides is going to supply our power. I would hope that we would, in our research around this, create advocacy to remove that system. It's very frustrating for me. My energy supplier, first of all, has changed without your consent. One day you're getting bills from this company and the next time that company's been bought out and you're paying this other company, and the company I pay currently is one of the biggest users of coal fired energy and I have no choice, I can't disconnect from them. They also took on a nuclear project that fell through and all the cost was put onto the consumer, so in South Carolina we do not have a very good energy landscape right now.

I got into a conversation with someone and when you're in it and you don't realize that other places you can choose your energy provider it's like a eureka moment. Why aren't we able to choose our energy supplier and how do we change that to have a more equitable system so that we can choose to spend our money on things that the consumer cares about?

CN:
Yes, well initially in most markets before energy markets for consumers evolved, it tends to be a fixed supply system. This is what it was like in the UK. There are still some remnants of that in the name, for example, the grid infrastructures, they're called the National Grid, even though it's a privatized company, but there was a monopolistic state supply in the UK until the early 1990s, actually I think the first acts were introduced in the late 80s to liberalize the energy markets. There are also huge issues with liberalized energy markets because it's very complex to regulate these markets. You have to have very good regulators in place to make sure that there isn't a monopolistic pricing tendency where if you have several companies, I believe in the UK for example, there were traditionally up to about 2012 you had six companies with 99.7% market dominance.

Instead of a monopoly you had an oligopoly and the prices were set accordingly among these oligopolistic companies. What might on paper have appeared as competition was actually not driving prices down. Since then, things have diversified in the UK market, I think the percentage that these big six companies now supply is around 80%. That means they have conceded nearly 20% of the markets to smaller sized, potentially more competitive business models and also supplying better or greener tariffs to people who are willing to pay for it.

FM:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), interesting. It's almost beyond me the economic aspect of it, but it's interesting to dive into these topics. I appreciate it, Colin.

CN:
You're welcome. Well the economics are often beyond me and probably also beyond most people engaging in it like the grid code that was written and has been expanded in the last 40 years in the UK and is in desperate need for reform because there's very few people who even have a grasp over particular areas. Energy systems are very complex systems and one can ever only understand a tiny little fraction of what's going on. It's a fun place to engage.

FM:
Well to wrap it up are you in general optimistic about the way that energy production is going in the UK?

CN:
I'm confident that we'll be able to generate loads of zero carbon electricity at a cost of less than £50 per megawatt in the next 10 years. I'm very confident. Now whether that is sufficient to actually decarbonize economies is a completely different question.

FM:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), interesting. I like the time period aspect of it because again I feel like it's hard for us to conceptualize what's going to happen in a decade or two decades. As humans we are very short sighted and so it's hard to conceptualize generations down the line and it's either we're too short sighted and think it can't be done because it's not happening tomorrow or we think it's so far away that it doesn't concern us. I think we all need to actually step back and understand that there are things that we can do for a better future and not just write it off because it's either too difficult or it's too far away.

CN:
Well indeed I think we overestimate how much change can happen in a short period of time, but we underestimate how much change can happen in a generation, for example. I think we have to be a bit patient, but then once you're at a certain point to also have the hindsight to realize how far we've come. At that point we can realize how much further we can go.

FM:
Yeah, perfect. That's a great way to wrap it up, I appreciate it, Colin. I appreciate your time.

CN:
You're very welcome.

FM:
Yes, and stay safe. We're all going to be washing hands and I'm glad we were able to do this interview before we're officially on Coronavirus lockdown.

CN:
Certainly yes, wouldn't have happened otherwise.

FM:
Okay Colin, I hope you have a wonderful rest of the day. Stay safe and I really enjoyed our conversation, thank you.

CN:
Thank you Fiona. Take care.