Dame Mary Archer’s Presentation to DOE Future Energy Conference on 29th November 2023

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THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH FUTURE ENERGY CONFERENCE

26 November 2023

Keynote Speech 1  Dame Mary Archer  Synopsis

Overview :

• Dame Mary took care to point out that she wished to make no claims on being an energy professional.  However, her tour de force keynote speech covered over 50 years of her academic, research and scientific work and achievements.  It also touched a remarkably wide range of the energy issues that we still grapple with today – and enabled her to provide a detailed and profound perspective on how we arrived where we are today, as well as why she retains a degree of optimism for the future, albeit well tempered by an understanding of the challenges and difficulties still to overcome.

Background :

• Dame Mary’s career has taken her through many areas of renewable energy research and development and this is the lens that she used to frame her speech. Moving from the basic chemistry of carbon and its role as a rich and fascinating element, through the apparent dullness of carbon dioxide – to where we are today. Setting out her direct involvement in many areas of renewables, including solar, tidal, nuclear fission and fusion. Initiating and directing academic and government organisations and initiatives. With significant roles with the Science Museum and then as Chair of the Science Museum Group, itself closely aligned with the COP meetings and processes.  A huge breadth of experience from which to comment on the energy issues of tomorrow.

Current challenges for the UK :

• Dame Mary identified four key areas of current challenge for the UK :
  • to stimulate all energy-consuming areas of the economy to move away from fossil fuels in order to make the country net zero by 2050 in the most pro-growth, pro-business way possible;
  • to provide affordable energy and security of supply across all parts of the UK;
  • to strengthen the National Grid so that we all benefit from the massive increase in the use of electric power that is implied by the decarbonisation of the economy;
  • and to see that the UK plays its part on the international stage in securing a just transition
• She felt pessimistic about first item on this agenda, agreeing with Professor Sir Bob Watson, the former head of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, that there’s almost no chance that the world’s major emitters will act together to keep the global mean temperature rise below 1.5 degrees.
• But there are also reasons for optimism. There are various tipping points, some on a national scale, others on an international scale, moving us in the direction we need to go.
  • The IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook 2023 says it expects CO₂ emissions to peak “in the mid-2020s” and an accompanying press release says this will happen “by 2025”. The predicted rate of decline from this peak is not fast enough to hit the 1.5 degree target but entering an era of falling emissions is a notable milestone.
  • Some green energy industries such as Electric Vehicle manufacture and green steel production are growing at pace and scale.
  • Wind is huge success story for the UK; just over one-quarter of UK electricity consumption last year – 2022 – came from wind.  
  • As we heard from Jason Frost before lunch, innovative companies such as Aker Carbon Capture are developing CCS.
  • The Energy Act that’s just been placed on the Statute Book should help by introducing a licensing framework for CO₂ transport and storage.
  • Then we heard from Paul Spence of EDF Energy that the competition to build a new generation of small modular nuclear reactors is underway.
  • And many others points too, referenced in the full text.
• Dame Mary concluded that therefore there remain grounds for cautious optimism about stabilising the climate in time to avert the worst-case scenario of runaway positive feedback loops.

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Keynote Speech 1  Dame Mary Archer  Fuller text 

Perspective :

• Dame Mary expressed her pleasure to be speaking in the DoE conference and her thanks to all the speakers and panellists – highly experienced energy professionals – for a fascinating set of presentations and discussions.
• She made no claim to be an energy professional, but took a different perspective by referencing the great changes in the energy scene she has  witnessed over the past fifty years, through her distinguished and wide-ranging academic career. She felt that, in spite of the rocky road ahead of us, there are grounds for cautious optimism about stabilising the climate in time to avert the worst-case scenario of runaway positive feedback loops.

The Journey :

As a young chemist, studying organic chemistry, she appreciated that carbon is a wonderful element, with more important chemistry than the rest of the elements in the Periodic Table put together. But then nobody lingered over the chemistry of carbon dioxide. It was a boring, unreactive linear molecule.  About all it did was dissolve in water, making it fizzy, and turn lime water milky. The physics of carbon dioxide was no better. How times change!    

• Nevertheless, in spite of her limited interest in carbon dioxide, as a young scientist she became an early champion of renewables, specifically solar energy.
• Over subsequent years, many new reserves of oil and gas have been discovered, and now hundreds of new North Sea oil and gas licences will be granted to boost British energy independence and grow the economy. It is of course completely impractical to Just Stop Oil, and it’s worth noting that new domestic gas production has only around one-quarter of the carbon footprint of imported LNG – liquified natural gas.
• In 1972, she started post-doctoral research at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street under the late, great Sir George Porter, later Lord Porter of Luddenham, Nobel laureate in 1967 for the development of the powerful technique of flash photolysis.
• It was George Porter who awoke her interest in solar energy utilisation and how to mimic natural photosynthesis by using sunlight to drive the reductive fixation of carbon dioxide to food and fuels. As he liked to say, maybe only God can make a tree, but surely man can aspire to making a leaf.
• She joined the RI at a pivotal time in 1973 – to see the first oil price shock, and suddenly there was world-wide interest in renewables. ETSU was formed at Harwell, SERI in the US, Project Sunshine got going in Japan. There was also great concern about energy security, and the IEA was founded in 1974 to ensure security of oil supplies.
• She represented the RI at a UNESCO conference, The Sun in the Service of Mankind, which was organised jointly with ISES, the International Solar Energy Society. There she discovered that none of the 40 UK delegates attending actually knew each other. Accordingly, she obtained permission to found the UK Section of the International Solar Energy Society.
• At the same time, she was developing her own research in the infant field of photoelectrochemical methods of direct (non-thermal) methods of solar energy conversion.
• Back then no one foresaw the huge reduction in the costs of PV modules and the increases in their efficiency and guaranteed lifetimes that have transformed the economics of PV power, even in cloudy Britain, where 4.3% of our power came from solar PV last year. The Powering Up Britain paper produced last year by the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero has set the goal of quintupling that contribution by 2035.
• Research and development on photoelectrochemical systems that convert sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into a range of commercially useful fuels continue. In the late noughties, she sat on an appointments panel convened by the US Department of Energy to choose the team to host their proposed Fuels from Sunlight Energy Innovation Hub.
• JCAP, the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis at Berkeley Lab in California, was chosen, where a couple of years ago they achieved a landmark: the sunlight-driven reduction of carbon dioxide CO₂ to carbon monoxide CO with 19% efficiency at a gas diffusion electrode flow cell. A mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen is known as synthesis gas (or syngas) which can also be used to produce a wide range of fuels and chemicals.
• This research background in solar goes back a long way – Dame Mary wrote the first assessment of non-thermal utilisation of solar energy for government at the request of David Hunt when he was an energy minister way back in the 1980s.
• That led her to an interest in renewables more generally. In the late eighties, she served as one of the members of REAG, the UK government’s first Renewable Energy Advisory Group, chaired by the then Minister for Energy, Colin Moynihan. They tramped round wind farms in Jutland, visited a pig slurry biogas plant in the appropriately named Dorset village of Piddlehampton, and learned to compare what would now be called the carbon footprint of various alternative technologies.
• REAG set the UK’s first renewable energy target – a modest 1.8% of UK electricity from renewables and waste by 2000, and its work also led to the introduction of the UK’s first market support mechanism for renewables: NFFO, the Non-Fossil Fuel Obligation.
• She subsequently sat on a number of energy advisory bodies, among them a joint working group set up by The Royal Society and The Royal Academy of Engineering to examine an aspect of energy policy where there was a powerful temptation to procrastinate: the role of nuclear energy in generating electricity.
• The 1999 report from that group, rather neatly entitled Nuclear Energy: The Future Climate, noted the role of nuclear in reducing CO2 emissions from the power sector, and endorsed the 1998 recommendation of the Commons Trade and Industry Committee that ‘a formal presumption be made, for the purposes of long-term planning, that new nuclear plant may be required in the course of the next two decades.’
• Another body she became involved with at about the same time was the National Energy Foundation, a charity that had been set up in 1988 to commercialise the pioneering work that had been done by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation in a series of energy projects in the town between 1972 and 1980, which demonstrated the viability and cost effectiveness of energy efficiency measures in domestic dwellings.
• Following this, the Corporation designated an area in the town as an Energy Park in which all developments would have to demonstrate a much higher level of energy efficiency than was required by the building regulations of the time.
• She was the founder chair of the NEF, and they developed a number of products to promote energy conservation and renewable energy, in particular the NHER – the National Home Energy Rating Scheme – which grew out of the performance criteria developed by the Development Corporation for the Energy Park and is now owned and operated by Elmhurst Energy.
• The NHER scale is more comprehensive than the more familiar EPC – the Energy Performance Certificate that is required by law when a house is bought or sold – because it includes cooking, lights and appliances along with space and water heating to give a comprehensive picture of energy usage in the home.
• The NHER scale runs from 0 to 20, with 20 being best, achieved only by a dwelling with zero CO2 emissions and zero net running costs. There aren't many of those - indeed, there is only one certified net zero home in the UK, which was built and lived in by a distinguished sustainable design pioneer, the late Max Fordham.
• But the rest of the UK’s homes remain among the least energy efficient in Europe. An average dwelling in England currently scores between 4.5 and 5.5 on the NHER scale. A gas-heated masonry semi that meets current Part L1 Building Regulations would score approximately NHER 10, and energy use in the UK’s 28 million homes – that number is predicted to rise to 31 million by 2037, by the way – generates 14% of the UK’s total CO₂ emissions.
• The pace of change in making the UK housing stock more energy efficient needs to change up several gears, so it's good news that the Energy Act passed into law earlier this month granted the government the power to amend the Energy Performance of Building Regulations, which we inherited from the EU.
• Stimulating the investment needed in improving domestic energy efficiency is another matter, so we must hope that the new Great British Insulation Scheme will extend help to a wider group of households, as well as providing generous subsidies for heat pumps.
• She talked about domestic energy efficiency, but recognised that there’s plenty of room for improvement in energy efficiency and sustainability in other sectors too. For example, the construction industry is responsible for 11% of carbon emissions and the average life of a commercial building is only 40 years. As the architect Thomas Hetherwick points out, we should repair, adjust and adapt the buildings we have rather than demolishing them and building new.
• Still looking back at her own experience, she served as a trustee of the Science Museum in Exhibition Road for ten years throughout the 90s, and is just coming (rather reluctantly) to the end of a nine-year term as chair of what is now the Science Museum Group, as there are four museums in the north of England as well as the Science Museum itself.
• Over that 30-year period, there have been great changes in the way that the Science Museum represents STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – to itself and to the visiting public.
• A series of online climate talks were held throughout 2021, an exhibition called Our Future Planet was opened (the first to present carbon capture and storage) and the Science Museum set itself the target of becoming net zero by 2033.
• The Science Museum was the venue for the launch of COP26 and since then it has held high-level, invitation-only discussions a few weeks before each new COP, which they privately dub COP26.5 and COP27.5, to discuss the implications for the UK.
• At COP27.5, formally entitled towards Nature Positive, Smart Net Zero Cities, which the Science Museum hosted a few weeks ago with their partners the Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens, they included discussion about biodiversity. The changing climate is accelerating global biodiversity loss, threatening some of the ecosystems that support life on earth as well as Nature's own ability to regulate the climate.
• At COP28, due at the time of the talk to open tomorrow in Dubai, we must all hope to see the design and operationalization of the Loss and Damage Fund which was established at COP27, as well as climate finance commitments and enhanced emission-reduction goals through National Determined Contributions and other bilateral and multilateral alliance efforts.

The Future :

• Dame Mary set out four areas of challenges now for the UK :
  • to stimulate all energy-consuming areas of the economy to move away from fossil fuels in order to make the country net zero by 2050 in the most pro-growth, pro-business way possible;
  • to provide affordable energy and security of supply across all parts of the UK;
  • to strengthen the National Grid so that we all benefit from the massive increase in the use of electric power that is implied by the decarbonisation of the economy;
  • and to see that the UK plays its part on the international stage in securing a just transition.
• She felt there are reasons to be pessimistic about first item on this agenda. Even if we do make the UK net zero by 2050 – in itself a huge challenge – Imperial College has recently calculated that we have only 6–7 years of carbon budget left, rather than 9 or 10 as previously thought, if we’re not to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius.  She also agrees with Professor Sir Bob Watson, the former head of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, that there’s almost no chance that the world’s major emitters will act together to keep the global mean temperature rise below 1.5 degrees. We would need to cut global emissions by 40% by 2030 to keep 1.5 degrees alive, and that in a time of very difficult geopolitics and overriding concerns about the security of national energy supply. We’re already at 1.2 degrees Celsius, and the Met Office is predicting that 2023 may well exceed the 1.5 degree-benchmark.
• But there are also reasons to be optimistic. We’re seeing various tipping points, some on a national scale, others on an international scale, moving us in the direction we need to go.
  • The IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook 2023 says it expects CO2 emissions to peak “in the mid-2020s” and an accompanying press release says this will happen “by 2025”. The predicted rate of decline from this peak is not fast enough to hit the 1.5 degree target but entering an era of falling emissions is a notable milestone.
  • Some green energy industries such as Electric Vehicle manufacture and green steel production are growing at pace and scale.
  • Wind is huge success story for the UK; just over one-quarter of UK electricity consumption last year – 2022 – came from wind.  There will be further growth in our offshore wind industry, now the strike price has been upped, and we can hope to see some investment in floating offshore wind too.
  • As we heard from Jason Frost before lunch, innovative companies such as Aker Carbon Capture are developing CCS.
  • It will be interesting to keep an eye on the Acorn CCS pilot to decarbonise the Scottish Industrial Cluster, which runs from Dunbar up the east coast of the country to Aberdeenshire and is responsible for 80% of Scotland's industrial emissions, by repurposing existing oil and gas pipelines and other infrastructure to transport captured CO₂ to permanent geological storage under the North Sea.
  • The Energy Act that’s just been placed on the statute book should help by introducing a licensing framework for CO2 transport and storage.
  • Then we heard from Paul Spence of EDF Energy that the competition to build a new generation of small modular nuclear reactors is underway.
  • Nuclear fusion reactors that produce more energy than they consume have always been said to be 25 years off in the future. Now they could genuinely be just that. As Ian Chapman told us, JET – the Joint European Torus – is approaching its decommissioning phase at Culham and the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) is to be built in its place, and is expected to deliver modest amounts of energy to the grid.  
  • Data centres are rapidly growing consumers of energy, and another pilot to keep an eye on are the five heat networks in planning which will receive share of nearly £65 million to use waste heat from data centres to provide heating and hot water to more than 10,000 homes.
  • The hydrogen economy has been the future for a long time, and it’s good that the government is doubling its production target for low-carbon hydrogen, which is also the route to low-carbon ammonia, as we heard from Richard Hulf of Hydrogen One this morning.
  • In that context, it’s good to see the second phase of the ASPIRE initiative – ASPIRE stands for Ammonia Synthesis Plant from Intermittent Renewable Energy – get underway to develop a small demonstration plant at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. This will combine nitrogen extracted from air with electrolytically generated hydrogen in a Haber-Bosch process to make green ammonia.
• In conclusion, she felt that there are grounds for cautious optimism about stabilising the climate in time to avert the worst-case scenario of runaway positive feedback loops.