SUMMARY KEYWORDS
heat, people, innovation, support, projects, networks, building, sustainability, loads, government, deliver, areas, sources, objective, waste, low carbon, work, sustainable, cooling, net
SPEAKERS
Joel Hamilton, David Bent-Hazelwood
David Bent-Hazelwood 00:26
This is one of several interviews on innovation, business and sustainability for the students studying for the MSc in sustainable resources at UCL. My name is David bent, and I'm an honorary lecturer at the UCL Institute for Sustainable resources, and CO lead on the module, eco innovation and sustainable entrepreneurship. Most of the course gives people the latest academic theory and insights, these 30 minute interviews or with practitioners to get some of the grit under the fingernails of innovating for sustainability. And today, I'm glad so we're joined by Joel Hamilton's. Hello, Joe. Hi. Hi.
QUESTIONs 1 and 2. So the first question is about you in your organisation, what's the role you play and what in what organisation
Joel Hamilton 01:08
so I'm, I'm a civil servant. And I work for the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, more commonly known as BEIS, previously known as other things like beers or deck. So Business Innovation and Skills are Department of Energy and Climate Change. And I'm a technical specialist.
So I have a background in engineering. I have a doctorate in specifically utilising discontinuous waste heat for refrigeration, in the context of rural renewable power plants in developing countries. And I've worked in industry both in energy efficiency, in industrial settings, and also in energy efficiency and renewables. And in an across the public sector, but working for private sector organisations prior to coming here. So that was everything from energy efficient lighting to installing solar PV, both on roofs tops and big solar farm, megawatt scale stuff, and he now works.
In BEIS. I'm in the heat networks team, or some people know them as district heating. And these are large infrastructure projects, which supports the decarbonisation of heating and or cooling at a multi building scale, so it can even be city wide.
Within that as well i because I've got an engineering technical background, I sometimes get brought in to do other things. So I support some of the innovation assessments that come in particularly on things like thermal storage. I have a chair position, I did have a chair position in the heat recovery, some industrial heat recovery support programme by hrs.
And then I also have some roles, that crossover with bass slightly. So I volunteer as the chairperson for a research group called Green skies, which is a project to deliver smart, a smart energy system that integrates low carbon energy technologies across heat, power and ability has a big focus on Islington, but also to be repeatable in other areas. They're looking at projects and the likes of Banbury, and other places spread across the UK. And that's quite an interesting one because I get to bring in some of the findings from that research. And it's also delivering projectors, I should say, as well into the kind of work that we're doing and base and I'm happy to talk more about what I do specifically in phases one if you want to know to more detail.
David Bent-Hazelwood 03:54
So let's let's focus on the team like because you name the team for us. You're working in days again, just look again for us. Sorry, you're making the team that you're part of
Joel Hamilton 04:05
Okay, so specifically, I'm in the heat network delivery unit, which is HNT you, we love our acronyms. With which sits inside the heat networks team.
And what we do is we provide support in the form of both funding and also what we'd like to call a critical friend or intelligent client function role. Just basically someone that has a bit of an idea of what the topic and can help you out to typically local authorities, but we do spread wider than that to try and help deliver these low carbon district energy projects because they're quite complex.
And to give an example, if you were going to take a region apart and city, it has a couple of waste heat sources you'd need some support in evaluating what that waste heat potential is. You would probably need some supporting try to negotiate how you take that weigh seats, whether there'll be any costs or benefits associated to that to the wases. Fire, you don't have to arrange, you're going to sell the two.
And that's quite tricky, because you people have to agree to buy heat for a very long time. But these products that work makes sense, because they can often take anything between 20 to 40 years to pay back their long, large, large scale infrastructure projects. And then you've got some of the practicalities to look at as well. So that's everything from where are you going to dig up a road pipe?
So heat network is where you connect with a heat source with typically more than one building? Can you dig up those roads? What happens if you haven't, if you cross a road and burial ground or some other things that you weren't expected to find that and all of this takes quite a long time to work out. And then you've got to interface with planning, you've got to get customers on board, as I said, so these customers may be existing buildings and maybe new ones.
So if you've got a development of flats, and other things at schools and other bits, ideally, you'd get them on board because you're digging up the ground anyway. So you can put the infrastructure in. So there's loads of moving parts. And so you need people to look at whether it's technically feasible, whether it's commercially feasible, it will just help you engage with the right people that you need to and all of that we provide an overarching support with, with a range of different skills within our team.
David Bent-Hazelwood 06:23
So let's pick up a few of the different aspects of that just to make sure that listeners can understand so the first is the heat sources, what could be a heat source.
Joel Hamilton 06:35
So pre net zero, or, or objectives, net zero, that can be burning fossil fuels or some tools. So that could be in simplest form, it might be a gas boiler, it can also be combined heat and power plants, which is where you have a gas engine, where the engine generates electricity, and then there's some heat typically coming out the exhaust of the radiators, and you grab that.
And as we're moving towards that, zero, those technologies, environmental potentials don't really align that well, unless you can find a low zero carbon fuel. So now we're looking at in waste heat, so that could be from the likes of data centre.
So you have two data centres generate heat, they need to be cooled, that process of cooling is taking heat away from those electrical components that basically launch computers and other things. So that's one source of heat, you've got other sources of heat, like a factory, and a cooling process in a factory will have waste heat. You have even some power generation, you'll have heat to even get on the back of it.
So we look at an energy from waste plants, for example, to generate electricity, we would take waste heat. Then there's other low carbon heat sources that people might be a bit more familiar with. So you've probably heard of air source heat pumps, where you're taking heat out of the air and then upgrading it for the heat pump, water source heat pumps from the river ground source heat pumps, where you can be either doing deep geothermal ground source or some shallower boreholes on brimscombe Silky arrangement things. And sometimes you even can dig down get to an aquifer.
So you kind of have both geothermal and water source, or mine water. Because mines are quite warm as you dig deeper into the ground and gets hotter. So the deeper you go, the hotter it is. And so you can take that heat and do something with it.
Other things, we're looking at quite innovative and pretty interesting, although some people might find them a little bit gross. Is sewage, water treats and sewage treatment, sewage gets warm, the biological breakdown of waste products, releases heat, how do you get that heat out? Then how do you balance that, because you want that stuff to break down. So you don't wanna make it so cold that it's not bringing it down, because then you've got a hard job to do later, in terms of treating it. So I was looking at where is the best place to take heat out of a system as well. But there's loads of others out there. If you I generally think of if you see cooling, there's waste heat. And cooling could be anything from like a fridge chilling food food to you've had to like melt some metal and then let it set. So anything in between that.
David Bent-Hazelwood 09:16
Yeah. And then. So I mean, a note gives us a sense of the variety that is available on just one half of that network and the pushing of when there will be a similar kind of variety on the takeaway of the site. Before we get we'll come back to an innovation story. But I also want to ask,
QUESTION 3. How is sustainability framed within BEIS or maybe the layering up from the heat networks up to that net zero ambition?
Joel Hamilton 09:50
Oh, wow. Okay, so there's, I mean, anyone trying to do eat network project is usually doing it with the context of sort of environmental sustaining ability in their minds, I mean, otherwise you, it's quite difficult, it's easier to let a building do its own thing.
But you don't end up with as good a solution. As you might imagine, you probably, if you've ever seen pictures of parts of developed parts of East and Southeast Asia, where you've got air conditioning units dangling out of every window, that's probably not the most efficient solution for managing the heating, cooling in those buildings. So you want to avoid them.
But sustainability, particularly from government, and within within these projects is a much broader concept because these projects take into account social, environmental health and economic sustainability. So and how do you tie them in?
So it's quite difficult term, it's probably worth defining sustainability. And people probably have disagreements over that of what that definition is, as well. But without going into the detail that we need, we want to be able to make things happen to infrastructure happen in a way that they provide positive outcomes for everyone involved, and future generations as well. And that's more than just its environmental output that reduces our carbon emissions or reduces pollution.
That's also how are we supporting a market to be able to deliver low carbon heating cooling technologies in future? How are we making sure that people are trained appropriately, so they can continue installing these things and building them and maintaining them? Can we put the stuff in a way that lasts as long as possible and has little impact? To start with? That even the installation, the sustainability of that has got loads of variables in there? From? How long do you have to close roads down? Which causes other problems, too? How do you access it to repair it later?
What as I said, before, materials is made out of it. It's a huge beast of a concept, which is kept at the core of everything we do.
But I guess if you tried to ask someone to sort of talk you through and explain it, as you're seeing here, it's quite hard to actually pinpoint anything. But just kind of give an idea around it. There's also the overarching kind of sustainable aims of the organisation as a whole.
So BEIS is responsible for energy business is responsible for climate change. So we have to work with businesses to try and drive an EPA results for the net zero agenda. So we have to work with the whole country to try and drive and zero agenda and get us to a place where we have a sustainable society in the same economy. And that also requires a lot of work across other departments. So there are other departments are responsible for other areas that feed into sustainability.
The most obvious one people would think of is death for us as a public food environment to Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. So they look after things like pollution management. But then your other ones that you that tie into that. So what about health and social care? If you're doing something that improves the air quality of an area, you're improving people's lives, so you're potentially making them healthier? So that's something to tie in with that? What if you're able to provide low carbon energy for schools, or hospitals, so then you get to the partner of education, you've also got still back with health and social care. So there's always interfaces, you want new buildings or existing buildings. So there's the department, I forgotten, they're really dynamics of change. The name is levelling up communities. And it used to be mhclg. So I'm going to be caught out
David Bent-Hazelwood 13:46
a little changes payment over years. And more your answer the illustrates is the complexity of the situation. And if I think about the other interviews that I've already done with people who are in business, they rarely talk about that 360 degree view of all of the different aspects. Whereas as a policymaker and actor in national government, you're doing your job? Well, you do have to consider all those different things. So let's move on to just a story because I think we will learn best through stories.
QUESTION 4. Can you give us a story of a good example of your work? So it really illustrates what you've been trying to do?
Joel Hamilton 14:31
Yeah, and I want to try and take that into the sort of innovation question that you've got on here as well.
So tip so when I started, it was just before the net zero agenda was declared. Now we also had carbon reduction targets. As you probably aware, it came to 80%. But the narrative of getting to 80% did give people wiggle room to then say well, but we can carry on with this, which is a low carbon tech, but it's not really driving to net zero. but it also and it's, we can do something about it later. Because if you only 80% by 2050, then if you want some kit that could be replaced by 2040.
That gives quite a lot of wiggle room and probably someone else's problem, which is, which is an interesting challenge when you're trying to support infrastructure is going to be in the ground for 50 6070 years. So we have a project with a with a small city that wanted to take a different approach. And we had some consultants who wanted to take a different approach.
So our classical approach with heat networks was, let's look for something that makes economic sense that we can get this to stack up. So we we would call that looking for things like an anchor load. So that's a couple of big sites, they're going to sit there for a long time activities, schools, hospitals, government buildings, ones that you can get on board to buy heat from you, they've got a decarbonisation agenda, and you know, they're not gonna be going anywhere for a while. And then you just kind of work from there, then you look for a low carbon heat source, and you can try and make things happen.
What this did was it said, Well, let's take a step back from that. What are we trying to look at here? We know we've got to decarbonize this entire city. It's got its own much quicker decarbonisation targets than the national government, I believe it was 2030. It has a number of both social and health issues to the cat, and so on, what's the cost of this? Rather than looking at what's an economically? What's the most economically attractive?
Let's just say, well, we're gonna have to do something anyway. How do we do that? So, look, consultants, which was it was really they did a great job, actually. They took some nationally available data on make sure I got all the right bits here, because I wrote it down on air quality, and fuel poverty, building types, and also really importantly, the building quality. So that I build a quality that's like, on these buildings insulated, is it possible to insulate them and they're made out of just weird stuff, there's nothing you can do with them. And then also, within the building types, what was interesting there was how to be efficient with the resources that we have for this project, which wasn't a huge study, to look at something that's repeatable across the cities, particular city had quite a unique set of houses where they were very, very similar houses clustered all over the city. I mean, you do get across a lot of UK cities, but there's one more so.
So we then mapped everything. And then you started to see stuff that might intuitively makes sense to you. Like high areas of weather's poor air quality is probably got higher likelihoods of fuel property. So buildings that require more heat, because they're leakier, producing more emissions, busier roads, possibly cheaper houses, all of those things fit together to make both to show you that the the most vulnerable people in that area are probably living in arguably the least healthy conditions. And that might give you some areas to target.
So you can start to look at once well, how can we make the most benefit to the people who need it most? But also how do you do it in a repeatable manner. And what was interesting was that the results, the approach that also looked for where there were low carbon heat sources that made sense that were available, some of them were repeatable, some of them weren't. So there was like, one I was looking at was, I think, a water treatment plant one had an Riven it running by it, and I just wasn't anything. So it was looking at air sources and option. So that source heat pump, I should say.
And we started to get a picture. What does it look like in terms of cost? As I said, before, every other bit of work we did was going what makes economic sense. And you kind of intuitively go, Well, we're just going to dismiss these areas, because we know they're not going to stack up. Whereas this is saying nothing like there's nothing nothing's gonna stack up. Because in that context, at that time, when this was done, gas was still very cheap. So the idea of trying to make something economically viable when your alternative, although high carbon is very, very cheap is very difficult to do. So it's totally different dynamic.
Joel Hamilton 19:27
They got came up some interesting results. The local local government, we call a local authority, took them on board and started to evaluate whether they would be using them, or at least look at using that for their own strategy of how to decarbonize but then internally within base, because we've got a really good culture of sharing work. We were then able to take this approach and say, well, to my colleagues, what do you think about this? Do you think this is something useful? said yes is great. And now my colleagues are putting forward in all their projects, where it's appropriate if that if that approach is appropriate. We also provide specifications for a lot of projects that are typically in the form of guidance, they don't have to use them specific use them in their, in their pure form. And they're a good starting point, particularly for local authorities doing a project on this, to know what to ask consultants to deliver. And this kind of this feedback loop that we continuously share stuff with each other, that goes back into the specifications, they're almost like hard written into what we're expecting later on. And all it took was some people taking a step back and going, hang on a minute, this current approach isn't going to deliver what we want is not the right outcome here, the right outcome is, we need to be able to make a decision about how best to support people in this area on a journey to net zero. And just looking for an economically attractive option to start with isn't gonna do that. But later on, it has that approach has now provided loads of loads of opportunities to look in areas where they otherwise people otherwise wouldn't look. And I could go into other examples from the likes of the work with a research project, green skies, but we'll probably be here till next year. So
David Bent-Hazelwood 21:12
we're just to pull out some things from that story you just told around the city in the consultant. So I think there's, there's one thing there, which is by the UK Government upgrading its 2050 target to Net Zero from 20% energy levels. Relationship dropped to net zero, with a more of an emphasis on zero than the net, for men that people couldn't get away with thinking, or will be able to keep on doing what we're doing now, for longer.
The emphasis on the city had a greater ambition than the government even, again, the role of ambitious targets to induce innovation.
And in this case, the innovation has been how even to think about the problem, and what priority to put on it. So the typical way of doing it would be to put a priority on what we can prove will be economic now. And with the irony, that if you build in assumptions about the status quo, and then gas prices go up by four times, because bunches of reasons, including Russia being annoyed, it turns out that your take on what is economic goes out of date and obsolete. Whereas what they did by starting with the outcomes they wanted to create, and then using new spatial modelling, they're able to say where the biggest gains would be had by having networks. And that was to give a different impetus to where to try. And then to find out whether those places could be economic, bearing in mind, the extra outcomes that we're getting, which will have economic benefits that can improve people's health, they're able to do more work and use public services less, for instance.
So there's these like, in order to get the diffusion of the innovation of new infrastructure, new heat networks, that was preceded by innovation in the methods of understanding what to do.
Joel Hamilton 23:15
Yeah, that's a really good, good summary. I wish I was concise as you to explain it in the first place.
David Bent-Hazelwood 23:22
QUESTION 5. In order to do as well as the methods you've already talked about in that work, or in general, are there frameworks prioritised to make decisions to innovation that you're trying to?
Joel Hamilton 23:42
Wow. Yeah, so actually, we were really lucky. And our team were quite a unique civil service team, where we were set up with the objective of trying to deliver these complex energy infrastructure projects, rather than sort of the typical process within government where you have lots of generalists who are very clever, very good at things can absorb information really quickly and support, setting an ambition around that.
We have a team of people with various different backgrounds that will feed into this, which is why we're able to provide that sort of critical Frankel. And so because of that, because we've said governments say kind of doing some work on the ground, it's not quite on the ground, because we're not actually physically digging our brains and putting things in my previous background in engineering was treated a bit on the ground. We, we've got a few kind of quite straightforward, things that really help us make decisions and help us support innovation. So one is that the overarching objective of our group is really easy to work with.
Our objective is to support the delivery of low carbon heat networks at Pace Now that might not sound like much in terms of an innovation concept, to have a good, clear, objective, but it's actually very, very difficult to set. And I've worked in many places where that objective was not clear. Now, because I know that my objective and my team's objective is delivering low carbon email at a pace, that helps us make decisions around stuff that comes up. So that could be anything from a new piece of technology coming in? Because they will evaluate it, does this help deliver low carbon email at a pace? If it does great, let's have audit, run through to a new type of thinking coming in, to even just how to change how to be dynamic when the situation changes.
So as I described earlier, delivering an email has got many variables, and many players, many stakeholders there. What happens if that just changes overnight? I don't know, the original developer that you were expecting to be there to build half of this half of the buildings that are going to connect goes bust. What do you then do? Or the route you took is going to hit a load of stuff that you're not allowed to pick up anymore? The various environmental archaeological reasons.
Because we have a very basic objective, we can then say, well, we've got some money here. Its objective is to deliver low conky. Now at some pace, what else can we do, we can very quickly pivot, do something else that supports a different kind of project, which if we didn't have that objective, in such a clear manner, we wouldn't be able to do.
So I think that's really key in managing innovation is kind of knowing what your objective is, and your team's objective. The other thing that we do as well, which I think we're really good at, so service generally is very good at. And that's probably because of just the way we structure, what we're trying to do is that we have a lot of meetings, some might argue too many meetings. But it's that communication is really important, we do have not so much a meeting, obviously, it's quite a lot of churn. But people, we encourage people to take different roles and become and learn about different things and develop themselves, which means that you've got to be able to know what everyone else is doing and be able to hand work over really efficiently.
And then there's all the other stuff that's out there, which you might not think about is innovation. But like, since I've started work, the push for working within cloud space, you know, online stuff like SharePoint, Google Drive, or Dropbox and other things, peers, being able to physically see someone's work and operate and work on it at the same time as them, be able to run your messages on something, get back to it later not have to have 10 people in a room giving their opinion once all of this stuff, which keeps you open. And I mean, that helps manage all sorts of personality differences and other things, you know, these tools really do help capture the innovation that's happened, but also innovate within it. and problem solve. And I think one, sorry,
David Bent-Hazelwood 27:59
I have to move along, because we've only got a few minutes left.
QUESTION 6. What's the biggest challenge you face?
Joel Hamilton 28:07
Oh, the biggest challenge I face? I would say sort of it's. So I've actually sort of structured this answer from the previous question, which are now kind of gone around. So I need to think about how this is a problem when you prepare and you don't wing it.
So I would say the biggest challenge we face is still even though we're quite get around is communicating effectively and collaborating effectively. And I mean, I like mantras, like you've been kind of things you need to do to listen, share, ask and expand on, on what people are offering, what what's needed. We have regular, very focused day long sessions on what's gone, well, what's not gone. So well, what do we want to do better? We make time for that, which is really great. And it's really important stuff to actually foster foster innovation and that collaboration. Because you kind of set out what you need. But still, like actually capturing it. getting stuff out of people's heads, and sharing it with other people is really difficult. And it's I'm sure you must be aware, some of the greatest ideas and greatest thoughts come when you need deep in loads of other stuff. And it's not related to that. So how do you get out of your head at that point in time sharing? Yeah. And that is just I don't know the answer to that. But that I would say is really the biggest challenges is that collaborating and communicating effectively.
David Bent-Hazelwood 29:47
And I'm going to let us go over our 30 minutes just for one more question, which is, other people are asking what do they want from policymakers but seeing as you're in the policy world, oh, come Well,
QUESTION 7. my question to you is, what's one thing you'd want from businesses?
Joel Hamilton 30:06
Oh, wow. Okay. So I was, again, I've been stumped on preparing an answer. What do I want from businesses? You know, I think it's actually the same thing that I wanted for policymakers. I think it's integrity and honesty, is what it comes down to.
And the way I see, integrity and honesty in this context is be clear about the assumptions you're making. Be clear about the logical paths that you followed to come up with those answers to whatever it is, whether it's a new widget, you're trying to sell me to do something that we need through to anything else or product or service, way of thinking?
Be honest about where the gaps are understanding Don't, don't try and tell me that you've got the answer to everything. Just tell me what you've got the answers to what we're still trying to work out. And it'd be really, and this is the hardest one, but also, tell us your motivations. Because if we know what each people's motivations are organisations motivations are we can work with them, to support them, rather than trying to assume that it's something else.
And that, I think, would make things a lot easier and a lot faster. If you're if your motivation is to make profit, that's fine. That's your main objective to make profit profits. Not a bad thing. But you know, we can work with that. If your objective is social change, and if you can make some profit on the way. Brilliant, let me know that. So that's Yeah, I think honesty and integrity. And that's kind of how I would break it down. I think if it was to make because I just hope that was listed at the beginning policy, or at the end.
David Bent-Hazelwood 31:50
And I think it's been fascinating hearing your stories and your perspective, because as I say, the contrast with the businesses I've been speaking to is the 360 degree view and the sense of responsibility for the whole rather than essentially wanting to contribute to one part of the whole distinction. As the as the responsibility being the national government. And it's been fascinating, also the parallel, what you're saying about having a clear goal, which allows you to pivot as soon as come out from the other businesses to the importance of being able to adapt to circumstances. That's all great. And I want to draw us to hold that and say thank you very much to job. interviews for the Eco innovation and sustainable entrepreneurship module. It's been a pleasure. Thanks.