Thrive In Construction with Darren Evans
'Thrive in Construction' is the only podcast that delves into the personal journeys of sustainability leaders and innovators in the construction industry across the UK. Our show differentiates by offering unscripted, passion-fueled conversations that go beyond the buzzwords to the heart of what's driving the industry forward. It's tailored for aspiring professionals, seasoned experts, and anyone with a keen interest in the sustainable evolution of construction. We're here at a time when the call for sustainable development is not just a trend, but a societal imperative, empowering listeners to build a career that contributes to a greener future.
Thrive In Construction with Darren Evans
Ep. 67 ‘We’re Sitting on a Giant Thermal Battery’ – Karen Spenley Talks Ground Source Heat Pumps
The UK’s untapped thermal battery and ground source heat pumps could transform sustainable heating and cooling for the future. In this episode of Thrive in Construction, Darren sits down with Karen Spenley, the UK Country Manager for Celsius Energy, to discuss the role of geothermal energy in the UK's energy transition. Karen dives into how shallow geothermal systems and ground source heat pumps can significantly reduce energy consumption, decarbonise heating and cooling, and create sustainable solutions for large-scale projects like schools, hospitals, and industrial facilities.
Karen also shares insights on the future of energy efficiency, the importance of collaborative leadership in the energy sector, and how geothermal energy can be a game-changer for the construction industry. Learn how this innovative technology is transforming the way we think about energy use in buildings, and why ground-source heat pumps are becoming an essential part of the UK’s decarbonisation strategy.
If you're passionate about sustainable construction, energy efficiency, and green building technologies, this episode is a must-listen.
Key Topics Discussed:
- The benefits of geothermal energy for large-scale systems
- How shallow geothermal systems work
- The future of heat pumps and energy decarbonisation
- The role of collaborative leadership in the energy transition
- The importance of long-term energy efficiency for the construction industry
Links:
Celsius LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/celsius-energy/?viewAsMember=true
Karen's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenspenley/
Darren: https://darrenevans.komi.io
The next episodes of Thriving Construction come straight from FutureBuild. Huge thanks to EcoCocoon. The space was great for chats, acoustics and, even better, well-being.
Speaker 2:So quite often when people hear geothermal, they think Iceland, they think volcanoes, they think super high temperatures, which is useful you can generate electricity from that but it's not something that in the UK is particularly relevant We've got the one project in Cornwall and so on, but but isn't applicable to the majority of the UK. You come a little bit shallower and go to sort of two, three kilometers deep and that's where your temperatures might be sort of 80 degrees, 90 degrees C. But again, that's quite specific in terms of the geology that you're on. If you go shallow and you go to sort of 200, 300 meters D, and I and I was looking up the other day the height of the shard is about 300 meters high, sorry, so we're talking about the same height. But going underground and at that kind of depth, your temperature is around 15 degrees C, whatever the weather. And so this is where then, if you put a heat pump on top of that, your energy efficiency you can reduce the consumption by a factor of four your energy needs. So this is why going underground is really useful.
Speaker 2:But then, to answer your questions spatially, um, this is where, um, yes, your classic solution, your garden solution, would be the slinky, and then you do need a very, very large garden.
Speaker 2:You can go vertical, and they tend to be spaced out at 10 metres or so. Again, you need quite a lot of land space for that, and in the urban environment we don't necessarily have, you know, bucus of space available or it's being used for something right in an urban environment. What we do is we can bring an inclined drilling technique and this has come across from oil and gas and we drill out at that at an incline, which allows us to take a very small surface footprint and go out underneath the building, out under a park, under a car park, whatever it happens to be and access the ground underneath. And this is where the UK, if you like, is sitting on a giant thermal battery. But what we've got to try and do is access it, and this is this is what one of the things that we're trying to do, and because we want, effectively, the higher efficiency of the ground source of shallow geothermal to play its role in the UK's energy decarbonization.
Speaker 1:And so how do you see, then, the technology you have being rolled out and being more common than what it is at the moment? And the reason I'm saying that is because it seems as though air source feels more accessible and feels more common than what it is. But the issue with the air is the temperature in the air has got huge fluctuations and you can't predict it either, but the temperature in the ground doesn't have such a variance.
Speaker 2:Yes, and I think the first important thing to say is as we go through the energy transition, it's not always one technology against another- Right.
Speaker 2:Some technologies will be more applicable than others, and if you are in an individual house, you only have a certain amount of money to spend. You're probably going to go down the air source route, and that's okay. But when you get to larger systems, you probably start to talk about multi-energy sources, and this is where ground source needs to play a role, because then the higher efficiency really plays in, if you're in sort of your very large kilowatt or megawatt type systems. So I think that's probably the first point, right, because then what you can do is rely on the ground source for the bulk of the heat demand, particularly, like you said, with those steady temperatures that we see from the ground and we're not as reliant on on the air temperature um. The other, I think, really important thing that we don't necessarily talk enough about is that energy consumption reduction that you're seeing not only reduces your energy um but it reduces your exposure to volatility um in energy prices, which I think we're, all you know, becoming increasingly exposed to at the moment.
Speaker 1:right, so it sounds like from what you're saying, then the real benefit here is around the community heating types of scenarios as opposed to individual dwellings.
Speaker 2:So we focus on large scale systems. So that could be domestic, it could be industrial. So that could be domestic, it could be industrial, it could be hospitals, it could be schools. It's more a scale question. So, yes, on the individual home perspective, we don't really tend to work in that space. It's the large, large scale systems which can be blocks of flats, it can be roofs of houses, it could be moving into the heat network space where you connect the school and the hospital and the shops and the houses all together, because then it's the efficiency of scale that you're starting to look at, which then allows you to use ground source, allows you to use multiple energy sources in order to basically optimize energy consumption, optimize the carbon footprint and also optimize the cost of of heating and cooling delivered what are some of the biggest misconceptions, then, apart from the ones that I've mentioned, that show up for you and for the organisation or the industry on a regular basis?
Speaker 2:Not sure it's a misconception, more an unawareness maybe. Sometimes I describe geothermal as the invisible energy source because it's not something that people talk about. Your head, as I mentioned, goes straight to that volcano if you say geothermal, they don't know that it's available to 90% of the UK. They don't know that it's under your feet, it's local, it's renewable and it's here and I think perhaps it's that invisibility almost that's the problem. And then that plays into whoever's advising and designing systems. It plays into discussions in government on policy. It plays into discussions with investors on stepping into the energy infrastructure space. So it is something I think we need to raise the awareness on the benefits fundamentally around energy efficiency and long-term energy efficiency that I think we need to elevate.
Speaker 1:And what types of conversations and what projects can you talk about? Where you've seen, actually, because they've used this technology, it's completely transformed, not just the efficiency, but also the what's the word. I'm looking for the desirability from an investor's point of view into a project. Do you get involved in anything of that size or of that scale?
Speaker 2:So some of the things that we've seen maybe more, on the investor space is, when investors step into a new technology type arena, they're very risk averse. So being able to do design of a system we have digital twins that we apply for both the equipment on surface but also the ground below allows us then to step into the performance space. You can see, we have digital monitoring and we have algorithms that start to learn how the system is behaving. It can optimize further, and raising the visibility of how the system is performing is then really important because it de-risks effectively. Then the project right.
Speaker 2:And if you can step into that space over a long period of time, which again is what investors are looking to do then it helps with the economics because all of a sudden you don't have ridiculous percentage rates that you're trying to match. You can bring down the return in time on the investment, and that sort of opens up the conversation then, as far as people willing to invest in the space, and I think that's particularly important because, yes, there are grants available. The government has grants in certain sectors like PSDS and social housing and so on, but not everybody that applies for a grant receives one. It you know they may have to have multiple goes at it, which means we need to open up um so private investment into the energy infrastructure, which means again you started to talk at scale large system let's talk now about you personally.
Speaker 1:How did you manage to get into this industry or or in the role that you're in at the moment? What was the light bulb moment for you?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, in the UK you're forced quite early right to narrow your choices right.
Speaker 1:So you're talking to GCSE.
Speaker 2:GCSE A-level. You have to whittle it down to sort of three or four subjects by the time you get to A-level, right, and at that point I think I was going okay, I'm not sure I care what subject it is, I was doing maths and physics and so on, but I want to be useful and I want these subjects to be useful. I don't want to study for subject's sake, if you like. So engineering popped up as a subject. I didn't know any engineers so I didn't have a dad as an engineer or anything like this. I wasn't tinkering with cars in the garage a weekend, so it was a bit of a hunt into the, into the into the dark, if you like. But, um, it allowed me to do that that purpose piece, right, what I was doing was useful. Um, and then when I, when I graduated, you know you get a lot of banks come and try to hire engineers. You get a lot of car companies try and come and hire engineers and neither of those really spoke to me as a subject, right, I didn't particularly want to become, you know, an expert in a car door handle or something like this, right, and I came across an organization called Schlumberger and I had been working in nuclear and Schlumberger at the time were working in oil and gas, a very technology focused organization. The CEO was an as an engineer and so they spent a percentage of their five percent of their revenue on R&D and I was like this is the place to be. As an engineer, you want to be involved in technology. So I've always worked in energy, first nuclear, then oil and gas, and then about sort of six, seven years ago, when the noise around the SDGs was happening, there was a lot more discussion around the energy transition and decarbonization. I started getting much more involved in how can the energy space you know, how can Schlumberger, how can SLB as it is now work in the energy space? So started with carbon accounting, circularity and bringing all these concepts and tools into the organization.
Speaker 2:And at the same time, celsius Energy was forming as an internal venture where again, sort of the founders, cindy, sylvain and Mathieu, had effectively the same sort of thinking professionally how can my skills be used in the energy transition and what can we do about it? What do we know how to do? That can apply in the energy transition. Um. So celsius energy grew in france. Um, and then they opened up operating units in the uk and the us and I was asked to to then take on, take on the uk and open up the market, um, and and try and get the uk uh into this energy source that they're currently underutilizing.
Speaker 2:I think there was a report the government asked for a couple of years ago that showed that 0.3% of the UK's heating demand comes from GFS 0.3% Tiny, tiny. And with all of the noise and all of the focus on decarbonization of the electricity grid, on, you know, decarbonization of our transport, of evs and aeroplanes, what is hidden, and perhaps the elephant in the room, is our heat consumption. So about 40 percent of the energy used in the uk is for heating of our buildings 40 percent. So decarbonisation of heating and cooling has to be the next big topic in the energy space. And there's a little bit of noise happening around heat pumps, starting noise around heat networks. It can only grow right, it has to grow because it's such a huge percentage of our energy consumption consumption.
Speaker 1:It seems as though to me, though, um, that there's a um, a consistent increase in the amount of um demand that we are putting on energy, or that we are the demands that we have for energy. There's there's been a significant increase. But before I get to that, but I'm just interested on how you made the jump from um doing your a levels and and progressing there, to then being chosen by um celsius to head up the uk, and just what you think kind of the two or three attributes that you had honed and either unintentionally or intentionally developed to make yourself stand out to, to, to take on this role and make a difference.
Speaker 2:So my reach started off very engineering focused, as an engineer, as a design engineer, and then you sort of step up, you know, then you run a project and then you run a department, and then I took a little bit of a left-hand turn, which sort of coincided with kids and trying to have a more flexible job role, and I worked much more in corporate performance.
Speaker 2:So how do you take a business and how does a business need to perform, and how do you, how do you make it the best operating company in the world or something like this, right?
Speaker 2:So I took a very deep dive into processes and KPIs and KPOs and how you structure them, and that was probably the start of understanding that there are multi-dimensions. Right, you have to look at the finances, obviously, but you also have to look at social impact, and then you have to look at environmental impact, and so you start to look more in a pyramid of types of KPOs, if you like, which broadened up, I think, think then at that point, my understanding of how schismas works, uh, and how the landscape works, and then, moving then into the, so the environmental space and the carbon emission space, um, I started to build, I suppose, uh, I don't have to say the word brand, but I think that's what people used to do reputation, yeah, reputation around um, understanding the energy transition and what was needed to do that um, but I think there's another piece that um that plays in, which is perhaps my approach to, to leadership, uh, my approach to problem solving, which is much more collaborative, I think, than perhaps historically.
Speaker 2:Um, people have been right and in this new energy arena, this energy transition space, we do have to do business differently. We have to build different types of relationships, ones that are much more collaborative and inclusive. Because we have to do things differently. Business as usual will not get us to where we need to be. So I think perhaps all of those combined together meant they went okay, it's a new technology in a new space, working in a new, new environment, new industry, new customers and partners. There's there's a lot of news, right, which means you have to, then, I suppose, be able to, and we talk about that actually regularly in our team. You know, have you has the day gone by without you learning something? And chances are the answer is no. Every day there's something new.
Speaker 1:I love the thing that you spoke to there with leadership, because you're only a leader if you've got followers. You can get a bunch of people together and you can manage them, but you can't get anyone together and lead them unless they are willing to come with you Absolutely To a place that you want to go. So I think that the definition of leadership has been, uh, better defined recently than maybe what it has been in the past, where leadership have been confused with management or dictatorship or compulsion or something like that.
Speaker 2:That's that's not, it's vital, yeah, absolutely yeah, that's not leadership.
Speaker 1:So the leadership definition, at least in my opinion it's up to you whether you come with me or not um is that you're only a leader if you have followers, and it's nothing to do with your title it's nothing to do with your title.
Speaker 2:It's about the the environment and the vision and the destination yeah um, that then, yes, hopefully helps you.
Speaker 2:You find the people who want to come with you on the vision and the destination. Yeah, um, that then, yes, hopefully helps you. You find the people who want to come with you on the journey, and it is about that, particularly in the energy transition space, it's a journey. Will we get everything right first time? No. Will there be bumps in the road? Yes. Will there be turns? Absolutely, but as long as we're clear on where we're headed and how we get there. Um, both technically, but also, I think, socially yeah, very, very, very much.
Speaker 1:Because you need other people, don't you? As a leader, you do need other people and other people need you. So it's not. Sometimes people say that leadership is isolating or can fill life on your own. Yes, I think it does it at times, or it could do, but at least when I've reflected on it myself personally, I've found that actually there are other people out there that I can connect with. That will enhance me as a leader, enhance that clarity, maybe enhance the experience that my followers have in the business, in whatever sphere, as well. So I think that that is quite symbiotic in terms of the way that the leaders, or effective leaders, work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's an interesting point that you raise around sort of the isolated potential nature of leadership, and I don't want to stand on a tape box, but when you look at, you know, women in leadership, and then you look at women in STEM in leadership, the numbers are appalling.
Speaker 2:So one of the sort of organizations that about five years ago, I joined was an organization called Homeward Bound which looks at leadership for women in STEM, which may sound quite niche, but it's looking at how does the future leadership need to look, how does it need to behave, how do we, as we mentioned earlier do business differently? What are the skills that you need to bring into this space to allow you to lead, to allow you to get followers, to allow you to enact change and, particularly in the STEM space, drive decisions with data for both you know the planet and people. But what that does is it gives me a global network of women in the leadership space who you can always say has anybody come across this problem, or what would your advice be in this situation? Um, which allows you, like, like you were saying, to sort of find other people to work with and talk about. How do we progress forwards here?
Speaker 1:um, yeah, which, which is a massive support, to be honest and I think that sometimes leaders can forget that, that they can feel as okay, I'm a leader, so that must mean I need to feel isolated, I need need to feel on my own, it needs to. But what I think, what we're both saying, is it doesn't need to be like that. That feeling more is a sign or a flag or maybe a data point to say you need to go and find someone else.
Speaker 1:Okay to ask a question that has been in that position, or there's no, because there will be.
Speaker 2:And I think the other interesting piece actually in the whole of our network is there are people who are in their 20s and there are people who are in their 70s, and I learned from both end of the spectrum, right, because, um, there are things that, yes, people in their 20s, they've grown up in a slightly different environment I say very different very different environment and obviously people who are older than me have seen more and experience, so being able to just go hey, you know I'm feeling a little bit adrift here.
Speaker 2:You know what? What advice would you have? It's okay to ask the question, right?
Speaker 1:well, all that yeah let's talk about energy now and about the demand. So the way that I see it is, demand is ever increasing for energy, even though the population necessarily isn't increasing at least in this country, um dramatically. Do you think that that will always be the case, and how do we cope with the demand for energy, especially when we look at more electrical items out on the market? So my oldest child is coming up 22 years old. When she was first born, the amount of um devices that were in our house were nowhere near as as as high as they are now. I'm an interested thing my, my wife, um, clicked on an app that then told her the amount of Bluetooth devices that were available in our house, and there were 55 Bluetooth available devices in our house. Now I know that going back to 2000,. That was nil, yeah.
Speaker 2:So when you get home, look at vampire energy, which is usually about 10 of your domestic consumption, um, which is, those devices that are plugged in, that are just on standby, ostensibly sucking the life out of me um, and using using energy.
Speaker 2:But going going to your original question, um, it's a really interesting one and, yeah, I used to sort of think, oh gosh, you know, um, as, like you said, more devices come online, we have more data.
Speaker 2:We have, we have more electronic, you know widgets in our life, our energy consumption is can only snowball.
Speaker 2:But quite recently there's been a lot more discussion about actually what it might start to look like and whether sort of developed countries, western countries, can reduce their carbon footprint and their energy carbon footprint, and that's where I think you have to draw the distinction between electricity and energy.
Speaker 2:So, yes, we will use more electricity, but if you start to look at adoption of things like heat pumps, if you can get a division by fourth of your energy consumption, yes, you're switching to electricity, you're electrifying heat, but you have also dropped the energy that you're consuming. Same with EVs, I think it's by a factor of two or three the energy that you need per mile. So it's a switch from, you know, gas and so on to electricity, but with all of these energy efficiencies coming in actually gas and so on to electricity, but with all of these energy efficiencies coming in actually, it's starting to look like we can either plateau or reduce total energy consumption. Now these are early studies. You know there's obviously adoption rates that have got to play in there's future evolutions to occur, but it's actually starting to look perhaps more positive than the past.
Speaker 2:I would have thought yeah so you're talking here about efficiency from overall energy consumption, whereas in our day we sort of go oh, we're consuming more and more electricity. Well, electricity currently isn't the only type of energy that we consume.
Speaker 1:So talking now to space energy and heating. What about water? Because after space, words definitely be hot water. How to keep that, keep that, keep that temperature, that, uh, that we need, um, what um, what options, what insights can you give to try and help address the demand for hot water?
Speaker 2:so I think there's a scale question there as well, right? So in terms of space heating in the UK it's around I think 17% is on buildings and around sort of 3% is on then domestic hot water. So I think the interesting piece there is they quite often come together. Obviously, domestically you tend to be using the same system for both, and the same can happen If you want to use a ground source heat comp system. It can do both, and so then you bring the same efficiencies then into heating your domestic hot water as you do space heating.
Speaker 2:And the piece perhaps to tag on to that is the needed increase in cooling as the climate changes as we all switch into urban environments and cities grow. There's an estimated 300 increase in air conditioning and it's going to be needed by 2050 um. So if you think about all of that heat that's effectively available in buildings, you can choose to do something with it. You can release it to to atmosphere or you can try and keep that heat for use interseasonally. So if you can store it subsurface in the ground, using the ground as a thermal battery, take the heat out of a building, put it in the ground and then in the winter, when you need it, do the reverse and heat rebuilding, and this is something we have to, I think, consider more again in the systems and technologies that we use because of our anticipated increase in coolant weights.
Speaker 1:So is this technology available already.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:So just to break this down here I've got excess heat and instead of sending that out to the atmosphere, I'm storing that excess heat in the ground, correct? And then, in colder periods, that temperature in the ground that is risen slowly. Is that temperature in the ground then gone up, or has that remained the same 15 degrees that you'd mentioned before? And then am I pulling that heat back out?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then putting that into the building.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what you tend to see is a sort of a cycle, right? So as you inject, it rises, as you extract, it drops, and so there's a sort of a seasonal cycle that we keep within quite tight bounds because obviously you don't want to over cool the ground and you don't want to overheat the ground. So, yes, there are regulations and we, we do that, but that's exactly what we're doing. We're taking effectively rejected heat, waste heat, air conditioning, heat recovery there's many ways that you can take heat and store it in the ground, and that improves the efficiency of the overall system, and it also means we're not rejecting heat to atmosphere, so that heat can come from data centers, air conditioning, supermarkets, you name it.
Speaker 1:There's lots of available heat that can be recovered. I love this. This conversation is so fascinating because, as we know, we don't um lose energy. It just gets converted into something and we don't gain energy. It just gets converted from one thing to another and there's energy all around us. Yes, this is in everything that that that we are so used to, and it's in terms of a resource. It's how we use that resource.
Speaker 1:You're efficient with that as how we push and call and and and direct it yes uh, and I think that the things that we've been discussing here is, uh, it's definitely been uh, much wider and more interesting than the straight. I just want to get electricity and I want to get this power and I want to get free or cheap or whatever electricity is. How do we use the energy that already exists and control that or convert that in a way which is intentional? And then, when there's too much energy in this area, we've got some surplus. Where do we put that back into something so that we can draw back from it or use it later on?
Speaker 2:No, absolutely, and you would think very simplistically. You know, if we generated too much electricity, you would store it in a battery. Same thing If there's spare heat, store it in a battery. It just, in this case, your battery. It's a thermal battery made out of rock, underneath your building, and we're walking on it.
Speaker 2:And you walk it on, it underneath your feet. And it goes to that question about the worry about the sort of the increase of energy that we are consuming. Well, actually, if you start to get smarter with it, start to understand the flow of energy, we start to control that and understand and to work for efficiency, Then that's effectively. Then you know what we're looking to do is use the ground do to use the ground.
Speaker 1:Karen, tell me one thing that you wished or that you hope people would understand with more clarity.
Speaker 2:That would make all the difference to the world I don't know if it's a wish so much of a pet peeve, um, in today's sort of energy retrofit environment, um, capex is very much king. Um, and what I find, I guess, a little bit hard to understand is we've just gone through the ukraine war where, you know, prices of gas, electricity, went through the roof. They haven't returned yet, right, we're still all paying more, um, for our energy. Um, volatility is not off the cards yet, right? We will inevitably see, because of all of the geopolitics that's happening around the world, volatility in our energy phrases.
Speaker 2:So one my pet peeve is that there isn't an increased focus on energy consumption reduction, on opex. Um, because if you can divide your energy consumption by a factor of four, you reduce your volatility exposure by a factor of four, you reduce your carbon footprint by a similar factor, and so on. Right, but capex is still king. So I suppose my question, or ask to to anyone that's considering an energy strategy, is look at the long-term costs to you as well as that initial capex.
Speaker 1:It's difficult, isn't it, for organisations at times that have got a very fixed and precise business model that is just pointing towards that capex or that capital expenditure, to have them even be interested in looking at things operationally because, well, why do I care? Because I'm here just to build it and then I'm gone. There's no operational thing for me here.
Speaker 2:Which is where it's the end user right. It's the owner, the operator, that is then going to have to take a look at those opex. So he's becoming, I think, perhaps more savvy and asking the questions and saying okay, the system is being installed, what will it cost me to run? What will this look like in 10, 15, 20 years time? I think it's something we all need to maybe educate ourselves on and ask those questions.
Speaker 1:Karen, it's been great having you on the podcast today. I appreciate you coming to FutureBuild and coming here to speak to us. Thanks, uh for having me and it is the place to be. It definitely is and appreciate your wisdom. You know the way that that you've put that time and effort in and you've narrowed down your focus at school and you've applied those, those principles that we discussed earlier on, for you to be in a position where you are now just really grateful for what you do well.
Speaker 2:No thanks for having me thanks.
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