Energy efficiency is the fast answer to blackout threats
Ofgem’s dramatic warning about looming blackouts must focus minds on improving building energy management, says B&ES president Bruce Bisset.
Power regulator Ofgem set the energy alarm bells ringing again last month. It warned that its newly revised figures show that significant power shortages will lead to blackouts by the middle of this decade. Spare electricity capacity will be just 2% by 2015, which means we have almost no margin for error during times of peak demand — particularly in winter.
In response, it has called for major energy users to cut their consumption during peak winter-demand periods in return for a financial reward. Will this work? It sounds rather too much like a panic measure rather than a fully thought through strategy, but it would be hard to blame Ofgem for panicking when so little progress has been made to tackle an energy gap that has been looming for years.
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‘Britain's energy industry is facing an unprecedented challenge to secure supplies,’ said Ofgem chief executive Andrew Wright. He blamed the global financial crisis, tough emissions targets, the UK's increasing dependency on gas imports, and the closure of coal-fired power stations to meet legally binding European pollution targets.
The recession has held back investment in new power-generation capacity — particularly renewable and nuclear. We are rapidly running out of options, but is a bribe to industrial users really the best we can come up with?
David Cameron recently pointed out that ‘you can’t build a nuclear power station overnight’ when trying to defend the coalition Government’s slow progress on infrastructure projects. Of course, he is right, but his and the previous Government was well aware that we needed to add capacity years ago — and they chose to do nothing.
The carbon floor tax will finish off coal-fired power generation this year, but the first new nuclear power station will not be generating power until at least 2020 — possibly even later. Renewables account for less than 10% of our energy mix. The Government’s Green Deal and Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) programmes are laudable initiatives, but small steps like these will take decades to change our energy landscape.
Shale gas? Yes, there’s much excitement about that, but getting to our large reserves is problematic in such a densely populated island; we are not the US where they have plenty of wilderness in which to drill. John Cridland, director general of the CBI, told a recent ICOM Energy Association meeting that UK shale gas would not be the ‘game changer’ it has been for the US. He said the business community was only banking on it providing about 10% of our total energy mix in the long-term.
So what’s left?
Reducing demand has to be the focus. Not only is it achievable but it can be done quickly and much more cheaply than trying to build a completely new energy-generation infrastructure. A massive programme of very rapidly improving energy efficiency can give us some breathing space while we wait for new generation to catch up.
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The building-engineering-services sector is best placed to deliver this energy efficiency on an industrial scale because we understand what is required technically. Unfortunately, we still tend to approach projects in pretty much the same way we always have. The traditional supply chain restricts us to just ‘tweaking’ designs by finding replacement technologies that use marginally less energy than whatever they are replacing when the urgency of the situation calls for more radical solutions.
Simply doing things the same way we always have is reducing the potential for us to sell our expertise as building engineering specialists. Energy shortages represent a huge business opportunity for companies with the right competence and understanding of how to cut demand.
We need to stretch ourselves by designing for occupancy. That means finding out what the occupant intends to do with a new or refurbished building – we should also be designing our systems so they are easy to maintain. Too many ‘sustainable’ solutions are extraordinarily complex and hard for non-technical building occupants to understand.
We also have to monitor the actual performance of a building so the facilities-management team can compare their results with best practice and industry benchmarks. After all, you can’t save what you can’t measure. That means revisiting completed projects and learning their lessons. The data produced by Display Energy Certificates (DECs) proves that a large number of buildings simply do not live up to their promises.
Building — or ‘better’ — information modelling (BIM) presents a vision of a new type of supply chain that has the design and installation professions working hand in glove with facilities managers from the very outset. This allows us to explain and fine tune the ‘energy hierarchy’ of a building so we can start with basic, low-cost measures such as insulation and high-quality glazing. Tackling thermal gain with solar shading, for example, will reduce the need for mechanical cooling and allow greater use of passive solutions.
Adding intelligent controls systems and sensors to installed building-services systems makes them operate more sensibly — including turning off automatically when not needed.
Only once these basic measures are complete should building managers consider replacement technologies and, even then, they should first look at introducing new pumps or variable-speed motors that do not significantly alter the set up of the system, but which can make immediate improvements to running costs.
None of this is particularly exciting or, I suspect, of great interest to politicians, but this is the pragmatic approach and can be tackled immediately at low cost. In any case, if we are staring down the barrel of energy shortages, what option do we have?
Bruce Bisset is president of the Building & Engineering Services Association (B&ES).
