Nigel Hargreaves, Synfo Ltd. August 2022
The burgeoning impacts of climate change, as the drought rolls northwards from southern Europe and temperature records in this country are broken (as part of a 21st century trend), are all too evident. This, in addition to unsustainable resource extraction is putting pressure on the supply of water and food supplies in countries closer to home. Here, following Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, the disruption to markets and supply chains is adding to the strain, made worse by the recent war in Ukraine, and driving inflation.
Businesses are being forced to ‘re-localise’, to reconsider global resourcing which has been the norm for the last 40-odd years. In the face of the latest ‘cost of energy and living’ crisis, arguably, now is the time to focus on resilience. As energy cuts across so many business and behavioural issues, the following advice has been written with resilience in mind. This advice views resilience through an energy lens, to develop more sustainable businesses, integrated and aligned to the rapid changes we are witnessing around us. Other lenses also exist through which business resilience can be viewed to form a detailed sustainability plan, including water, materials, skills, behavioural patterns and social welfare. However, energy is a priority not least because of recent rapid price increases, but also because it is cross-cutting of many business activities. Carbon accounting is also becoming the norm, pointing to the heart of the ecological and economic challenges facing us.
The following suggestions are deliberately pitched at a systems level and can be broken down into solutions from there. They follow a hierarchy as described in Figure 1. Practical measures businesses can undertake to apply these principles are summarised in Figure 2.
Energy conservation forms the basis of further actions in the hierarchy because avoiding energy usage is fundamental to sustainability and evidence of its conservation in practice can be observed everywhere in the natural world. For example, plants don’t waste energy in their growth and productivity and have had 4.5 billion years to evolve and develop, so they ought to be a good teacher!
For energy conservation, these include:
- In the case of heat and cooling, insulate to the maximum practical to reduce U-values[1].
- Utilise waste and passive heat and cooling from nearby sources if available.
- Invest in increasing the efficiency of appliances such as boilers and cooling systems, machinery, and lighting.
- Review process and product design, which should aim for simplicity and reusability to reduce material consumption and waste. Can service delivery be digitalised?
- Plan for an integrated approach to materials acquisition, product or service delivery. Lifecycle analysis can be applied in helping to compare between different strategies.
- Apply manual input to processes where feasible to reduce reliance on appliances. Simply fitting window blinds or shutters that keep heat in or out depending on the season will save on energy usage.
- Consider market and supply chain localisation to reduce transport energy use, which could also create more immediate and therefore secure business networks.
- Close-off leaks and drafts. Airtight buildings with mechanical ventilation and heat recovery (MVHR) systems reduce energy loss and are healthier to live and work in.
Promote active intervention in energy use.
- Develop energy usage ‘avoidance thinking’ – switch things off and don’t turn them on if unrequired. Champion the ‘waste not, want not’ message amongst colleagues.
- Walk, run, cycle, or use any number of other personal mobility devices (such as electric scooters) that are available to get to work or shops, rather than habitually using the car. This could improve personal fitness and welfare at the same time! Implement car sharing where practical and encourage use of public transport.
- Take care to avoid the ‘rebound effect’, resulting in things being left on, or overused, which sometimes arises out of a ‘feel-good’ mindset after efficiency measures are deployed.
- Reuse, repurpose, repair, redeploy and recycle wherever possible. This is sustainability ‘by design’ and reduces energy and resource impacts driving climate change and associated costs.
- Develop a ‘circular systems-thinking culture’ inhouse – it brings benefits ranging from greater supply chain resilience and lowering waste, to improving product and process economy. This can become the start of demanding a similarly aligned supply chain that will help to reduce Scope 2 and 3 emissions[2] in carbon accounting as well.
- Aim for improvement by implementing standards such as ISO 50001[3] and PAS 2060[4]
Go renewable wherever possible. This actually applies not only to energy but also to materials consumed. Nature depends on renewability and so should businesses to limit their ecological impacts. Minimising ecological impacts will assist in returning us to ‘one planet living’[5] and help mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Measures to consider include:
- Implement renewable generation and storage technologies such as PV, solar thermal, heat/cold stores and electrical batteries on site, or close to it. These can help avoid the cost of importing energy, if equipment is connected behind supply meters, while at the same time it will increase energy resilience in cases of network supply failure that could result in businesses having to shut down operations.
- With rising energy prices, the cost and benefit from these measures will pay back on investments faster. Sizing of generators to avoid surplus energy generation beyond demand requirements should be considered because spilled, or exported, energy to the grid is not currently well rewarded compared to the price of import tariffs.
- Electric vehicles will cancel out their embodied and operational emissions sooner when compared with fossil fuel equivalent vehicles, if they are charged with renewable electricity, which can be factored into generator sizing. Consider an e-bike over buying an electric vehicle for personal use or hyperlocal deliveries.
Deploy responsive controls to become a smarter business. There is a vast range of devices such as a desktop/mobile apps and remote sensors and actuators that can be retrofitted to help with situational awareness and control over energy and other resource usage. But that isn’t the limit of options immediately available.
- Install smart meters to receive accurate billing and profiling from energy suppliers. ‘Consumer Access Devices’ can also be deployed to gain more detailed information on energy use and cost.[6]
- Install smart controls to manage heat and electricity usage that can operate over secure wifi, Ethernet or SCADA[7] based networks, offering greater control and access to energy efficiency and conservation.
- Integrate data on management platforms with inputs from LoRaWAN IoT[8] and other publicly available networks such as API channels[9] for weather and public transport API data.
- Consider ‘vehicle-to-grid’ connection options for EVs and static battery discharge contracts if offered by your electricity or battery supplier. These can earn revenues by using your surplus stored energy in helping stabilise the electricity grid. Many battery suppliers offer deals of this nature by forming energy communities they can draw upon to sell energy to network companies, in effect creating virtual power plants (VPPs)[10].
- Consider transferring to variable renewable electricity tariffs for electricity imports which are cheaper at times of lower demand and surplus renewable energy on the grid. This will mean demand from business processes will have to align with these off-peak and surplus generation times (known as ‘demand side response’) to receive beneficial tariffs. A common example of this practice is a night storage heater tariff.
Regenerative actions help to not only reach net zero but also to repay some of the environmental deficits that we have accumulated from following an essentially extractive economic system since the time of the industrial revolution. These actions give back more than is taken out over time. Carbon offsetting is not included here as regenerative, even though it may result in the planting of more trees, because the aim is to theoretically balance our continuous emission of an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases. Regenerative actions aim to give back more than we take. Actions to consider include:
- Invest in partnerships that operate regenerative practices such as rewilding, reforestation, seaweed aquaculture and soil remediation. Processes and products designed around a circular economy can promote regeneration.
- Consuming locally grown organic food and planting trees around a building to offer shade that will reduce the energy demand from mechanical cooling systems in the summer time could be another option.
- Actions that help to replenish energy from renewable sources – such as charging inter-seasonal heat stores with solar energy. These can form part of a heat network to reduce the impact of energy demand over the winter.[11]
- Heat pumps could be considered a regenerative solution because they can return, in heat, more energy than is input in electricity. However, the extra heat is still extracted from somewhere in the environment (air, water, ground, etc.).
[1] https://www.thenbs.com/knowledge/what-is-a-u-value-heat-loss-thermal-mass-and-online-calculators-explained
[2] See the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Protocol or explained here – https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/what-are-scope-1-2-3-carbon-emissions
[3] For further information on ISO 50001 see https://www.iso.org/files/live/sites/isoorg/files/store/en/PUB100400.pdf
[4] For further information on PAS 2060 see https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/pas-2060-carbon-neutrality/
[5] One Planet Living is a sustainability framework produced by Bioregional https://youtu.be/JZ0erjJFiCE
[6] For example, try the Bright App. See https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/bright/id1369989022 also available for Android platforms.
[7] Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/SCADA-supervisory-control-and-data-acquisition
[8] For details on Norfolk’s public IoT network see – https://www.norfolk.gov.uk/news/2020/09/largest-of-its-kind-sensor-network-launched-in-norfolk
[9] To understand more about API channels – https://www.digitalml.com/what-api-channel/
[10] Moixa Gridshare is one example, https://www.moixa.com/gridshare-how-ai-software-is-transforming-virtual-power-plants/
[11] For more information on interseasonal heat transfer, see https://www.icax.co.uk/interseasonal_heat_transfer.html
