WEBVTT NOTE Transcript 2024-03-24 from FLAC by https://elvery.net/prototypes/transcribe/ on my MacBook Air M1 on maximum quality setting. NOTE Body lightly edited. 00:00.000 --> 00:05.600 [Intro Music] 00:05.600 --> 00:13.440 Hi, I'm Damon Hart-Davis, and welcome to Earth Notes podcast on all things eco and green 00:13.440 --> 00:16.440 and efficient at home. 00:16.440 --> 00:25.200 9th August, 2023. This is the core of my post-grad researcher seminar talk today on my PhD work 00:25.200 --> 00:31.120 so far given in person and over teams call brutally trimmed. 00:31.120 --> 00:34.760 Just a little tip from me as I've given lots of pictures and so on, often while people 00:34.760 --> 00:40.200 are faffing around your first or your last slide are left up for a long time and particularly 00:40.200 --> 00:45.480 if you are having a pitch make sure you put your URL and a strap line and something other 00:45.480 --> 00:49.200 down there because people will remember them and you might even get another investor or 00:49.200 --> 00:53.400 another you know so put something on your first and last slide that is useful for people 00:53.400 --> 00:58.320 to get you. In this case I'm not selling you anything so you've just got my name on it. 00:58.320 --> 01:05.680 So what am I working on? Well I've spent a long time thinking about climate change and 01:22.440 --> 01:26.200 So we're not going to build an awful lot of new buildings, we're not knocking many down. 01:26.200 --> 01:31.580 I'm also not particularly interested in industry or commercial or anything. There are twenty 01:31.580 --> 01:38.400 in the nine and a half million households in the UK that need improvements. Twenty million 01:38.400 --> 01:43.600 of those for example at the moment have gas boilers. That's what I'm interested in. Ah 01:43.600 --> 01:51.160 now I may never be able to move on. Here we go. So there are about from a previous estimate 01:51.160 --> 01:55.960 I've done which lines up fairly closely with what the Climate Change Committee said in 02:05.880 --> 02:13.640 which will still be standing in 2050 which have gas boilers and pretty well all of those 02:13.640 --> 02:20.220 are going to have to move to being on heat pumps. It's the preferred way to decarbonise. 02:20.220 --> 02:24.760 There are some alternatives which is for example plane electric resistance heating, electric 02:24.760 --> 02:30.720 storage heaters and so on. But we want to use heat pumps because for every unit of electricity 02:30.720 --> 02:36.780 you can get three units of heat out and because we don't have infinite space to build our 02:36.780 --> 02:41.520 turbines or our solar panels or whatever it is we should make best use of what we've got 02:41.520 --> 02:46.200 and so a heat pump is the way to do it if we can. Why am I assuming that running off 02:46.200 --> 02:52.400 electricity is a good thing because we already have a plan to get our the GB grid to essentially 02:52.400 --> 02:58.120 zero by 2035 and it's dropping still very fast. It's about half the carbon intensity 02:58.120 --> 03:05.160 it was even a few years ago. Note the distinction by the way UK including Northern Ireland it 03:05.160 --> 03:11.300 is on the Irish grid. They are quite a long way behind on decarbonisation but for these 03:11.300 --> 03:16.820 purposes less than 10% of the UK population is in Northern Ireland so these things still 03:16.820 --> 03:25.120 apply in broad terms. So I'm trying to make sure that those heat pump retrofits are cheap 03:25.120 --> 03:30.520 and effective and robust and user friendly. I have a horror story of a friend of mine 03:30.520 --> 03:39.400 in a newly built social housing 200 yards away from my front door where A) the building 03:39.400 --> 03:44.920 work was obviously shoddy even to my untrained eye and the places weren't going to be well 03:49.960 --> 03:55.480 went up and they were shoddy. They were all fitted with heat pumps. The users were given 03:55.480 --> 04:01.160 no training or explanation and my friends ended up and this is 30 years ago with a £4,000 04:01.160 --> 04:06.260 heating bill which it took the Secretary of State for Energy, who was our MP, to intervene 04:06.260 --> 04:12.080 with Centrica's CEO to get it cancelled. That's not user friendly or robust. Someone 04:12.080 --> 04:17.440 ticked a box somewhere that doesn't work so it's not just a technology problem and we 04:17.440 --> 04:21.720 shouldn't make the best of the enemy of the good so it might be better to have an 80% 04:27.800 --> 04:36.440 I'm not here just to get letters DR in front of my name and so it's important that I get 04:36.440 --> 04:42.120 this anything useful I find get it out as I go along and not just in the academic community 04:42.120 --> 04:47.560 but for example I'm talking to two or three of the probably the biggest influences in 04:47.560 --> 04:54.159 the UK heat pump market at the moment. In fact my whole current piece of work is based 05:00.080 --> 05:08.400 publications as well podcasts, trade journals whatever it takes. So I've been thinking about 05:08.400 --> 05:12.840 fixing climate change for at least 2007. I can't remember exactly when but I stuck up 05:12.840 --> 05:19.920 my first explicit how to fix the climate web page then and I have that website now which 05:19.920 --> 05:28.280 has expanded slightly from that to sort of circa 400 pages. I spent the last decade inventing 05:28.280 --> 05:35.040 a domestic heating control for the UK market well the whole EU market but launched initially 05:35.040 --> 05:40.960 in the UK brought it to market that's now being sold on to a third party. I'm pleased 05:40.960 --> 05:46.360 to say they have put about 10 times more onto the market last year than we were able to 05:46.360 --> 05:51.240 manage while we were doing it so it's moving in the right direction. I've spent a lot of 05:51.240 --> 05:57.200 time all of my life basically doing startups and consulting this is the first time I'm 05:57.200 --> 06:06.040 turning into something that I might pass as an academic. I currently am for example agreeing 06:06.040 --> 06:10.960 the liaison between all the green and environmental groups and my local council I don't know how 06:10.960 --> 06:16.520 that happened but there you go. And just because I finished working on Redbolt the climate is 06:16.520 --> 06:24.880 not looking happy so I want to do whatever I can to continue to fix it thus this research. 06:24.880 --> 06:32.120 Now Matt suggested I talk a bit about slightly non-academic things so yes I'm new to academic 06:32.120 --> 06:36.720 research but I have done quite a lot of what's called industrial research when Innovate 06:36.720 --> 06:44.360 UK or Baze or Desnez as they are now pays for it. Lots of innovation so development I 06:44.360 --> 06:49.760 mean all sorts of things I ran one of the UK's first internet service providers when 06:49.760 --> 06:56.920 I realised that internet was going to be important and it wasn't being done well. Redbot was 06:56.920 --> 07:03.160 one of those things I don't know done all sorts of innovative stuff but I've also done 07:03.160 --> 07:07.400 production system delivery I started working in the city as IT support so I've done a lot 07:07.400 --> 07:12.120 of crawling under people's desks and fixing computers and taking dirty sandwiches out 07:12.120 --> 07:18.080 of their fans and but also one of my previous startups was a small e-money issue we did 07:18.080 --> 07:24.520 the first virtual Visa card in Europe and that was you know people actively trying to 07:24.520 --> 07:33.760 break in and steal our money so you know also used to doing very practical things like that 07:33.760 --> 07:37.640 and there are a bunch of people who obviously can't stand me having worked with me but I 07:37.640 --> 07:42.760 have a bunch of people who still talk to me so I have a decent network of contacts and 07:42.760 --> 07:49.280 that's already being helpful here so for example when we were developing Redbot we tested stuff 07:49.280 --> 07:55.600 at the Energy House in Salford which is a house built inside a lab which is rather marvellous 07:55.600 --> 08:01.120 and so I did a sanity check on one of the things on my current paper and I dropped him 08:01.120 --> 08:05.640 a line and said dear Richard is this completely late potty or not and he said it was fine 08:05.640 --> 08:12.440 it's very good so that was from a previous life. Now does that mean I know what I'm doing? 08:12.440 --> 08:19.160 No in fact I know that I don't know what I'm doing but it turns out I've got this far and 08:19.160 --> 08:24.080 I'm still solvent and have some friends left so apparently that's not the end of the world 08:24.080 --> 08:27.680 and it is important it is a life skill to know that you don't need to know what you're 08:27.680 --> 08:34.400 doing all the time. It's located flounder, ask to help, pivot, a friend of mine who I'm 08:34.400 --> 08:41.720 well nominally a mentee of mine passed back some advice saying and also for God's sake 08:41.720 --> 08:46.720 when you know you're doing it wrong stop you should not go for the sunk cost fallacy just 08:46.720 --> 08:50.640 because you've put a lot of effort in if you're doing the wrong thing stop doing it now and 08:50.640 --> 08:56.720 that's an important lesson to learn. So while floundering however I attempted to keep decent 08:56.720 --> 09:00.760 notes because it turns out that all those failures are interesting points I hope for 09:00.760 --> 09:05.640 the paper so tried all these approaches and they didn't work is nearly as good as and 09:05.640 --> 09:13.880 I waved my hands and the perfect answer fell out of my head. So those are just some observations 09:13.880 --> 09:19.680 which are easier to feel comfortable about having done all these things wrong commercially 09:19.680 --> 09:30.280 for 30 years. Okay topics and papers so I keep so my plan here so I'm on a part time 09:30.280 --> 09:39.680 deal here which means I'm here till 2031 and the climate needs a lot of fixing doing there 09:39.680 --> 09:48.240 are a lot of things that need to happen and I'm focusing on this well both narrow UK domestic 09:48.240 --> 09:55.320 space heating only but also broad that's nearly 30 million buildings each of which is its 09:55.320 --> 10:03.160 own thing. So as I'm thinking about it new ideas come to mind and some of them jump for 10:03.160 --> 10:07.600 cue and the one that I'm currently looking at has pushed itself to the head of the cue 10:07.600 --> 10:13.900 but here are three things that I think are important. So I spent 10 years developing 10:13.900 --> 10:19.080 a smart TRV thermostatic radiator valve so any of you who have radiators at home for 10:19.080 --> 10:23.500 heating and have a little usually white thing on one end of it which you have one two three 10:23.500 --> 10:28.160 four five on that you set your room temperature with that I did a smarter one of those which 10:28.160 --> 10:35.000 saves and an extra 12 or 13 percent energy on top by working out when you're not in the 10:35.000 --> 10:41.360 room and dropping the temperature a little bit. So I am kind of biased I think TRV is 10:41.360 --> 10:49.120 a useful things but that's for gas fine systems and heat pumps are not the same creature so 10:49.120 --> 10:53.880 even if you take out your existing gas boiler and you do an absolute drop in replace it 10:53.880 --> 10:59.000 with a high temperature heat pump do we still want to manage things the way we have before 10:59.000 --> 11:08.720 with TRVs so there's one of the big influences in heat pumps are small and kind of immature 11:08.720 --> 11:13.240 heat pump industry in the UK is a chap called Heat Geek or that's his company is called 11:13.240 --> 11:21.080 Adam Chapman and he wrote this page slightly polemic saying why we shouldn't have TRVs 11:21.080 --> 11:26.840 with heat pumps and I got into this PhD partially because I thought that's nonsense I'm going 11:26.840 --> 11:31.920 to show him he's wrong so obviously when I came to test what he said in the page it turns 11:31.920 --> 11:36.680 out he's not wrong which is slightly embarrassing or it's not completely wrong and it's very 11:36.680 --> 11:41.000 interesting I think it needs some explanation I think it at least needs some understanding 11:41.000 --> 11:45.560 so that's what I'm working on at the moment and if it turns out he was depending on how 11:45.560 --> 11:49.440 right he is if it only affects one percent of people one percent of the time maybe we 11:49.440 --> 11:55.240 just don't try teaching all homeowners to do different things they've ever done before 11:55.240 --> 11:58.920 but if it turns out that he's right most of the time in most houses we should be changing 11:58.920 --> 12:04.880 building regulations which currently still require TRVs basically so that's the first 12:04.880 --> 12:12.320 one which I might get out next month another hot question though as it were appropriately 12:12.320 --> 12:19.760 is it would clearly be better to improve our very leaky buildings before we put heat pumps 12:19.760 --> 12:25.080 in because heat pumps are expensive and it's been relatively cheap to throw in a massively 12:25.080 --> 12:33.720 oversized gas boiler it is very expensive to throw in an oversized heat pump and I mean 12:33.720 --> 12:38.000 very expensive you can double the cost of one if you go slightly over and heat demand 12:38.000 --> 12:42.480 what you might otherwise need but in some cases you can't do fabric improvements you 12:42.480 --> 12:47.080 might be in a conservation area you might have a listed building it might just be very 12:47.080 --> 12:53.280 expensive a friend of mine with a double friend at Victorian place in Kingston his initial 12:53.280 --> 12:59.200 suggestions to him in pricing have been it would cost him £50,000 to external wall insulation 12:59.200 --> 13:05.040 it would cost him £25,000 to buy a heat pump so should he just buy a slightly bigger heat 13:05.040 --> 13:11.400 pump and do fabric insulation later if he can fabric improvements such as insulation 13:11.400 --> 13:16.080 if you do that what happens in the shoulder months when the barn goes down is your heat 13:16.080 --> 13:21.040 pump going to cycle more and more madly so it's terribly inefficient so can we decouple 13:21.040 --> 13:25.840 heat pumps and fabric improvements and how should we do it that's the second paper and 13:25.840 --> 13:29.000 then the third one which is important and this goes back to that horror story I had 13:29.000 --> 13:35.240 before you can't just make replacing boilers a tick box exercise we've done almost every 13:35.240 --> 13:42.360 UK heating system currently in a home is badly installed oversized and not understood by 13:42.360 --> 13:48.440 its of the occupants right almost every single heating system the UK is currently wrong maybe 13:48.440 --> 13:56.320 we could do better and part of that will be giving more agency control and understanding 13:56.320 --> 13:59.760 to the end users these are people without physics degrees you know these are people 13:59.760 --> 14:03.600 who don't want to spend all their time understanding their heating but who want to understand 14:03.600 --> 14:07.720 the consequence if they turn their heating off overnight to save energy that they're 14:07.720 --> 14:11.880 going to be paying peak time electricity costs tomorrow and it's not going to get warm till 14:11.880 --> 14:17.320 noon some way of illustrating to them the effect of what their behavior or proposed 14:17.320 --> 14:23.440 behavior or tweaking the system is controls that work is my summary for that one so those 14:23.440 --> 14:29.240 are three of the current ideas I have so as I say the first thing I'm looking at is this 14:29.240 --> 14:37.560 puzzler posed by heat geek and he's on a very very simple model which I've confirmed with 14:37.560 --> 14:44.200 about ten lines of code it doesn't even happen at runtime the compiler is actually resolved 14:44.200 --> 14:50.280 that it's all correct as is arithmetic more or less and I'm extending that model in a 14:50.280 --> 14:57.600 number of ways he made a couple of small errors in his arithmetic compared to his words so 14:57.600 --> 15:00.000 I've parameterized the model so I can turn on 15:00.000 --> 15:05.760 and off the fixes. I can turn off a couple of other things. His model was a study state 15:05.760 --> 15:10.000 model with a fixed external air temperature, so I've allowed the model that you can vary 15:10.000 --> 15:15.400 the external air temperature. I've now got hold of every, for about six cities around 15:15.400 --> 15:22.040 the UK, hourly data for every hour for the last 20 years, so I can go and try these out 15:22.040 --> 15:28.560 with actual different geographies and so on. And I've tried it for a year's worth for London 15:28.560 --> 15:34.640 and Glasgow. And hey, this is not big data. I used to work in the city. Let me tell you 15:34.640 --> 15:45.120 about big data at some point. And then the model in HeatCeeks paper is a very, very stylised 15:45.120 --> 15:50.680 bungalow. Bungalows aren't a very large chunk of UK heating stock, and it's a slightly weird 15:50.680 --> 15:55.520 simplified model. So we were just discussing earlier, I think my next step will be just 15:55.520 --> 16:01.160 very slightly generalise that to two stories. It will then be representative to some degree 16:01.160 --> 16:09.920 of detached, which is the second largest part of the of GB housing stock. So I think will 16:09.920 --> 16:14.680 be more representative. So I'm doing all this in the open. So there's a GitHub there, which 16:14.680 --> 16:19.680 I publish it on and you can see, you know, the work and it is incredibly simple from 16:19.680 --> 16:24.320 a programming point of view. I mean, the original thing is, you know, there's far more comments 16:24.320 --> 16:28.520 than there is actually any arithmetic going on. And part of the discussion with Matt this 16:28.520 --> 16:33.400 morning was how simple is too simple? I think it's nice that it's simple, because you can 16:33.400 --> 16:39.600 see there's no hidden surprises that there does genuinely seem to be an issue here. And 16:39.600 --> 16:44.120 nothing is outrageous about this thing. It's just simple. So anyway, picking something 16:44.120 --> 16:49.600 of an appropriate level of complexity, which shows the issue, but is believable, is what 16:49.600 --> 16:52.000 I need to steer through for the rest of this paper. 16:52.000 --> 16:57.000 [Outro Music] 16:57.000 --> 17:04.000 There's more on my Earth Notes Web site at Earth.Org.UK.