A Net Zero and Sustainability keynote session on the second day of Healthcare Estates 2022 included a chastening look at the energy generation challenge facing the UK in the short-to-medium term, by Dame Sue Ion, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. One of her key messages was a need for a considerable stepping up in the construction of renewable energy-generating facilities, although with some renewable technologies, and also nuclear reactor facilities, there remained cost and practical hurdles to overcome.
Dame Sue Ion presented her conference address before two other speakers in the session – Councillor Tracey Rawlins, Executive Member for Environment & Transport at Manchester City Council, and Annie Shepperd, CEO at Salix Finance, gave their own standpoints on some of the key sustainability and Net Zero challenges facing the healthcare engineering and estate management sector, the wider public sector, and the UK as a whole, and discussed some of the initiatives already in hand
She was introduced by the session chair, Ian Hinitt, an IHEEM Past-President, who chairs IHEEM’s Environmental Sustainability Technical Platform, and in his day-to-day professional role is Director of Estates & Facilities at the Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust. In setting the scene for the three presentations, he reminded delegates that the NHS has set itself the target that the emissions the service controls – the so-called NHS Carbon Footprint – will reach Net Zero by 2040, and that those it can influence – the NHS Carbon Footprint Plus – by 2045. The IHEEM Past-President said: “This afternoon’s discussion with key industry influencers and experts will consider how emissions can be addressed in healthcare and wider society, and how events since the launch of NHS Net Zero – including NHS waiting list recovery, the war in Ukraine, and the fuel, food, and cost of living crisis – are presenting challenges to decarbonisation.
A background in material science and metallurgy
With these words said, Ian Hinitt introduced Dame Sue Ion, explaining that she has a background in materials science and metallurgy, and holds visiting or honorary professorships at numerous universities, including Imperial College, and the University of Manchester. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society.
The recipient of the Dame Grand Cross award in the Platinum Jubilee Honours for services to engineering, Dame Sue gained a First Class Honours degree from Imperial College in 1976, and a PhD in 1979, before joining British Nuclear Fuels, where she was Group Director of Technology from 1992-2006. She has represented the UK internationally on key committees overseeing the nuclear sector for over three decades. She was Chair of the Nuclear Innovation Advisory Board for the Government from 2015-2018, and is currently Honorary President of the National Skills Academy Nuclear
She began her address by saying what ‘a great pleasure’ it was to be able to come to talk in Manchester ‘at this tremendous conference and exhibition’. She told the audience: “My role today is to try and set a national context for the drive to Net Zero, and to explain just how challenging it is. So, while the health sector is making some amazing steps forward, there might be some challenges ahead in the national sense.”
As Ian Hinitt had pointed out, the world was ‘rapidly changing’, with ‘unprecedented geopolitics’ resulting in us no longer being in control of our energy supply or energy price, or the material resources that affect them both. She asked rhetorically: “So why do we still care whether energy is low carbon or not?” The answer was that the climate change impact was ‘irrefutable’. She elaborated: “We’re warming the planet up, and as a first world country, we’ve got to set a really good example, but how much do we really care, especially when we’re choosing between heating our homes, feeding our children, and making sure that our hospitals actually run – whether they are low carbon or not?”
Extreme weather events
If additional evidence were needed on the human impact on our climate, there had been a number of extreme weather events; Dame Sue showed photos of floods in Bedfordshire, fires in California, Austrian flood damage, floods in Sudan, recent floods in Pakistan, and Hurricane Ian in Florida – all deemed ‘one in 100 year events’, which were now happening ever more frequently. In global emission terms, the speaker pointed out, the UK contributed just 1%; the big players being China and the US, closely followed by Russia and India. Dame Sue said: “While what we do in the UK will make a difference, unless some really big steps are taken by all those nations, our input will only make a small difference.” Looking at the UK’s daily energy use, Dame Sue said she had an ‘app’ on her phone called Electricity Maps (available as a free download) which gives a picture of different countries’ main energy sources, and the CO2 emitted in their generation. She showed a map of Europe from the app, which highlighted how the various European countries were doing.
Energy sources and associated emissions
She said: “Those shown in brown like us are not doing very well in ‘green’ terms. If you’re shown as green – like France and the Nordic countries – then you’re doing very well, while if you’re shown as brown like us, then gas is the main cause of your carbon problem in generating electricity. Contrastingly, in Germany and Poland, the main energy source is coal. So, even when the wind is high here in the UK, we still have a big problem in our generating capacity.”
One of the major issues for the UK, Dame Sue said, is that the our electricity demand varies widely over a 24-hour period. She explained: “So, even when the wind is strong, and the grid can take it, it’s not enough, and similarly with solar, in the winter, the solar to grid input is not very high at all.” Gas thus remained ‘the mainstay’ of our electricity requirements. However, she asked rhetorically, looking at gas ‘geopolitics’, how does the UK get its gas? In fact, much of it is currently imported, with just 47% coming from domestic production, and the rest from pipeline imports from Europe, or from LNG by ship from the Middle East.
LNG imports
She said: “Most LNG imports are from Qatar, with some – and in fact more currently – from the US, because we’re not actually now taking any from Russia. It’s the pipelines through Europe that are causing us the bigger problems, and we have a bigger issue than most of the other European countries, because our gas storage capacity is tiny in the overall scheme of things. We’ve only got 9.3 terawatt hours of stored gas reserves, compared with Italy’s 167.9, and 151 terawatts in Germany. So, while we’ve only got enough gas for a four-to-five day problem, everybody else in Europe has gas which will last quite a bit longer than that.” The UK needed low carbon energy supplies; it was ‘not just about electricity’, but also low carbon transport, low carbon residential, and low carbon business.
Dame Sue said: “When we look at electrification of our transport network, or putting heat pumps or other renewable fuel systems in our homes, our electricity supply needs are going to double, or possibly even treble, without some demand restrictions.”
This – the speaker said – was one of the things that would cause us a problem going forward, since we are currently in the UK running at 50% gas. She said: “If we’re doubling or trebling the grid, we can’t build renewables and other forms fast enough.” While the previous government had published the document, The Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution, with lots of new wind farms, solar, and potentially new nuclear plants envisaged, so far very few of the plans had come into play, and there was as yet no certainty as to what the current administration would do – ‘faced with other very big financial pressures’. Dame Sue Ion said: “I would like to draw your attention to a Royal Academy of Engineering report, Generating the Future: UK energy systems fit for 2050, published over a decade ago, where the Academy sat down with industry experts and worked out what would be physically possible to build that will get us to an 80% carbon emission reduction by 2050. The report is still very relevant today, because it indicated that we needed to build thousands of new wind turbines on shore, install the equivalent of 38 London arrays and 25 million solar panels, put wave power and sea turbines down, and build a Severn Barrage.”
Need for new power plants
She continued: “Some of those have already been ruled out, but the publication said we also needed to build at least 80 big new power plants to replace the gas turbines that currently churn out over 50% of our electricity, and to look seriously at how we reduced the demand, and were more efficient.” Dame Sue’s next slide showed what has actually been built to date in terms of new energy generation facilities, in contrast to what the 2010 report said we would need. She said: “We’ve not built anything like enough of these new facilities to get close to the right trajectory, and we haven’t built, and delivered to the grid, any new nuclear power stations or fossil with carbon capture. So, please focus on these figures here. If you look at wind power, we’ve in fact only managed to build some 24 GWe of electricity-generating wind capacity on the grid so far.”
National Grid data
In August 2022, she explained, the National Grid had published figures on a monthly basis; these showed that of the total UK energy requirement, gas made up just under 50%, wind, 15-16%, nuclear, 15%, and – even in the middle of summer, solar was only giving us 7%.
Pointing to another slide, Dame Sue said: “Going back to what I was saying earlier, this is a National Grid view of a day in the life in 2035. So, by 2035, National Grid says we should have built 25-35 GW of onshore wind capacity, and 55-65 GW of offshore wind capacity, and yet today we are at levels way below this. It’s clear that we have a massive hurdle to overcome in what needs to be built in the timescale. National Grid also expects us to still have 8-10 gigawatts of nuclear power, and unless we start building new nuclear power stations pretty rapidly, we won’t have it. The slide of the imaginary day in 2035’s energy sources in the UK is simply aspirational as things stand – because at the moment the engineering reality just isn’t there to deliver it.”
Low carbon electricity-generating sources
The speaker explained that, currently, our low carbon electricity-generating sources were nuclear, biomass, hydro, marine, solar, and wind turbines, and of those, wind and nuclear made ‘by far and away the lowest carbon contributions’. She said: “Although biomass’s emissions are a lot lower than coal or gas, it is still a polluting fuel unless we also put it with carbon capture and sequestration.”
Looking next at how long nuclear energy would be available to the UK – without the construction of any new plants – and the speaker pointed out that all of our current nuclear power plants except Sizewell B in Suffolk will have been ‘retired’ by the end of the decade. She explained: “The government has asked EDF to look at extending the lives of the Heysham and Hartlepool nuclear plants beyond 2024, because if we lose these nuclear stations, we will lose a significant chunk of solid base load energy, and currently, gas is the only replacement for that that will deliver power to the grid when it’s necessary.”
Focusing on new-build aspirations, plans for a number of potential plants – for example at Wylfa Newydd in Anglesey, and Moorside at Sellafield, had been abandoned, and the only plant currently under construction was at Hinkley Point in Somerset, with work still yet to start on a planned new additional facility at Sizewell. Dame Sue said: “These are the big stations that deliver 1.6 gigawatts each.” She noted here that, against this backdrop, Rolls-Royce has been working hard to deliver small modular reactors, and – like the healthcare sector – adopting offsite manufacture and design for manufacture and assembly to create them. The result was that they could be built in a 3-4-year timeframe, instead of taking 7-10 years to build. This was, she believed, ‘probably our best hope for rapid delivery of nuclear power stations’.
Nuclear’s ‘additional functionality’
“Nuclear does have some additional functionality, because we can couple it with heat generation and hydrogen generation – since nuclear power stations have heat as outputs as well as electricity,” she explained. The advantage over the renewables here was that the primary heat output could be used to make electrolysis more efficient, and thus cheaper. Efficiency and cost competitiveness-wise, she added, it was comparable to fossil with carbon capture, ‘but without the fossil emissions’. She said: “This may be an advantage that nuclear can give us if we build it going forward.” She continued: “Hydrogen is the other alternative we have – but we have to generate it cleanly, and we don’t do so currently. We make it via steam reformation of methane, which is not low carbon. We will thus, in all probability, have to generate hydrogen by electrolysis to generate clean hydrogen, meaning it must come from nuclear power stations, or from wind and solar.”
While some small trials were taking place in the North-West and North-East of England, Dame Sue said we ‘would need to do a lot more to understand how we’re going to both produce the hydrogen and then deliver it to our homes and industry’.
Battery storage options
One other potential avenue – the speaker said – was to couple renewables with battery storage. “However,” said Dame Sue, “this is tricky too, because there are still some challenges for batteries. They need to be optimised for better performance – with a longer life, faster charging, and greater safety. We need to make them cheaper, mass-producible, and more sustainable; we don’t currently recycle batteries, and we need them to be 100% recyclable to put the materials back in the supply chain.” Batteries also met a lot of purposes – for instance being used for cars, big vehicles, and stationary storage, coupled with renewables, ‘to give us more stable power’
There remained major sustainability issues, however, associated with the source of the materials used to create batteries. One of the major sources of lithium is the Atacama Desert in Chile, and Dame Sue explained that sourcing it from there involved ‘draining big tranches of it’, while mining of cobalt was mainly undertaken by children in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She said: “So these are the big sources of global lithium and cobalt. We thus need to ensure we ask ourselves about sustainability, as well as low carbon, when looking at battery storage.”
Electricity price issue
Dame Sue noted also that UK newspapers had suggested the previous week that rapid electric car chargers were now costing as much as petrol to use – mainly because of the price of gas driving up electricity prices. Meanwhile, heat pumps were definitely an option – for use in both homes, and for larger installations such as hospitals and schools. She added, however, for all new technologies, that ‘a lot more needs to happen in terms of standardisation and deployment’, although she knew our national academies were all ‘working very hard to look at the science and engineering challenges that are still there for us’.
Remaining challenges
As her presentation drew to a close, Dame Sue said there were many questions still to address. “For example,” she said, “’What else can we use carbon dioxide for?’; ‘How can we produce hydrogen at scale?’; ‘Can we use ammonia as an energy vector?’; ‘How can we make sustainable carbonbased fuels?’; ‘How do we transition to hydrogen?’; ‘How do we take greenhouse gas out of the earth directly when it’s emitted?’, and ‘Can we make biofuels sustainable?’ ”
She closed with the words: “I want to finish my presentation with a real round of applause for you as a sector, and to IHEEM, HEFMA, and the Carbon & Energy Fund, for their jointly produced document, A Healthcare Engineering Roadmap for Delivering Net Zero Carbon, because the Government hasn’t got a roadmap of how we’re going to get to Net Zero at a national level. It’s got lots of individual initiatives – all very laudable – but none of them have a real powerhouse behind them, whereas your ‘Engineering Roadmap’ was fantastic. It was realistic, it looked for low-hanging fruit, it covered everything from demand side to generation side, and it examined the differences between old hospital estates and brand new hospitals, and what goes into them all. I’ve indeed used it as a blueprint in many talks that I’ve given to other industries. So, very well done to you.” This brought Dame Sue Ion’s presentation to an end, and Ian Hinitt then introduced the next of the session’s speakers, Manchester City Council’s Councilor Tracey Rawlins.