Are we keeping up?

Thinking large scale can be difficult. There are lots of examples of things we talk about in terms of millions of units and visualising that scale isn’t easy. For example, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 411.19 parts per million (ppm) on 19th September 2020. I know what 411 looks like but I don’t find thinking of it in terms of a million easy. Seeing it rise or fall is a much simpler concept. If we move on to the rate of change taking place in technology the same applies.

You will have heard of the Law of Accelerating Returns, which revolves around the continuous changes in the world of technology and tries to predict future advancements and their impact. Coined by Ray Kurzweil, the law states that several technological progresses are exponential, resulting into exponential returns, which include computer chip speed and cost effectiveness. Kurzweil wrote in 2001 that every decade our overall rate of progress was doubling, “We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at the 1999 rate when he wrote about it).”  It was Kurzweil, who in 1990, predicted that a computer would beat a professional chess player by 1998, which came true in 1997 when Garry Kasparov lost to IBM’s Deep Blue. In 2016, a computer mastered the even more complex game Go - an accomplishment not expected by some experts for another decade. It is clear that progress this century is already pretty stunning—the global adoption of the internet, smartphones, ever-more agile robots, AI that learns. The first human genome was sequenced in 2004 at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, machines can sequence 18,000 annually for less than $1,000 a genome.

We could spend a long time trying to predict how this scale of change will apply to our lives and probably come up with something generic so it helps when there is a specific case to point to such as the examples above. So, here’s a recent one applicable to our agenda.

At the beginning of September, the first fully domestic weekly Firm Frequency Response (FFR) contract with National Grid was won. The winner will use its assets of over 5,500 domestic solar and battery storage systems to respond to National Grid calls, providing 4MW of capacity to help the operator balance demand. FFR capacity had previously been met by larger scale technologies, including as grid-scale batteries. Domestic batteries offered by the provider range from 3kWh to 5.8kWh battery which can be linked up to 4 units depending on the size of the house and the circumstances of the customer. National Grid mandates that you need a certain type of metering, now down from several thousand pounds to a few hundred. A reliable broadband is vital too, as is the location of the battery, to avoid extremes of temperature.

In other words, what was considered either too expensive, not necessary or technically unachievable just a couple of years ago is expected to become commonplace. According to accepted thinking we shouldn’t be surprised by this – it’s exactly what the Law of Accelerating Returns predicts – but what does it mean for our future plans in terms of energy efficiency and renewables? Well it tells us that the future is approaching much faster than we think and it is critical to think exponentially about where we’re headed and how we’ll get there.

At APSE Energy we have mentioned the idea of scale before - the need to act at scale to tackle the impacts of climate change. Small scale won’t make a dent in a big issue. Thinking of the example above, those local authorities who own housing stock have the option to use at as this provider has. The point is, we will see others doing things we can’t imagine now. To what extent should your local authority be part of change happening at that scale and do you have the appetite for that type and scale of change?