Prizes to help make Britain a clean energy superpower
The government’s energy mission is hugely ambitious: clean energy by 2030. It’s not just about breaking our addiction to fossil fuel and halting global warming.
It’s also about the cold reality of geopolitics – severing our reliance on Russian gas and oil from unstable regimes in the Middle East.
And it’s not even just about problems – it’s also about creating opportunities: of affordable and abundant energy for businesses; of warmer homes and lower bills for consumers.
There are daunting challenges in achieving these goals, and innovation in technology and services will be a huge part of this – alongside big investments in infrastructure.
I think challenge prizes should be part of this.
Home Energy Efficiency Prize
My first prize idea is a prize to reward clever solutions that achieve small gains in homes’ energy efficiency.
The UK’s built environment is dominated by old buildings that weren’t designed for energy efficiency. Victorian terraced houses with wobbly sash windows. Sixties blocks with paper-thin walls. In my case, the Edwardians who built my flat held up the ceilings with huge steel beams – they do a terrific job at holding the roof up, but they’re also remarkably good at conducting the cold right into my bedroom in the middle of winter.
We all know there are big things we can do – get loft insulation, replace windows, or get a heat pump.
But the energy inefficiency of our housing stock is also down to a thousand and one tiny problems – uncapped chimneys, air bricks that leak heat, poorly-designed heating systems.
If you fixed all these small problems, the marginal gains could add up to a big difference.
A neat example is the AirEx smart air brick, which Nesta invested in. Houses often have vented bricks in their walls to stop moisture building up – but they vent out heat too, and they’re open, whether the moisture level is high or low. AirEx is a simple replacement for these vents, which opens and closes when moisture levels require it, rather than being open all the time. It’s cheap and easy to install, and leads to measurable cuts in household emissions.
There must be hundreds of clever solutions like AirEx for all the tiny niggles our houses have. So let’s celebrate these marginal gains! I want to offer a £1m prize for the best ideas for how to plug these gaps in our houses’ energy efficiency. I think we could get a huge range of solutions – cutting heat loss, making lighting more efficient, managing electricity use and more.
And it makes sense as a prize because, despite this huge variety of solutions, they could all be judged on the same clear metric: on energy saved, ease of use, cost and size of market.
Dynamic Demand Challenge Prize II
My second idea for a prize in the government’s energy mission harks back to one of the very first prizes that Challenge Works ran, a decade ago. It is to award a prize to the best technology or service that helps households benefit from variable energy prices.
Solar energy generation fluctuates: clouds, day, night and seasons all affect the amount of electricity we get from the sun. Wind power does too – on calm and windy days.
On the scale of a whole country, these largely balance each other out – it’s usually sunny and windy somewhere – but there are still peaks and troughs in production of electricity. And that means big variations in the wholesale price of electricity throughout the day. When it’s windy and sunny across the whole country, electricity can even be free.
Almost a decade ago, one of the very first challenge prizes that we ran was called the Dynamic Demand Challenge Prize. We challenged innovators to come up with technologies that shifted demand for electricity away from times of peak demand, and into periods of peak supply. The results were amazing – one of the finalist teams was later acquired by Octopus Energy and forms a key part of their Kraken division.
But dynamic demand management tools like these mostly focus on business customers, who are exposed to these variable prices. Almost all consumers are insulated from the costs – but also the benefits – of fluctuating electricity prices, by fixed tariffs. Boiling your kettle when the wind blows costs the same as when it doesn’t.
Tariffs that fluctuate by the minute exist – but they’re the preserve of geeks – people who are happy to time their washes, people who keep an eagle eye on their smart meter, people with large banks of batteries. Early adopters and obsessive money savers.
I think innovation could help with this. If someone created a truly idiot-proof technology or service that handled all the aggravation of a variable electricity tariff for me, but let me reap the benefits, then I’d sign up in the bat of an eyelid.
And so for the second of my proposed energy prizes, I’d like to offer £10m for the best technology or service that manages my home energy use, optimising for when electricity is cheapest and has the lowest climate impact – measured by how effectively it shifts demand away from peaks, how easy it is to install and use, and how cost-effective it is.
Why £10m? I think this needs to be a big prize, because to truly demonstrate scalable impact, I would like to see real market traction with real customers. And that means not just a design or a proof of concept, but building a compelling service and marketing effort around it – and that takes, time, effort and money.
Reach out
These are my ideas. You might like them – or not. You might have better ones. And you might have £10m going spare. If you’d like to chat about how to make these prize ideas, and others, a reality, then get in touch.
