Regeneration of our electrical soul

Regeneration is a profoundly beautiful thing. It means to restore something to a better state, to form something anew: to be re-born. It’s the transformation of something broken into something repaired, something injured into something healed, something ugly into something beautiful. And we in the energy sector are doing it.

The concept of regeneration permeates all the nooks and crannies of life. Turn on the television and you can find Repair Shop, where a tatty leather wallet is cleaned and restitched, or a delicate violin is made to play again. If one of the Repair Shop experts were to accidently cut themselves, they would be able to see the regenerative power of their skin growing across the gash, properties that scientists are working hard to replicate in self-healing concrete and other materials.

Drive in an electric car and the momentum of the vehicle is used in regenerative braking to charge the battery, instead of wasting energy as heat in the brakes. Drive past a church and recall preachers talking about regeneration of the soul. Drive through any city centre and see examples of urban regeneration, taking industrial wastelands and repurposing them for offices, accommodation and community spaces.

Regeneration is all around us. My favourite examples are The Lost Gardens of Heligan and the Eden Project, both schemes of the visionary Sir Tim Smit. With Heligan, a once beautiful garden had been forgotten and overgrown with brambles, a victim of the first world war. But it was lovingly brought back to its former glory through hard work and great skill, with the addition of new sculptures, such as the Mud Maid shown in the banner image above.

Eden is very different. The china clay mining in Cornwall is good for business, but leaves great scars on the landscape, huge lifeless pits unable to be recolonised by nature. Eden turned that around and regenerated one of the large pits, so that today it is humming with nature and beauty, not to mention the biological preserves housed under its incredible giant geometric greenhouses.

But what about the energy sector? Since the establishment of the grid and the electrification of our nation, electricity has been at the heart of everything we’ve done. Perhaps it could be called the hidden soul of our society. It’s genuinely unimaginable how we could now operate without electricity.

But our electrical soul has been somewhat dirty, relying for decades on coal and oil. The regeneration of our electrical soul was a long time overdue, but is now underway at a fast pace. The end product is no different, but look under the bonnet of our grid and it’s getting cleaner by the day. It will only be a few years until coal is completely gone from the UK grid, and net zero for the electricity network is intended to come by 2035.

If we lift our gaze just a little higher than the regeneration of our electricity generation facilities, we see a wider remit of change happening. Creation of wetland habitats, planting of trees, not to mention the revolution of electric cars and heat pumps. Together, these are helping to ensure that our country is beautiful and sustainable, for the benefit of all.

However, regeneration doesn’t happen by itself. In the first place, it takes a spark of vision, a desire to change. But that, in a sense, is the easy bit. The hard bit is making it happen, like excavating Heligan’s Victorian ram pump by hand through meters of mud, or creating tens of thousands of tonnes of soil to bring life to an ex-quarry to create Eden. The grind for developers of finding grid capacity, the challenge for network companies of looking for solutions to network restrictions, the complexity for regulators of balancing cost for consumers against funding network developments – this is where the reality of regeneration bites for us all on a daily basis.

On top of that there are genuinely difficult questions to answer as a society that operates without fossil fuel. Where do we put the wind turbines we need to replace the coal power stations? How do we balance protecting beautiful views with installing the new electrical infrastructure needed to support a low carbon economy, the infrastructure needed to slow climate change to prevent the natural landscapes we love to look at being damaged or destroyed?

The challenges are great, but the benefits are greater. So, if you are involved in any way in transforming the energy industry, you are helping to regenerate the electrical soul of our nation. And that’s a beautiful thing – thank you.