Seeking best reflective practice for the energy adventure

Flashback fright

In January last year, I penned something that captured my “energy assumptions” – this was a summary list of things I was watching really, trying not to be too arrogant. Looking back, I’m not sure I succeeded there. Just over a year later it is positively terrifying how many of my views have evolved and downright changed. Always a healthy state of affairs to realise how wrong we can be. Not always overtly wrong perhaps, but so many new caveats, subtleties, shades of grey. Other views I held though - really have gone from nearly white to nearly black, and that has been a disarming surprise. 

I guess that’s a good thing in a way right? It suggests I’m not too stuck in any dogma, I suppose, to be able to change view. Famous last words…? It is embarrassing though. So much of what was said seemed to make sense at the time. The power of a new piece of information to turn things on its head can rarely be overestimated. An underlying mantra immediately emerges - read widely, read often, read detail.

Looking at that article (and I’m not suggesting you do) it strikes me how I thought the thing to do at the time was to produce a long list of the usual energy suspects and then discuss my perceived merits of each of them. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at them in more detail over the past twelve months, and almost every month, almost every week even, has brought a fresh revelation, a fresh issue, a fresh insight. Almost always accompanied by an increasing appreciation that there are no easy answers, and of how much I still have left to learn. Life really is quite short. I'm just going to get the hang of it I suspect, and then...

On the importance of processing

I’m not about to repeat the exercise this year in the same fashion, realising that the same thing could happen again. I could go on about this that and the other as we all tend to sometimes, but I suspect most of us are so entrenched in our own views that we are not going to be easily convinced that our own pet topic is anything other than great and that the others aren’t nearly as good. The motivation to find out more, to double check that, typically comes from within ourselves.

What the past 12 months has inspired in me is more of an interest in how we evaluate things than the precise thing we are evaluating. That is, I think a more interesting thing to share. Not what I think (who cares) but rather the processes I have found helpful to discover, actually, reliably, why I think it. Processes we can all deploy for ourselves to reach our own conclusions.

Old hands, sky pies, and adrenaline junkies

Noticing and seeking out those who have worked a topic for decades, and who are now sufficiently long in the tooth to be essentially independent – this has been a real source of insight and inspiration over the past months. They don’t feel under any career pressure to tow any “line” and feel liberated to tell it how they really perceive it, after a lifetime of thought. They are "secure in their skin" and a default position of honesty is refreshingly common and openly shared.

That's not to suggest others are dishonest, it's just that we can get so entangled with our own survival baggage sometimes, or misguided loyalties, without even realising it. The older hands amongst us have the confidence that many years bestows, to be better at letting that stuff go. Their perspective of decades in an industry, doesn’t necessarily make them right all the time, but it does make them really worth listening to in reality-check land. That’s not about being sycophantic, as experience is no guarantor of correctness - but if we haven’t learnt that experience counts for a lot, then we are condemning ourselves to a whole lot of unnecessary pointless mistakes. By experience I mean the hard end. Nuts and bolts. Coal faces. Hands dirty. Bruises to prove it. Long witness to the fickle merry-go-round of human and corporate intrigues that pervade all our endeavours.

Something else to emerge over that time has been a real disenchantment with these kinds of phrases: I think; it will; studies suggest; projections show; models indicate. It is even worse when these phrases are given a licence to excuse the remaining sentence from any semblance of justifying information. Let first stage alarm bells ring when you hear such things. It’s the old W. Edwards Deming quote – without data we are just another person with an opinion. Some later paraphrasers prefer to replace the word person with a*****e. Your choice. 

This predilection we have to swallowing projections and forecasts based on so many unstated assumptions is quite depressing. We have not yet evolved as a species to distrust charts in the way that we do large mammalian predators or arthropods. We should. I’m not immune. Fallen for it many times. The right chart. The right absence of information. Desired effect. If the ancients worshipped gold statues of Baal, we worship powerpoints of excel charts. 

Oh, and always the love of the new. There is nothing inherently wrong with the new, and sometimes it has real merit. Yet so often it can simply be an excuse to avoid the hard work, drudgery, and cost associated with the long-haul, tried and tested, methods that we know will work with lesser margins - but which are boring compared to the bright new promised land. They are far less exciting, and harder to whip up excitement in stock markets hungrily looking all the time for the next big thing.   

Of data, technology and magic over matter.

If you’ve read or talked to me before this year, you will already be fed up with the phrase “case study”. It is the antidote to the projection. The real project. The real data. How many years the thing has been going and how many times it has been repeated. Moneys made, moneys lost, payback times. The issues and the biggest problems. There must have been some. Show, show, show, show. Tell, tell, tell. Everything has a biggest problem. Warts and all please. What have been the failures in the past, and what's so very different now? Why won't history repeat, because as the cliché goes, it does have a tendency to.

Don’t have that? Too soon?

That’s OK, that doesn’t mean I have any less respect for what is trying to be done - since everything has to start somewhere. It does mean though, that you must pardon me if I reserve judgement until you do have that information to hand. And don’t expect too many cheques before then, not from my employer, or my taxes.

The other modern idol of course is technology. Technology and positive thinking. With that anything is possible. We can shoot for the stars if we want to. 

Well, no. Sorry, anything is not possible. We cannot magic things into being with positive thinking and an R&D budget. Technology cannot remove fundamental laws of physics, no matter how much it would love to. It’s easy to say that with conviction, but harder to keep all these things in our critical minds, all the time. We are easily beguiled. I have witnessed my own beguilement. The power of the oft repeated whispers and shouts. The honey trap of the half-truth. Chemistry too has laws of its own, lest I have the chemists hunting me down. OK, fair dues, at some rare spectacular moments in history our view of these physical bedrock foundations shift – but that kind of shift should never be the base assumption of a business plan. 

Oh, lighten up.

Well, it probably sounds like Mr Grumpy has arrived and I’ll be honest, there are days when it does take a toll on good cheer. Yet for all that, getting it wrong sometimes is the fickle way we progress isn’t it. We never move forward perfectly. The successes are usually accompanied by at least a dozen dead ends. Truth has a way of outing in the end and sometimes we just have to be patient in waiting for it. Sometimes when it does, it is the outcome we were expecting and hoping for. Other times we are the clowns with pie on the face. That’s OK. We learn, lick what cream is still edible and move on.   

Local, simple, finite, and if it has to be distal, make it big

If it's less about things and more about themes, then over the past year, five recurrent ones have really stood out.   

The first is that the more locally and renewably we can do energy the better. Shifting things around distally makes things more complicated, less efficient and costlier. Look at a place. See what it has that is renewable. Be imaginative. Combine, cascade, capture. Use it first before we even dare look far-afield. And remember our muscles. We have some great little powerhouses on board already. Energy doesn't come any more local than that. If local isn't in the first instance enough, then defaulting to "How can I use less?" before defaulting to "How can I bring in more?" should be a habit.

The second is keep it simple. Every conversion step costs. Both money to make the kit, and energy loss. We like being “clever”. We like switching something into another. It gives us a sense of power and mastery over nature. “Tah-dah” I’ve changed it. The great philosopher's stone mania, the alchemy of alteration.  The truth is though, our universe is hard-wired to not let us get away with conversions for free. Such changes come with a cost. We should minimise the number of them we have to do. Sometimes the cleverest thing to do is to not mind being mundane. A wire or a bike might not be so sexy, but they might be best.

The third is that nothing manufactured is without cost, and everything we make is made from stuff that is eventually finite. Even the world itself is essentially finite – whether we like it or not, both in time and space. We can’t keep growing forever in the room without bumping our head against the ceiling. We can’t technology more platinum than there is into widespread existence. We can’t technology a cupful of dysprosium from the coffee maker.  Recycling efficiency is virtually never 100%.

Given constant expectations of growth, that can ultimately only be in direct contradiction to this reality of finiteness. Some resource limits might still be a long way off, but some are closer. Whatever the case, we are going to have to try navigating peacefully and safely through an ever increasing number of resource ceilings - and the disruption - that brings. There is no guarantee we will manage it. That is not to be despondent – it is entirely conceivable that we could get it together, but if I was an alien betting on humanity achieving it, based on the past century, I think I would be looking at long odds. We certainly don’t look on a path to digesting the gravity of this reality yet. If we do achieve it, its not going to be by repeating what we've done before.

A fourth, and perhaps even more controversial theme is that if we are forced to go with distal provision of energy, then to go where it can be done big. Sometimes, inevitably, we do struggle with the purely local alone. Whatever we can do local, do it so, but if that is not enough, then making sure the distal is big – so that it can cover lots of distal to lots of places, and preferably with as little land footprint as possible. In other words, piddling round with little stuff far away is the worst of both worlds, and we don't want to mess up somebody else's "local" any more than we have to. 

A fifth and last theme, oft-neglected and occasionally concealed, relates to the question - what else might be done instead? Technically doable is so very very different from desirable. Evaluating the alternatives thoroughly and seeing whether they do it better. That also involves having a clear idea of what "better" is, knowing the question we are trying to ask, the problem we are endeavouring to solve. Then, knowing that question - asking whether it is more related to the welfare of the customer, or the longevity of our job security. That can be a trickier one to honestly ask ourselves than we might imagine.

Over to you, to think as you do

OK, so it’s been a humbling experience to incrementally realise how much I got wrong last year, but it’s also been revelatory to learn so much over that time. I’m not going to spend this year telling you what to think, there are plenty others out there with epistles to hand, oh so ready to tell you if that’s what you seek. Rather, sharing what might help you to find out what you think – that, in 2021, seemed a more productive use of time.