Professor Grant Ingram is the Programme Director of our MSc in Energy Engineering Management at Durham. Grant is an expert in sustainable business engineering development. Here he explains the importance of the power of collaboration and small changes in an energy transition.
This article is republished from Energy World.
If governments and businesses work together to make industry more efficient, and slowly but relentlessly transition into net-zero practices, the transition becomes more affordable, easier to accomplish and perhaps even more effective.
As human beings we tend to underestimate the impact of a large number of small changes. A good example of this is from the aviation world. If you were to describe a passenger aircraft today you might say it is a flying machine with a cockpit at the front, a cylindrical fuselage for the passengers, a wing on each side with an engine slung underneath and a tail assembly for steering. This description would apply equally to airliners from 60 ago but the machine of today has an astonishingly different performance from the machine from the 1960s.
In terms of pollution: the aviation efficiency (the number of kgs of CO2 emitted per revenue passenger kilometre) has decreased by around a factor of ten since 1960 - but the overall architecture has stayed the same. Improvements in safety have had a similar dramatic trend - in the 1970s there were around four fatalities per million passengers today the figure is less than 0.2 fatalities per million passengers - a twenty-fold reduction.
If the external appearance of the airliner is the same what has changed to deliver such an impressive change in performance over the last 50 or so years? The answer is a series of individual changes that alone don’t seem to amount to much but the relentless application of these technologies and techniques has year-on-year improved performance.
To give some examples of those changes imagine that you have a passenger jet from 1973 and one that has rolled off the production line in 2023 side-by-side to compare - there are a few detailed changes you could spot. Bar some tiny changes, such as the shape of the blades at the front of the engine or the shape of the wing tips, there are few noticeable differences.
If you step onto the aeroplane the changes are even less obvious: – internet booking has led to fewer empty seats, the seats you sit in are designed with sophisticated engineering analysis software to ensure the weight is kept to a minimum, they are lighter and (sadly!) closer together than their 1970s counterparts, LED lighting is used throughout the plane which uses slightly less electricity and saves a little weight.
There are some changes you cannot see: many countries change air traffic routes to ensure better fuel burn and hold aircraft on the ground rather than have them circling congested airports before landing. There has been a gradual increase in the use of composite materials in the aircraft – usually starting with a single part of the aeroplane to build confidence in the new material before being adopted in other parts of the aeroplane with modern aircraft having over half the structure made of this material.
Each of these changes on their own would perhaps sound unimpressive but the year-on-year application delivers impressive results in the long term. Not only do they improve the efficiency of aeroplane travel, thereby making flights more affordable as the years go but they also make air travel less harmful to the environment.
Human beings are bad at estimating the long-term effect of small changes and often seek solutions that deliver large results quickly – neglecting the hard work of continuous improvement. One example on the small scale is when we “hit the gym” – we look for quick results rather than making small steps to improve our lifestyle. Or at the larger scale when research funding agencies are looking for transformative and not “incremental research”.
Making these small changes to heavily polluting industries is an effective way in which we can tackle the transition to a net-zero world. Often, large-scale changes are seen as too costly or unattainable. It’s difficult to convince businesses, and governments alike, to commit to these huge changes in industry if a market is highly reliant on the current process, and business see a danger to their livelihoods by drastically changing. Instead, a relentless and continuous focus on improvement can reap rich rewards.
Take the Indian coal market for instance, the country as a whole relies on coal plants for between 70-80 per cent of its power. If, on a global-scale, coal plants were asked to completely transform into renewable energy plants or even wind down their activities, this might cause a power crisis in India. However, if, overtime governments and businesses work together to make the industry more efficient, and slowly but relentlessly transition into net-zero practices, the transition becomes more affordable, easier to accomplish and perhaps even more effective.
This is not to say that transformative effects don’t occur – there was a time when there were no aeroplanes for example, but we should recognise and celebrate the small changes that deliver such dramatic improvements in our lives.
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