6: Power to the people: Net zero and citizen engagement
How do those leading the charge on carbon reduction bring everyone else in society along for the ride? Our guest is Professor Rebecca Willis, who leads on citizen engagement in climate change at Lancaster University. Her book on this subject is called 'Too Hot To Handle: The Democratic Challenge of Climate Change'.
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Episode transcript
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Hello, I’m Dr Rebecca Ford.
Matt: Hi, and I’m Dr Matt Hannon. Welcome to Local Zero. This is episode six. How do those leading the charge on the net zero transition bring everybody else along in society for the ride?
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: We’re all about citizen engagement and local governance and how they can work together to shape what the net zero transition looks like in different nations and regions of the UK. Coming up in today’s show, we’ve got a real-world expert in this. Professor Becky Willis from Lancaster University joins us and her work focuses on the partnership between citizens and the state in delivering net zero and the tensions that might exist between national and local government.
‘Take something like decarbonising home heating, it will only work if people want these things in their houses and if people are willing to pay for them, one way or another, whether that be through tax or through buying a heat pump or whatever that might be. The best way that you can make those policies work for people is to ask them what would work for them and to share the challenge if you like.’
Matt: Right so as we’re recording, we’re currently recording this on US Inauguration Day and so how do we all feel about the new administration?
Rebecca: A lot more positive than the existing administration for sure [laughter].
Matt: To put it lightly.
Rebecca: Well, I’m excited about seeing the steps that are going to be taken to really take us forward not only toward COP26 and re-engaging the US in climate action, which could have a massive global impact, but also I have friends in the US that are really worried about a lot of things that are happening on the ground around COVID, for example, so I’m quite excited to see how this shift in power can start to bring about a bit more positivity.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely and do we think we might see Uncle Joe at COP26 in Glasgow? Fraser, what do you reckon?
Fraser: I hope so. I’ve got pubs picked out that I want to take him to. I know exactly the trail that we’ll take him on [laughter]. I hope so. I would say it’s nice to have a leader of the Free World who believes in climate change just fundamentally as a thing. I think that’s something that we can all take a little bit of comfort in going forward. It’s still a massive challenge. There’s still a lot to undo before he starts doing a lot of the good stuff that needs to be done but I would say, yeah, a nice collective sigh of relief for now but it’s important to keep the feet to the fire.
Matt: I was having this exact chat last night with my wife. We were saying if COP26 had happened last November, this would have been before the Biden administration and that would have been a very, very different discussion. So yeah, maybe we can get the momentum we need under this new administration to do something really worthwhile globally.
Rebecca: Yes, it’ll be very, very exciting. I guess we should pick up on what’s going on closer to home and certainly, across my Twitter feed has been news about the new coal mine in Cumbria where the UK government is refusing to step in and prevent planning for this new coal mine near Whitehaven.
Matt: I guess it’s worth saying that this is a decision taken by local government and, in some eyes, from the councils there for local people. It’s for jobs and that it’s producing coke for the steel industry and that’s actually something that’s relatively difficult to strip out but this landing in a COP year... wow! It couldn’t be further against the principles and the spirit of what we’re trying to do.
Rebecca: Yeah, and this picks back up as well on some of the stuff we were talking, in the last episode, with Chris Stark about, particularly around the role of local government and local authorities in delivering net zero. So I wonder if we’re going to see tensions here between national priorities and regional or local priorities where they may not always be completely in alignment.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely and we really do have the right person on board today to talk a bit more about that. For me, not the biggest news that we’ve had since the last episode but we actually got a tweet direct from Paul Scholes.
Fraser: The Paul Scholes?
Matt: Well, no, a Paul Scholes [laughter]. For those of you who don’t know who The Paul Scholes is. He’s a legendary Man United attacking midfielder, goals galore and never scored a bad one. No, this is from a Paul Scholes and he was tweeting exactly about this coal mine situation and asking us whether we could bring this into the pod. So Paul, this one is for you and hopefully, the discussion with Becky will tie up a few loose ends on that.
Rebecca: Absolutely. So we’re going to bring Professor Becky Willis in really soon but before we do, just a quick recap on our last episode where we had a huge star with us, Chris Stark, the Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee. He talked to us about what they’ve been doing in the run-up to the end of the year and the release of their Sixty Carbon Budget and what 2021 and the run-up to COP is going to look like for the CCC and for the UK.
‘So I think it probably is the most important COP for a while at least. It remains to be seen whether it’s the most important COP ever but it could be. That goal of net zero is, I think, going to be the binding thing that sits through all of the things that the COP is trying to pull off. I think that will be the first achievement of this COP is that net zero is a binding goal.’
Rebecca: I was actually really pleasantly surprised to hear how positive Chris was about where we need to go, what we’ve been doing so far and just the challenges that lie ahead. I wouldn’t say he said it was going to be easy but it certainly seemed that he’s fairly relaxed about the finances and the costs involved in the transition and that some of the key challenges really are around how those costs might be distributed rather than actually getting over the hurdle of the costs in and of themselves.
‘There is no real barrier to reaching net zero in technical terms. We know all the things that we need to do. We’ve got enough options in front of us that we can be very confident, I think, that we’ll get to net zero. We’re very confident too that the costs won’t be very high if there is any cost at all to the whole economy.’
[Music flourish]
Matt: Chris’ response really was very optimistic. What I really took from it was it’s highly achievable. I think maybe one of the big things he did touch upon, which we need to be aware of and which could be a real challenge going forward, is if climate change gets brought into the culture wars that we’ve seen divide America and seen divide the UK over Brexit. If that happens and climate change becomes highly politicised, then we may see new challenges raise their heads.
‘And I worry about Nigel Farage and his love, suddenly, of criticising cycle lanes. Political discourse can turn quite quickly against these, to my mind, very sensible steps which are generally well supported because they’re not captured by that political fight.’
[Music flourish]
Matt: I probably would place a bit more concern over this going forward than Chris did but saying now the changes really are going to have to come from you, the household and the individual... we’ll talk a bit more about this with Rebecca Willis in this episode about how we can participate with citizens and how we can bring them along but that’s going to be a real challenge going forward I think.
Rebecca: Of course, there are lots of different ways to engage citizens, aren’t there? So part of it is about the actions that we take in our homes and our everyday lives but Chris also talked to us about investment decisions and looking at our own pension funds, for example, and the ways in which we can have influence over actions that are ultimately taken by others. I think that’s a really exciting thing that we need to think about. So it’s not just our behaviours in our everyday lives but also how we hold influence over those, perhaps, more powerful actors with a bigger capacity to drive that change.
‘If you’ve got a pension, it’s quite interesting how often the pension fund is motivated to change its own investment strategy by those pension holders.’
[Music flourish]
Matt: So these exciting and novel forms of citizen engagement will be absolutely critical in delivering net zero in the UK. Hearing direct from citizens about what they would like to see from a net zero transition and why it’s essential if we’re to generate widespread buy-in across society is really the next step. But what do the people want and how do we uncover their wants and needs? How can initiatives, like climate assemblies help provide these insights?
Rebecca: Of course, it’s not just about uncovering the insights but looking at how government, whether local, regional or national, is able to deliver the will of the people and who is responsible for doing just that. Really, that’s the focus of today’s episode; so looking at the role of people and the role of government. We’ve got a guest who’s a total world expert on these matters, Professor Rebecca Willis.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca Willis: Hi, thanks for having me on. I’m a Professor in Practice at Lancaster University. I look at how to get the right climate governance and specifically, the relationship between the citizen and the state in climate change. That’s why I wanted to be involved in the Climate Assembly because that is literally a meeting of citizens and state to work out the way forward for climate.
Rebecca: So tell us a little bit more about what the Climate Assembly is because lots of our listeners might not actually know about the climate assemblies. So can you tell us a little bit more about what they are, what they’re hoping to achieve and some of the exciting things that you’ve seen coming from them?
Rebecca Willis: Yeah, the Climate Assembly was part of a wider approach that you might call deliberative democracy where you actually look at how to improve the democratic conditions and the ways in which people get to talk to politicians and talk to the government about the kinds of outcomes they want to see and the kinds of lives they want to live. So what you do with a climate assembly is select a representative sample of people. In this case, we chose 108 people who were representative of the UK as a whole in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, educational background, whereabouts in the UK they lived and so on. That, in itself, is amazing because when I walked into this huge hotel room in Birmingham, pre-COVID, I saw before me my country in miniature in these 108 people representing the UK perfectly. The idea is that you take them through a three-stage process starting with a learning phase where they hear from experts and witnesses, find out what the climate issue is and how we can deal with it and then they deliberate with those experts and with each other. The final phase is recommendations where they actually give their own views about what they think should happen based on a combination of that knowledge that they’ve developed but also, really importantly, on their own lived experience and on their own knowledge, understanding and expertise that they bring with them as citizens.
Matt: That’s absolutely fascinating. Why haven’t we don’t this before? Is it that we haven’t needed to do it before and that the challenge going forward in this transition is going to be different and needs different methods or maybe there just wasn’t the will previously?
Rebecca Willis: Yeah, these sorts of democratic innovations have been running for at least 30 years. Actually, it’s the Greeks who did it first [laughter] but in its modern phase, at least 30 years with things like participatory budgeting in Brazil where actually, how public funds are spent is given to a group of citizens to decide. These ideas have been there for the taking. My suspicion is that they haven’t been applied to climate before because climate has been, basically, a chat between experts, between scientists and between people with the technical know-how and then government and politicians. It’s been a bit sown up really. That hasn’t mattered so much up to now because a lot of decarbonisation to date has essentially been done without people noticing. With regards to decarbonising industry and decarbonising the power sector in terms of generation, a lot of that can be done without people noticing but the phase we’re in now with changes to transport, changes to food and diet and changes to the way we use land and so on are all things that people will notice, have views on and actually, have expertise about. That’s why I think, at this point now, it’s really vital that we switch to a much more inclusive way of doing climate politics and policy.
Rebecca: Why do you think that that’s going to help deliver net zero? I understand that people might start to feel these effects a bit more. To what extent have you found that engaging people might take you away from the scientific evidence and looking at other solutions or are there other reasons for engaging them? I’ll spell it out for us a little bit more. What are the benefits to delivering net zero faster and at the scale that we need to do it through these deliberative and democratic processes?
Rebecca Willis: Yeah, so it’s absolutely not about replacing the science or the expertise of academics or of people in business who are developing the solutions and working on innovation. It’s not about replacing that but it’s about supplementing that with people’s lived experiences. Take something like decarbonising home heating. It will only work if people want these things in their houses and if people are willing to pay for them one way or another, whether that be through tax or through buying a heat pump or whatever that might be. The best way that you can make those policies work for people is to ask them what would work for them and to share the challenge if you like and say, ‘We’ve got to decarbonise home heating. There is no way around that but we want to talk to you about a way of doing it that actually fits with your life and that you think would work.’
Matt: The Citizens Climate Assembly flagship was a massive, massive moment for UK climate policy and it must have just been absolutely phenomenal to be at the lead or one of the leads of that but as I understand it, this approach is being used at a local level now. From memory, you spoke previously about Lancaster, Warwick and other cities and towns. Are they doing something differently or are they essentially lifting the DNA of the Climate Assembly and just doing it at a much smaller scale?
Rebecca Willis: Yeah, so there were actually some local processes. A couple of years ago, I was part of various plots and schemes to get things up and running in different parts of the country. One of them led to the national assembly and another one led to one of the first local citizens’ juries which was the one that happened in Leeds. That was motivated by exactly the same reasoning but applied to the city level instead. I think the question that citizens were asked there is what should Leeds do about the emergency of climate change. So it’s very much city-focused. That links up to the national level because obviously, some of the things that the citizens of Leeds wanted can’t be delivered by cities on their own and they would need national support. Ideally, you would have those local processes working in tandem with national-level initiatives like the Climate Assembly UK.
Matt: Of course, and we’ve got the local authorities, many of which have declared a climate emergency and many of which have got very ambitious net zero targets. Do you see these two approaches going hand-in-hand? Is it almost like you can’t deliver net zero unless you do these local climate assemblies?
Rebecca Willis: Well, I think what’s happened is that we had the sweep of climate emergency declarations at national level but also I think mostly at local level. It started in Bristol and swept across the country. I think that local politicians could really see the logic behind those climate emergency declarations and could see the pressure and support for them, so they did that but then everyone thought, ‘What next? This idea of a climate emergency doesn’t fit with us trotting along doing our normal council business as usual.’ So I think that a lot of the motivation behind citizens assemblies at local level was trying to almost start again and really think through how a local area should tackle a problem like that. That’s why a lot of local areas have done emergency declarations followed by a citizens’ jury. My only concern about that is that if they’ve declared a climate emergency, they’ve held a citizens’ jury, the danger is that they then cannot muster the required political will, enthusiasm and resources, whatever that might be, to actually follow through on that.
Rebecca: Yeah, that’s a really good point you’ve raised and one we actually touched on in our last episode with Chris Stark which is around the role that local authorities and local government will need to play in delivering net zero. Do you see local government playing a particularly important role and what do you think needs to be done to support the role that they’ll need to play?
Rebecca Willis: From the point of view of citizen engagement, the local scale is really crucial because most people feel an affinity with or are attached to their local place. It’s a meaningful scale for people and so I think it’s the right place to have discussions about climate change. The thing is that in the UK, at least, that doesn’t match up very well with our policymaking which is still incredibly centralised. I’m particularly worried about smaller cities and towns and suburban and rural areas. I think that cities have managed to develop a head of steam and they’ve managed to scrabble together, from one place or another, a set of workable powers and resources around climate but other local areas haven’t managed that. We’ve got a really centralised system and definitely, when you do some international comparisons, most climate policy in the UK is done at national level and, at very best, cascaded down to local level. That tendency towards centralisation doesn’t match at all, I don’t think, with a level that’s meaningful for citizens.
Matt: So Becky, you’ve done a lot of work in the past engaging with politicians and understanding the dialogue around climate change has evolved and how they engage with that dialogue. Do you see much appetite from central government to rocket boost local government, as it were, to give them the resources and the capabilities to take that lead or not?
Rebecca Willis: I find this really strange actually because we’ve got, on the face of it, a really strong commitment from national government now to the net zero target and they’re in the middle of unpacking their strategy for how they’re going to achieve that net zero target. So it’s difficult to fault them on that but they haven’t done what, to me, is a really obvious thing which is to devolve some of those powers and responsibilities to local areas. You two might be closer to this than me but I don’t see any appetite on the part of government to devolve climate action, even when lots of local politicians want to see that. In the context of COVID recovery, for example, it would seem absolutely sensible to devolve money and powers for economic development for COVID recovery and allow much more control from local areas over economic policy and strategy and tie that very firmly into the net zero target.
Matt: I may be over cynical on this one but often, I think it’s about a power grab or, in this case, leaking power. The more power that central government maybe provides locally, then that’s less control that they have. Do you think there is any truth in that or is that nonsense?
Rebecca Willis: Of course, it’s true. Politicians like power, don’t they? [Laughter] But you could make the opposite but equally cynical case which is that the government have a net zero target that they do not know how they’ll meet. They could actually devolve that big headache and give carbon targets to local areas and say, ‘Right guys, it’s up to you.’ They would have to also devolve the means to achieve those targets in the form of funding, powers and maybe even tax-raising powers. That would be a big shift. As you say, Matt, it would be a big ceding of power but actually, it would mean that the buck didn’t always stop with central government.
Rebecca: Can you see any downsides to giving local areas more responsibility? I’ll hedge this with a question that we got on our Twitter feed from Paul Scholes about the Cumbria coal mine as an example. Can you see a situation whereby increasing the responsibility in local areas could mean that they end up making decisions that might be in tension with those wider national priorities because there are other very pressing local priorities? Do you see any tensions that could come in there?
Rebecca Willis: I was being really disciplined and not mentioning the Cumbrian coal mine because it’s a bit of an obsession of mine because I live in Cumbria and I’ve been following it for years now. This sounds counter-intuitive but the coal mine to me is an example of why you need more devolution actually because you need to give local areas a really clear responsibility on climate change. There is one absolutely chilling comment made by a local politician during the discussion at the planning meeting for the coal mine and he said, ‘I don’t do global issues. I do Cumbrian issues,’ and then voted in favour of the coal mine. That’s the kind of local government that we’ve encouraged, at least in places like Cumbria outside the big cities. The big cities see themselves as global players and Cumbria doesn’t [laughter]. So this politician can say, ‘It’s not my responsibility to do all this global climate stuff. I’m here to represent the local area, pure and simple.’ That can’t be right. It’s substantively wrong in that 9m tonnes a year of carbon emissions that this mine would be responsible for is clearly a global issue and not a local issue [laughter] unless we put a dome over Cumbria which would be a possibility. It is factually wrong but actually, it’s maybe an indication of the lack of power of local authorities that local politicians feel that way. If Cumbria had a very clear carbon target, including extraction emissions, there’s absolutely no way that it would be able to consent to it or that politicians would be in favour of it.
Matt: I’m really interested by this and basically, doubling down on devolution. It’s not just about giving more power but also attaching that power to more responsibility. I think you made this case, Becky, in one of your blogs on this which, again, we’ll link to because it’s a really good read, saying that there aren’t necessarily the powers but there aren’t also the targets and responsibilities around this. Chris spoke about this on the last episode and about a local level or a devolved level of carbon emissions reduction. Now if Cumbria had that and was legally obliged to meet that, then do you think that councillor may have had a different perspective on this and maybe, just maybe, we’d be in a different situation around the coal mine?
Rebecca Willis: You’d hope so, wouldn’t you? What the coal mine shows is just how messy and ambiguous climate policy is at the moment because you are supposed to take it into account in planning decisions. It’s there in planning guidance but the guidance just says, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘Take climate change into account.’ [Laughter] It’s really not stronger than that. There are no targets. There isn’t even a very well set out methodology for how you would assess carbon emissions. All this has to be decided in the courts at the moment which is what is now probably going to happen in Cumbria. I’m going to sound like an old lag now but just after the Climate Change Act was introduced in 2009, there was a plan to use secondary legislation to develop carbon targets for each government department and for local areas. That would have been a much clearer structure. So you had the national target and then that would be broken down into responsibilities for different government departments and different local areas. There wasn’t, in the end, the political appetite for that and then there was an election and so on and so forth. Basically, that should have been in place and we’ve wasted ten years.
Rebecca: One thing that I’m really hearing strongly throughout this conversation is the need for better alignment and frameworks to support that alignment, so whether we’re taking it from the national level through to local level but also bringing in citizens’ voice as well through different processes. Knowing that this is something that needs to happen to create that shift and to ensure that action at the local level marries up with what we’re trying to deliver at a national level, what does the UK actually need to do? How do we need to start to change things to unlock this potential and are there other countries around the world that we can look to for an example of how we could be doing this a bit better?
Rebecca Willis: I would say there are three things that we need. The first is much clearer responsibilities assigned to different sectors of the economy and to different geographies, so a really, really clear path from the national carbon budget through to individual geographies and sectors. The second thing, and part of that, is giving powers and responsibilities to local areas. The third and, again, really linked is to involve people in decision-making and to actually see achieving net zero as a partnership between citizen and state. That sounds crazily idealistic but at the end of the day, what we’re talking about is a social contract. We know citizens want to see action on climate change. We know they’re worried about it. We know and they know they can’t do that on their own. They need the state but they don’t want things to be imposed on them. It’s about a negotiation between citizen and state. Seeing climate strategy in that light, for me, just flips it into something different. It’s no longer a discussion between experts about what’s the optimum technological solution in situation X. It’s actually about what kind of life we want to live, what values we have and how we can make responding to the climate challenge something which fits with what we value and what we care about in life.
Matt: Just to follow-up on that and going back to your first point I think which was around the day you stepped into that hotel foyer and you saw little Britain or Britain in miniature. Did you see those people’s perspectives change on these issues during the process? I wonder as these climate assemblies go on that maybe it’s, as you say, not just a negotiation and a partnership but it’s a process where people’s views will evolve and they’ll become closer to these issues and take them on personally.
Rebecca Willis: To answer your question about whether people evolve through the process, I think they realised and understood the responsibility they were being given and that, essentially, those 108 people were representing the 70-odd million. You could really see in their discussion that they were doing that and that they were taking it seriously because they were saying things like, ‘It’s not what I want, it’s what is best for the country,’ or ‘It’s what I think would work for my area.’ They were often bringing in the experience of friends, colleagues and people that they knew locally, so they were really trying to do that job of representing the country. We were asking them to be citizens and not consumers and they were being citizens. That, to my mind, is in real contrast with... I mean if you look at the language used in energy regulation, for example, it’s all about consumers. If you’re told you’re a consumer, then you think that it’s decisions about how much you want to spend on something and whether you want to buy it at all. That’s a really different mentality. So I think getting away from that consumer-focused mentality is really crucial and one of the ways that you can do that is by using deliberative processes like climate assemblies. You don’t have to be the person going through the process for that to change. There is research to show that people who weren’t part of initiatives like the Climate Assembly will trust the findings of it because it’s people like them who have made those decisions. It’s about a different orientation about the way you see the role of people, if that makes sense.
Rebecca: It makes total sense. For people listening to the show that may not have been involved in those processes and may not have local climate assemblies or juries going on, do you have any advice on how they could get involved or what can people do to start to shift that mindset and act more as a citizen and less as a consumer? Are there ways in which we could get involved other than through these few processes that are going on in specific parts of the country?
Rebecca Willis: This takes me back to where I started which is that climate assemblies are only one aspect of what you might call deliberative democracy. They’re a controlled space in which you try to model perfect democratic decision-making and perfect dialogue and discussion. That happens through using really good facilitation, for example, and making sure that everyone is included, has a chance to speak and that it’s not just dominated by the clever or the gobby ones. It’s a controlled space but there is no reason why you can’t take the same principles and apply them to the rest of the world, [laughter] effectively. This is something for environmental organisations, for example. If they’re putting forward positions, then they need to make sure that they’re informed not just by their members but that they’re actually putting forward solutions that work for people that might never even think about joining their organisation but who are affected by those policy proposals. At a very personal level, it’s actually about being much more open to talking about climate change and not just keeping it as this hidden worry or concern but actually articulating it and talking to people. That’s another aspect of deliberation. There are all kinds of ways in which those principles of deliberative democracy can be applied in any situation really.
Fraser: There are still a lot of communities who maybe aren’t as engaged as the people on this call or the people who are listening just now. There are a lot of communities who aren’t engaged in basic-level democracy, let alone in discussing the climate emergency. If we’re going to scale this idea up and get more people involved, do you see a way that we can reach out to those people and bring them along in the discussion as well?
Rebecca Willis: Yeah, I mean I think we need to go where they are. It’s always pitched, as you pitched it just there, of how can we reach out to them or bring them along. I think it’s much more the case of how can we work out who isn’t part of these discussions and actually start from where they are. In very practical terms, if you want to get a local dialogue going about climate change, obviously, you go to the Friends of the Earth local group or the local Extinction Rebellion group but you’d also go to the Scouts or Parent Teacher Associations at schools or those places where people are already part of a community. Funnily enough, politicians do this really well because they respect people’s views because they have to get those votes. So if you look at political focus groups, for example, they will go out of their way to find people who don’t care about politics, who don’t always vote and who don’t tend to read newspapers and so on because they want to find out what makes those people tick. If we’re serious about climate action, we need to be doing that as well.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Thank you so much. Absolutely fascinating and, of course, it’s important to flag to our listeners your new book which is Too Hot to Handle: The Democratic Challenge of Climate Change. You should be able to get that from most outlets. I can see it’s on Amazon and others, so please check it out and have a look. I also need to sort myself a copy out. I’ve got my birthday coming up and so that’ll be a present to myself.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Right, on to the next feature. Will you stick around for our next feature which will be Future or Fiction?
Rebecca Willis: Yeah, I’m intrigued now [laughter].
Matt: Intrigued? Good. We snared Chris Stark on the last one and he rather enjoyed it, so hopefully, we can have a bit of fun as well with you. So over to Fraser, our compere, maestro and dreamer really because these are mostly in your head. Sometimes, they actually do exist, so over to you.
Fraser: I don’t make all of them up. You’re just tight because you get them wrong all the time [laughter]. Becky, just to give you a quick introduction. With Future or Fiction? basically, I’ll present to you with an exciting new technology idea and you have to decide if you think it’s real i.e. the future of technology or if you think that I’ve just completely picked it out of my brains.
Rebecca Willis: Right, yeah. I’m on.
Fraser: Excellent. Excellent.
[Music flourish]
So this invention is called a sunlight drive. A renewable start-up has devised solar panel technology designed to replace Tarmac and other traditional paving surfaces. The hope is that ultra-strong solar panels can be installed in driveways, car parks and pedestrian spaces replacing traditional paving surfaces with ones that can harness solar energy. Do we think it’s the future or do we think it’s fiction?
[Music flourish]
Rebecca Willis: Definitely the future.
Fraser: Strong commitment straight off the bat. I love it.
Matt: God, straightaway.
Rebecca: I’m going for pure fiction [laughter].
Matt: I know that you have solar panel tiles which basically act like a tile, they’re waterproof and they don’t get damaged by the wind hopefully and look basically like any other material. I know those exist. I don’t know whether solar-powered Tarmac does.
Rebecca Willis: I’m just laughing now because I teach a course on renewable energy [laughter] and so if I get this wrong, I’m going to look like a fool [laughter]. I won’t tell my students about this if I get it wrong but it just makes sense. I mean that’s the way that innovation in solar is going. You’ve already got roof tiles, as you said Matt. You just need to make them a little bit more durable and less shatterable and people can walk on them and drive on them. Job done I think.
Matt: This is where Becky Ford chips in and says, ‘Actually, in a previous role, I [laughter] actually hold a patent for one of these.’
Rebecca: I feel like this is fiction. I’m thinking about the application of them. So if it’s Tarmac and I just think about the roads they’re going to be used on, you’re not going to put something that expensive on roads that aren’t really driven on much. You’re going to want to put them on roads that are more well-used.
Fraser: Becky, my understanding is that it’s not so much roads as a driveway or a car park rather than something that’s going to be travelled on by thousands of people a day.
Rebecca: Got it. My issue with it is still the same which is that there is a car on my driveway which would prevent the sunlight from getting to the driveway, so I feel like this is a technology that is poorly, poorly designed. I’m not against the principle. We’ve talked about solar roofs and solar in glass in the last episode I think and so I’m not against it as a principle but as this application, I’m inclined to say fiction.
Fraser: Okay, commitment. Matt, what are we going with?
Matt: I think it is the future. I reckon somebody somewhere out there has thought, ‘This is a cracking idea. Let’s throw a bit of money at this.’ Yeah, I’m in. Future.
Fraser: Becky Willis?
Rebecca Willis: Well, I’m a little bit more hesitant after hearing the other Becky’s fiction but I’m still going for the future.
Fraser: And Becky Ford?
Rebecca: Yeah, let’s stick with fiction.
Fraser: Sticking with fiction? Oh, I love it. I love it. So the answer is... the future. Sunlight driveways are the future using thick, tempered safety glass which is textured to resemble asphalt. An outfit in Los Angeles has received over $1.5m in US Department of Transport funding to prove the concept of solar roadways running successful trials in a number of different locations.
Matt: Thank goodness for Silicone Valley. There you go [laughter].
Rebecca Willis: Surely, that must be the only thing ever which is not asphalt which is made to resemble asphalt [laughter].
Matt: ‘We need to make this look more like Tarmac,’ yeah. Great. Well done. I enjoyed that one.
[Music flourish]
Well, a big thank you, Becky, for your time. You’re welcome to come back anytime.
Rebecca Willis: Thank you. Thanks. See you soon.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for listening to another really exciting episode. If you want to follow us on social media, you can find us @EnergyREV_UK and also at hashtag #LocalZero. As you’ll have noted throughout this pod, we’re trying to link into any questions that you want us to ask and answer, so please do engage with us and ask us and we’ll try and weave them in. So until next time, many thanks for listening. Fraser and Becky, thanks again and we’ll see you all soon. Bye bye.
Rebecca: Bye.
Fraser: Bye.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: What was that, Fraser?
Fraser: What?
Rebecca: I miss your extended ‘bye, bye, bye.’
Fraser: Bye, bye, bye, bye [laughter]. Do you want me to do a take of it? I can do a take.
[Music flourish]
Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye [laughter].
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