Written by Bernadette Ballantyne
Supported by Mott MacDonald
Professor David MacKay had a reputation for being the smartest person at Cambridge University – the University that educated Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Alan Turing, Dian Fossey, Ernest Rutherford, John Maynard Keynes, Michael Foale, David Attenborough, Emma Thompson and Professor Stephen Hawking.
David’s work on machine learning, information theory and communication systems earned him international recognition and a physics professorship at the young age of 36. A member of the University “Zero Carbon” society, he also became increasingly annoyed about the prevalence of misinformation in discussions on energy and climate change. He was so annoyed that he decided to write a book about it and that book went on to form the basis of a carbon emissions calculator that just might save the world.
Becoming an Energy Leader
Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air simplified the maths around sustainable energy production and consumption, using consistent units so that readers could easily understand the numeric building blocks of our energy system. The book enabled readers to see clearly whether the UK could power itself sustainably. And it allowed people to judge the impact of changing elements of production or consumption.
David’s approach was so simple as to be revolutionary, and it immediately captured the attention of the government who appointed him as Chief Scientist at the UK’s newly formed Department for Energy and Climate Change at a time where the country had become the first in the world to set a legally binding reduction target for carbon emissions of 80% on 1990 CO2 emissions levels.
To achieve this a new set of tools was needed to measure the impact of different energy scenarios in reducing emissions and David had already set out the how to do this in his book. It was time to create the carbon calculator, which later became known as the 2050 Calculator.
“The calculator is really an interactive version of what David did in sustainable energy without the hot air. In it he set out all the possible sources of low carbon energy in the UK on one side, and all the demand we have for energy on the other and looked at how much we could decrease our demand and increase our supply and saw whether or not these actually lined up, so was it possible to meet our target and have a sustainable energy system,” explains Laura Aylett, programme manager for the 2050 Calculator at the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy – BEIS.
The 2050 Calculator Goes Global
The first version of the calculator was released in July 2010 and for the first time, it allowed people to figure out the impact of different energy scenarios on carbon emissions. During the next decade the use of the calculator spread to over 30 countries around the world and helped inform governments and businesses about the impact of energy systems on climate change, and got them thinking about how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 2019 the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy launched a three-year programme to build on the calculator’s development.
“You can choose in the calculator what level of renewable energy you want in the future in your country, you can choose whether you want to switch to electric vehicles or not, you can choose how much insulation you want to put in people’s homes to reduce electricity demand or heating bills. So you can make all these decisions around different parts of the economy,” says Sam Friggens, a senior consultant in energy strategy and innovation at engineering consultant Mott MacDonald, which is leading the consortium that’s delivering the international 2050 carbon calculator programme for BEIS. Other partners include Belgian consultancy Climact, Imperial College London and UK consultant Ricardo.
The inputs, or carbon sources, used to create the emission profiles are described as levers. The first UK calculator had 31. For each lever, users can set a level of ambition, from 1 to the most ambitious – level 4. “The levers are a really fundamental part of the structure of a calculator. So when you are designing or making a new calculator for a country you define different levels of ambition for key elements of pathways for your country,” says Sam.
Level 1 might be business as usual. So for example if you take the amount of electric vehicles foreseen in the future, level one is likely to mean a relatively low level of electric vehicle deployment based on current policies. Levels two and three represent increasing levels of ambition. And then level 4 pushes the limits aiming for the maximum achievable within the economy.
Changing the Energy System
Although simplicity is key to engagement, achieving it required very complex software – written by David. His former colleagues say that he was committed to making this open source, which is one of the reasons that the calculator has grown so quickly. Being open source, the calculator is transparent. Anybody can inspect how it works and examine all of the data. The results can be unexpected “Some people get really surprised by this, even people who consider themselves green or environmentally minded. They can use the calculator and see that sometimes the things that they thought would make a big impact don’t make as big an impact in reality as they had anticipated,” says Sam.
This then becomes a way of learning first-hand what is actually required to meet some of these more ambitious climate change targets such as the UK’s net zero by 2050 mandate.
“It really did drive quite a lot of policy thinking in the UK,” says Jenny McInnes, head of International Climate Finance, a UK government programme to that provides technical assistance to developing countries in tackling climate change. “It was the calculator that drove the cross-government climate strategy, and from that we identified the key sectors that we needed to decarbonise.”
It even led to the restructuring of the electricity market in July 2011, which in turn paved the way for mass renewable energy auctions and a huge increase in UK renewable energy capacity. The benefits of this are now become very clear. For two weeks in 2019, electricity supply from renewable electricity, nuclear and gas generation was great enough that no coal fired power production was needed – the first coal free days since the dawn of the industrial revolution. And according to National Grid, 2019 was the first year where zero carbon electricity generation sources outperformed fossil fuel generation
World Seeks to Cut Carbon Emissions
As the UK continued to make progress on decarbonising the energy sector momentum was building around the world for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and in 2015 187 countries signed up to the Paris Climate Change Agreement. They committed to work together to limit global warming to a temperature no more than 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial average. Putting that into action, each nation has to set domestic measures to reduce emissions, known as nationally determined contributions or NDCs. These will be revisited and strengthened every five years, to ratchet forward and accelerate the reduction of emissions over time.
Against this backdrop, interest in the calculator spread all over the world.
“Belgium was the first country outside the UK to use the calculator,” says Koen Meeus who works for the federal climate change administration in Belgium, which is using the calculator to develop different climate change scenarios.
In 2015 the results from the calculator were combined with assessment of economic impacts. This provided vital data on the likely effects of carbon reduction on GDP and employment, enabling more informed debate among politicians, stakeholders and the public. It has also been used in discussions on extending carbon pricing in Belgium beyond the sectors that are already in the emissions trading scheme specifically to housing and transport.
Vietnam is stretching itself too – albeit from a very different situation. Vietnam’s existing NDC emissions reduction commitment is to cut emissions by eight percent by 2030, but its ambitions are greater.
Vietnam’s Solar Power Calculation
Hoang Van Tam is the deputy head in the office for climate change and green growth in the Ministry of Industry and Trade (the MOIT) in Vietnam. He is also the manager for the country’s 2050 Calculator project. The Vietnam calculator, which was first created in 2014, is being used in collaboration with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment to inform the review process for the country’s NDC commitment.
“We are exploring more options to work on further ambitious target of NDC in Vietnam now. Not only the target of NDC but also we are exploring the possibility of measures to implement in the context of country conditions.”
He says that the calculator has been very useful for policy makers and stakeholders, describing it as an active way of getting immediate answers to any questions related to greenhouse gas mitigation in the energy sector. What is also key is that it has seen government departments working closely together – as has been the case for many of the other countries using the calculator.
One of the key levers in the Vietnamese calculator is on renewable energy supply where the country has been making enormous progress. Energy expert Quoc Khanh has worked on the calculator since it was first introduced. “I think since 2015 a lot of change has happened in particular new technology and policy. As an example last year in Vietnam we had 5000MW of solar PV were developed in Vietnam in just one year,” he says
China Pioneers Project Calculators
China was the second country after Belgium to create a national calculator. Professor Yufeng Yang is an honorary research fellow at Imperial College and a consulting expert to the Asian Development Bank. He has been researching energy systems analysis for over 20 years and says that the calculator is a revolutionary new approach that democratises the process and can lead to greater collaboration. He says that a major step forward that China has taken is to model the complex interrelationship between water and energy.
“The water energy nexus is recently a very hot topic. Not only water in fact but also land use,” says Professor Yang. “For any region or country in fact there are a lot of constraints especially including water resources and so we must balance the water uses for example agriculture and industry.
So far China has created national, regional and city level 2050 calculators. Now plans are underway to create project level calculators to model China’s largest development scheme – the Belt and Road Initiative. This enormous scheme estimated to be worth $1 trillion by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, is designed to improve land and maritime connectivity between China, Europe and Africa along six corridors. “This is a very important initiative, not only for China but for the whole world,” says Professor Yang. “But the problem in recent years from the international community has been whether or not the engineering projects are green. We need to evaluate the projects – is it clean or not? Is it green or not?”
This also has to take into account the varying requirements of the countries that the Belt and Road Initiative traverses through and represents a very different use of the calculator. Everything up to now has been about understanding and planning scenarios at a regional or country level. Here Professor Yang is talking about project evaluation and setting the level of ambition for reducing emissions on the next generation of mega projects.
Having emissions data for projects is becoming particularly important where bank finance is involved: Financial organisations are increasingly seeking to understand the impact of development on carbon emissions. “People are looking to understand where their investments can fit in with the Paris Agreement and what investments will be aligned to the transition necessary to achieve the Paris goals,” says Madeleine Rawlins, a principal consultant at Mott MacDonald and programme leader for the 2050 Calculator consortium.
“But the problem we have at the moment is the gap between the national plans and the national commitments on climate change and what is needed to achieve Paris.”
Calculating Investor Confidence
At their current levels of ambition the nationally determined contributions, NDCs, are nowhere near ambitious enough to achieve the 1.5 degree pathway, which is why they are reviewed and strengthened every five years. “So I think the calculator can be used really to understand the transitions necessary to achieve Paris in a country and to have a real dialogue with the investment community about those transitions,” says Madeleine.
Providing more transparency and insight around the transition pathways can then help with investment planning. “Many of the calculators include within them cost elements so some of the calculators have been used to test which pathways can be done most cost effectively to achieve net zero, to achieve low carbon transitions. Also it can be very important particularly in developing countries to understand what the investment pipeline is, where they want to see climate finance coming into the country in what sectors and in what technologies and really setting out a concrete investment plan.”
Since its launch a decade ago, ten of the calculators have been developed with support from International Climate Finance. ICE is now supporting five additional countries to develop national calculators of their own, over the next three years. At the same time existing users are working on new versions of their own national calculators.
Back in the UK experts at BEIS are working on the third version of the 2050 calculator, which will model scenarios to 2100, reflect the new net zero commitment and remind the world where the methodology came from.
Remembering David MacKay
Sadly the calculator’s inventor, Professor David MacKay died from stomach cancer in April 2016 aged just 48 but he leaves a very important legacy. In recognition of this, the UK’s new 2050 calculator will be named after him and the MacKay calculator was expected to be ready in 2020*.
“David really wanted the UK calculator to be used by the UK government policy makers to really have a proper evidence-based discussion about what the trade-offs are between different energy pathways, which I think it is being used in that way,” says David’s former colleague Anna Stephenson who is now a senior energy advisor at the Department for International Development (DFID).
As the calculator spreads, David’s key lesson, that we should use numbers and not adjectives to describe climate change, is being learned all over the world. But in the end, it will be government policies and human actions that will save us from global warming not a calculator. But the 2050 calculator can show provide a framework for how to do it.
*Episode broadcast in November 2019. Timescales noted in this episode may change due to the impact of COVID 19.
