Anglomania: The UK’s Smart Approach to Cleantech

by Amy Westervelt – March 3, 2010Follow Amy Westervelt on Twitter

It always annoys me to hear American journalists or experts fawning over Europe and how much better European countries handle pretty much everything, even though I know in many cases it’s true. So I was loathe to admit, after speaking with a number of UK companies and government officials at a cleantech conference last week, that the limeys probably have us beat on the research front.

It all boils down to what venture capitalist and Silicon Valley golden boy Vinod Khosla calls “being technology-neutral”: essentially, if you are too financially or emotionally invested in any one solution, you may lose out on other, possibly better, solutions. Whereas the UK government is the primary funder of research in that country, in the United States, corporations are responsible for about 65% of university research. And while there are issues connected to both government- and corporate-funded research, it seems as though the UK’s model is geared more toward finding appropriate solutions, while the corporate investors and venture capitalists responsible for funding innovation tend to focus on the solutions that will deliver the most profit, not necessarily the most energy savings or emissions reductions.

A study currently underway by the UK Technology Strategy Board is a prime example. About 90 percent of UK buildings are over 100 years old. “We love our old buildings, but they consume an incredible amount of energy and we need to find ways to improve their performance while preserving the existing structure,” Richard Miller, Innovation Platform Leader for the Board told me.

To that end, his agency, which has 1 billion pounds of government funds to spend over the next three years funding projects that explore solutions to the country’s most pressing issues, is funding studies of 87 different technologies. The technologies are being tested in council homes(that’s “the projects” for us Yanks), because, according to Miller, the landlords of these developments are typically responsible for thousands of dwellings. “We wanted to start there because if they find a solution they like, they’ll deploy it across thousands of residences and deliver a meaningful benefit fairly quickly,” Miller said.

The Board is testing a wide range of technologies, from home energy monitoring systems to more invasive add-ons and retrofits to buildings. They are monitoring the performance of each study building and also surveying tenants to determine whether occupants are comfortable with the solutions they’ve been given. After two years, they’ll compile the results into a report and make it publicly available.

“That way, if you’re a council landlord for example, you can read the report and say okay that solution looks like one that would work well for my buildings and my tenants in this location,” Miller explained.

In the United States, on the other hand, venture capitalists have worked themselves into a frenzy over the last few years over all things “smart grid,” an umbrella term that essentially refers to technologies that allow utilities and customers to better understand and thus modify energy usage patterns. The excitement over smart grid applications and technologies has led to increased private funding in that space, which in turn helped to fuel more public interest, culminating in several billion dollars of stimulus package money being thrown at smart grid pilot projects throughout the country.

I’m not saying this technology isn’t worth looking into, or that the government is blindly following the venture community. Clearly Department of Energy Secretary Chu, who is a big fan of smart grid, is an extremely smart guy. The problem is more that with so much money and excitement now flowing around smart grid, there’s little incentive to explore other options. So, while the UK will have 87 solutions to choose from, we will have one. That doesn’t seem like the smartest strategy.

Corporations are corporations and they exist to make money, so no one’s saying they should suddenly take an altruistic approach to research and development investments. Ditto private investors. However, concern has been mounting over the past several years that the lack of state and federal funds for university research in the United States is putting us at a disadvantage in the race toward innovation. Which, funnily enough, could end up hurting those bottom lines in the end, too.

Amy Westervelt, Managing Editor, Earth Island Journal
In addition to her work for the Journal, Amy is associate editor for The Faster Times, a columnist for Solve Climate, and contributes to an assortment of other magazines and websites. In 2007, Amy won the Folio Eddie for excellence in magazine editorial for her feature on algae as a feedstock for biofuel, which was published in Sustainable Industries magazine.

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