Interview David MacKay
“I’m really happy with any plan that adds up”
David Strahan meets David MacKay, chief scientific adviser, DECC
the chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change is a professor of physics at Cambridge. But the impression is reinforced in his cramped office on the sixth floor of DECC, where I negotiate piles of paperwork and shuffle furniture so we both can see his computer screen. I have come to quiz him about DECC’s 2050 Pathway Calculator, an online tool designed to illustrate different ways to achieve Britain’s legally-binding commitment to cut emissions by 80% by mid-century, while keeping the lights on. I have done my home- work, but start with a quip: what is the right answer? The professor laughs, and says any answer you like, so long as it is numerate. “I’m really absolutely happy with any plan that adds up,” he explains. “But any plan that adds up is really challenging, so the goal of the exercise isn’t to pick a particular. It is to move the entire conversation from plans that don’t actually add up – or are a bit of wishful thinking – to move the conversation into the place that does add up, and there are choices.” The choices in the 2050 Pathway Calculator cover which sources of energy we use – coal, gas, nuclear, renewables, biofuels – and in what proportions, along with demand-side measures, such as insulation, heating technol- ogies and transport behaviour. It is a multiple
M 20 | Sustainable Business | June 2011
y interview with David MacKay has the feel of a university tutorial. Perhaps it is not surprising, since
choice exam, with four options in each case, in rising order of effort. Under ‘electrification of transport’, for instance, level 1 is a business- as-usual scenario, whereas in level 4 all cars and vans are electric by 2050. A DECC official had described the option 4 assumptions to me as “heroic”, and MacKay agrees. “In some sec- tors, 4 is absolutely an Apollo programme’s worth of effort – a really hard push requiring very strong public engagement and transfor- mation of government policy,” he says. MacKay is well versed in the dilemmas and
“I would urge everyone to keep all the options on the table. It’s already so difficult to reach the 2050 targets, even with nuclear”
trade-offs inherent in our energy predicament, having written a widely-praised
2008 book,
Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air, which analysed energy supply and consump- tion on a per capita basis – cleverly reducing the numbers to a comprehensible human scale. You might even say that the book got him the job; he was encouraged to apply for the post after DECC’s top civil servant, Permanent Secretary Moira Wallace, came across it while browsing in Heffers.
While he insists that there is no single ‘right’ answer, MacKay points me to a ‘hedg- ing scenario’, with maximum effort on all the
demand-side measures, along with a strong emphasis on wind, coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS), and nuclear. This makes it look deceptively easy, lopping 92% off emis- sions by 2050. But the more we unpick the technological and political realities, the harder it looks to reach even the 80% target without resorting to unproven technologies or poten- tially unsustainable land-use.
MacKay likes the hedging scenario pre- cisely because it over-delivers. Simply aiming for an 80% cut would be too risky, he says, because some pathways are bound to fail or under-perform. What if the Government can’t persuade people to shift to public transport, or accept more onshore wind farms? What if CCS proves uneconomic? Better to aim to over-deliver on a variety of pathways, he argues, “so that in ten or 15 years’ time, when it becomes clearer what’s happening, you’ve got a chance of ending up still on track”. The hedging scenario could survive the total failure of any one of its three main legs of generation and still hit the 2050 target. But one of those legs involves building 90GW of new nuclear, a nine-fold increase over 40 years, raising nuclear capacity to 50% more than current peak demand. It would mean build- ing 30 stations of 3GW, whereas the largest in Britain today, Sizewell B, is just 1.2GW. Is any of this remotely plausible, post Fukushima? All across Europe, governments have put nuclear plans on hold, utility share
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