OPINION THE REAL GAME CHANGER
We need to cast aside our prejudices about energy generation and consider the cold, hard facts, says the Young Energy Performance Group’s ‘Hot Air’ board game supporter, Adam Poole
When it comes to stirring the energy generation debate,
there’s an abundance of prejudiced attitudes fi ghting for our attention: the older brigade with a technical background appear predisposed to favour nuclear power over renewables or gas, while the converse is also true. Most energy texts suffer from being polemical, but somewhere along the line we, as engineers, have bought into the idea that the drier and more technical we can make our arguments, the stronger they will be and the better able we will be to hide our prejudices. David Mackay’s landmark 2009
book, Sustainable Energy – without the hot air (available as a free download from
www.withouthotair.com) turns this logic on its head. Written by one of CIBSE’s newest Honorary Fellows (page 15), this conversational book presents the evidence but not the opinions, and was used as the basis for a game devised by the CIBSE Young Energy Performance Group (YEPG). I was invited to present the prizes at
this aptly named ‘Hot Air’ game, and it was such a socially and intellectually rich affair, I think more of us need to sit up and take notice. The game was designed by Buro
Happold’s Emilia Melville. It is about a group of people using negotiation to arrive at both a reduced carbon footprint and a new or preserved view of how society will function within that footprint. It is played out on a grid that is overlaid with a series of proportionally-sized tiles that refl ect energy production and consumption. As in real life, the object is to adjust
what we produce and consume and to explain why the axe should fall in some places rather than others. What makes it interesting is that the various tiles are given to different players, creating, in a sense, a veto. If a particular player does not like what is proposed, he or she has the fi nal say. It is, as is said about most good games, easy to learn but hard to master.
www.cibsejournal.com 17 Into the energy mix: members of the YEPG thrash out the issues during a round of Hot Air
We have bought into the idea that the drier and more technical we can make our arguments, the stronger they will be
• Firstly, negotiation is everything in our industry, in big things like
• Secondly, we often struggle to sell sustainability, fi nding it diffi cult to
contracts but also in important things like design and attitudes to risk. It is not clear where we hone our skills or get the chance to experiment. This seems to be a purpose-made vehicle, and one where you win by the strength of your vision for society.
lift it from an expensive add-on. This sort of exercise gets us thinking about future scenarios and the attendant numbers (all the numbers
The event was held at Arup and involved a room full of people representing the cream of British engineering. They were put into cross-company teams and asked to negotiate their way through an 80% cut in UK CO2 emissions, explaining what the UK will look like and how it will function. While the event was utterly fascinating as a spectacle – seeing people with different views and negotiating styles attempting to have both their way in their groups and be enough of a team player to give their group a chance – it also seemed to be useful, in at least three respects:
• Finallly, there is scope to make a market here. We, the collection of
that are relevant to a particular scenario). For the emergent generation to be able to talk about sustainability with reference to possible scenarios, with the numbers at their fi ngertips, would be a step forward.
fi rms embraced by the YEPG, agree on the need for sustainability but disagree on the manner in which it could be achieved. The way we distinguish ourselves with the latter can drown out the importance of the former. This sort of exercise aims to correct this. We embrace differing opinion and feed it into scenarios. The case for sustainability is made stronger by this process because the message to the client is not the detail of a particular solution, but an approach that is fl exible enough to cope with a range of futures; the totality is richer because people from so many different starting points have contributed.
Well done YEPG. Let’s sit up and take notice.
● ADAM POOLE is an analyst at Buro Happold, a member of the Green Construction Board Routemap Group, and a member of the Edge.
June 2013 CIBSE Journal
17
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