Interview: Lord Redesdale, chief executive, Energy Managers Association

“Most people are ignorant about the energy cost of computing.”

Have you got any idea of the energy footprint is of an email with an average-sized attachment? Did you even know an email had a carbon footprint?

If you didn’t, you are not alone. According to Lord Redesdale, chief executive of the Energy Managers Association (EMA): “Most people are fairly ignorant about the energy cost of computing.” He thinks most folk would be surprised to learn that computing has overtaken aerospace as the sector with the world’s highest carbon dioxide emissions.

Redesdale, a life peer and long-standing Liberal Democrat who has spoken for the party on a brace of issues including energy, has a wide interest in utilities. As well as his current role running the EMA, he has had a hand in many key pieces of legislation, including the Water Act 2014, and the Energy and Climate Change Acts. Today, he meets Utility Week to publicise Emex, the EMA’s annual exhibition at the Excel centre in London on 19-20 November, and share his wider reflections on the sector.

Redesdale explains his wide-ranging interest in energy and resource efficiency as a Damascene moment: “I became terribly worried about climate change,” he says simply. “I think this happens to a lot of people as they reach middle age. You suddenly go ‘oh my god we’re all going to die!’ and you fear for your children.”

Since waking up to the severity of the threat posed by climate change, Redesdale has been a disciple of a number of environmental and energy causes. “I’ve been through the full climate change journey,” he admits. “First I believed that micro-generation was going to save the world – it really isn’t.” Then came convictions about distributed energy and nuclear.

Now Redesdale appreciates that the solutions to such a giant problem will be complex. “Everyone is looking for a silver bullet,” he sighs. “But providing energy for a developed society is much more complicated than that. We’re going to need a bit of everything.”

Redesdale is doing his bit, working on multiple fronts. He is a strong advocate for water efficiency and counts among his greatest achievements his success in lobbying for water efficiency to become a primary duty for Ofwat under the Water Act 2014.

“This means Ofwat has a duty to promote water efficiency – not just among the water companies, but among consumers,” Redesdale explains. “This is very important, because water efficiency is not primarily about leaking pipes. It’s about what happens at the end of the pipe.”

The addition to Ofwat’s statutory duties will see it become “more than an economic regulator” enthuses Redesdale – though he is somewhat cynical about the enthusiasm with which Ofwat is embracing its enhanced responsibilities.

“I haven’t seen much change yet. Does Ofwat have a sustainability committee for example? The answer is ‘no’,” he says. “If we don’t see evidence of change soon then someone will end up taking them to judicial review – it could be me.”

Strong words – but then Redesdale is used to speaking his mind. He has acted as Liberal Democrat spokesman in the House of Lords on numerous topics, and he is particularly proud of the contribution he made to the Energy and Climate Change Acts.

After this, another key achievement was getting the inclusion of energy from anaerobic digestion in the coalition government’s energy policy agreements – a cause in which he believes strongly, as evidenced by his foundation of the Anaerobic Digestion and Biogas Association when he stepped out of politics in 2009.

When Redesdale felt he had taken his political campaigning on the importance of anaerobic digestion and biogas as far as he could, he turned his attention to energy efficiency and set up the Energy Managers Association in 2012.

“Energy efficiency is the big one. We waste about 40 per cent of the energy we put into the system through doing things like lighting up the sides of buildings at night,” comments Redesdale. “We’ve got to do more to regulate at point of use.”

And so on to the business of the day. Controlling the carbon cost of computing is the next big thing in energy efficiency, says Redesdale as he shares plans to launch a new training course, dubbed IT Energy Management, at Emex. He is ambitious for the new qualification. “I’d be very surprised if any manager working in IT did not have this in five years’ time,” he asserts, as the increasing costs tied to stockpiling data become harder and harder to ignore.

“IT professionals use more energy than pretty much anyone in most companies – yet they are not responsible for that fuel bill and they probably couldn’t even tell you what it was,” Redesdale says.

The biggest cost in the IT department’s domain is data storage, he explains, likening the “cloud” to a sort of digital landfill with “remarkably similar emissions patterns” to the physical beasts.

The EMA’s new IT management qualification shows IT professional how changing protocols on what data needs to be stored, as well as changing the way in which it is stored, can make “enormous savings”.

A pilot scheme with 11 IT managers at Coca Cola Enterprises, which has won multiple awards for its sustainability initiatives, appears to bear this out. “They thought they knew everything there was to know about energy efficiency,” says Redesdale with a smile, “but within a short time they were saying ‘hey we could save 40 per cent of our energy bill’.”

Over the next year Redesdale hopes to target government departments with the new course, since they are particularly big “offenders” when it comes to energy wastage through IT. “Government carbon targets would be out the window if they had to include the emissions tied to data,” he says.

Based on Redesdale’s compelling statements about the carbon costs of computing and the potential financial saving available to companies, the IT Energy Management qualification looks to be a clear boon to energy efficiency campaigns across the UK – and what’s more, it is just one of a range of new courses and qualifications in energy management that Redesdale says should help to bring greater rigour and discipline to a rising profession in the UK.

Why is this of interest to utilities? “It’s a matter of partnership,” says Redesdale. The energy sector is faced with multiple looming challenges around sustainability and security of supply for an increasingly demanding customer base in an increasingly politicised culture of blame.”

Supporting the training of energy managers within their commercial client base is an important strategy for helping to “regulate the grid and avoid brownouts”, he says . Done at scale, it will also translate into more intelligent energy usage in more homes.

“It’s almost impossible to get any individual to take training at home,” says Redesdale, brushing aside the idea that utilities might offer domestic energy management courses online for interested individuals to complete. “But if they receive training at work, then often they will take that knowledge away with them at the end of the day or shift.”

This is part of the logic behind the EMA’s drive to create a pioneer group of low energy companies in the UK in which the majority of staff have energy management qualifications.

There’s a groundswell of interest, says Redesdale, but he believes the initiative could be given further momentum if utilities offered to support delivery of the training as “a bonus to their biggest business customers”.

Under Redesdale’s vision, these large firms would make energy management training a weighted procurement issue – “so that if people don’t do it then they don’t win contracts”.

The incentive for the large firms or organisations is that they can mitigate the risk of rising energy costs aggregating and coming back to them through their supply chains. For energy firms, the incentive is in reducing demand and creating more educated energy users who, if they are clever about building relationships, could put them in a good position to become energy service companies in the future.

It’s a win-win-win scenario, and one that has captured the attention of around 40 councils across the UK, he says, as well as a number of government departments. It’s also peaked interest from abroad with organisations in the US and China in talks for the roll out of supply chain leveraged training.

This strong first wave of interest in the EMA’s new training schemes give Redesdale ground for some fairly ambitious targets to achieve in his time as chief executive. “I’d like to see three to four million people trained in the next five years,” he says. That’s a tall order – but if Redesdale’s track record is anything to go by, he’s in with a shot.