Preface

Our planet is facing an existential threat from climate change and yet, although we're all keenly aware of the looming catastrophe, few of us seem able to galvanise ourselves to stave off the disaster. We think one of the reasons is because we as humans need a story; our brains are narrative engines. In this story, we have the beginning, we know we're in trouble and we have the end; we're assuming it's going to be all right in the end. However, we're paralysed without the important bit in the middle, the solution, and how we get there. In order to embark on our own climate journeys, and to endure the hard times which will be ahead, we think we need believable stories, we need hope. I want to tell you a story about an unlikely hero in the great transition. Few know anything about her, those that do wouldn't think she had much to do with the climate emergency and yet her solution is big, it's bold, it's ambitious and it's practical and it's achievable. 

Introducing four wicked problems.

Our story opens on a planet on the brink of climate collapse. 300 years of burning fossil fuels has led to global heating that is now out of control. We're at 1.6º, we're heading towards 3º; beyond 1.5º there's no way of knowing the second order effects of what we'll witness. To confront this crisis, amongst several other thorny issues, there are four specific wicked problems relating to the electrification of heat that we need to solve and these problems stack, they get progressively harder to solve as we go. 

Heat

The first wicked problem is the heating of spaces. 27% of all the energy that we use as a country goes to heating our homes and offices and the vast majority of it, needs to be electrified. Despite the best efforts of the heat pump industry, the most efficient way of doing that is through systems called District Heating Systems; large centralised heat pumps which generate heat very efficiently and distribute it through a grid of pipes to local flats and offices. Industry. The second thorny problem? Industrial use of warm water. Laundries, distilleries, food production, sanitization, drying, desalination, pasteurisation... 30% of our economy uses some form of low grade heat. The vast majority of that is fossil fuel-based and, again, all of it needs to be electrified. Agriculture. The third wicked problem is where things get really challenging; between 70 and 80% of our food is intensively farmed, most of that is based on fossil fuels and over the last couple of centuries we've depleted our soils to the point where we probably only have less than 100 harvests left. As the climate emergency takes hold, the challenge is to feed 8 billion people and rising, abstracting that production from the dependency of land itself. We need to scale whole new types of agriculture, from the synthetic production of fats and proteins to the farming of fruit and vegetables, and much of that is now dependent on heat. Carbon Dioxide. The fourth and final problem, the mother of all problems, is carbon dioxide. One of the many issues which divide the climate community, this is so existentially terrifying it needs a little bit of time just to warm your brain up to the figures. There are an extra thousand billion tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than there were at the beginning of industrialization and we need to remove all of it. The science is pretty solid. 50 million years ago the Himalayas started to form, weathering took place, CO2 was sucked out of the atmosphere, we had an Ice Age. The relationship between CO2 and global heating is now pretty clear; it's linear. The last time there were this many parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere sea levels were 15 metres higher than they are today. So whether they rise in 10, 100 or a thousand years time, unless we take that carbon out of the atmosphere, like a ship made of iron holed beneath the water line, our climate will sink. Outside of all of the other implications of climate change this rise will mean a couple of billion people have nowhere to live. We need to stop debating the issue and get on with figuring out a way to solve the problem.

A shared dependency

Whilst these problems have many different aspects to them, they all share this common dependency, they all require vast amounts of low grade heat. This is where our hero enters stage right. She can generate all this heat energy, and what is even more astounding, she can do it for free. So as the title of the talk suggests, the hero of our story is the robot, or to put it more accurately, the artificial intelligence that sits behind the robots, which runs on computers, and which are hosted in data centres. 

Unlike the friendly image, the reality of how the robots live, where they live, is somewhat different from the brochure. This is where AI is being born, in cavernous cold empty sheds.

Data centres are artificially brutal environments, where thousands of computers scream at each other 24 hours a day. These super computers already consume 2 to 4% of the world's electricity supply and as a result, data centres are rapidly becoming the personification of everything that is negative about big tech's impact on the climate. They are hogging transmission grids, consuming electrons that many would consider to be better used elsewhere and wasting millions of gallons of water to keep the robots cold. The computers themselves have extremely short lifespans, meaning that the overall carbon intensity of these sheds is incredibly high. Despite all of this, the machines have a magical property. It turns out that semiconductors are only masquerading as super efficient computational units. Like a superhero with a conventional identity, they're also brilliant electric heaters. 97% of the electrons that go into a computer come out as heat and unlike other industrial sources of waste heat - blast furnaces and waste water treatments - AI data centres produce brilliantly consistent, well structured heat which means that whatever electricity we provide to the robots, we can have the vast majority of it back again as heat. The waste product of data centres - low grade heat - turns out to be the raw material that we need to address our four Wicked problems. If we can find enough electricity to meet the projected demand in data centres and AI, all of the heat that the robots are going to produce over the next 50 to 100 years might be sufficient to decarbonise heating, reboot agriculture and lead the way in carbon sequestration. We already know that we need 10 times the amount of data centres than we've currently got to do everything that the robots are going to do for us. In other words we already need 20% of the world's electricity supply to enable AI, with all of that energy being converted into heat. The reality is, there aren't enough electrons to go around. AI data centres can't possibly hope to access 20% of the world's electricity supply in the next 10 years with so many other sectors decarbonising. In any case, exponential curves do what exponential curves do. Beyond 2035 the robots will need more and more power generating more and more heat. To be blunt, whether the industry cares about climate change or not is irrelevant. By positioning itself as the sector through which electrons first pass then making that energy available as heat for secondary use this is the only way the data centre industry is going to access the amount of energy it needs to facilitate the demand in AI.

A new hope emerges

It's as if a story has been written by a Hollywood scriptwriter; a beautiful logic emerges on the eve of the fourth Industrial Revolution. We need the extraordinary intelligence that the robots are going to provide us to help us solve some of the most complex problems that we have in the climate transition, but in the process the heat that is given off will address some of the hardest problems to crack within the transition itself. In other words the robots aren't here to destroy us, they're actually going to save us twice - once with their intelligence, and once with their heat. Some heroes take time to warm up to their new role in life, and not all parts of the data centre industry have been as excited to meet this calling as others. Witness underwater data centres experimenting with cooling computers in the sea just in case our oceans aren't warm enough. Data centres clearing acres of virgin forest, building vast campuses with no sign of heat reuse in sight, despite their glossy brochures. And finally we have the insane logic of building more and more data centres closer and closer to the Arctic Circle, just in case we weren't melting the polar ice caps fast enough. Combine this shortsighted crazy with data centres spoiling Ireland, the Netherlands and Singapore which is leading to moratoriums on their construction, fishing communities in Iceland having to put on their fossil fuel generators because the data centres are clogging the grid, and local communities in the midwest in the US act struggling to access power and we're at the beginning of what is probably a fully-fledged culture war in the making. Despite these challenges the magical properties of the robot are starting to be understood and utilised. Back in 2011 Microsoft wrote a white paper and coined the phrase 'data furnace'. The abstract says "servers can be sent to homes and office buildings and used as a primary heat source". And it's these words which encapsulate the challenge at the part of this story. Instead of building data centres where the heat could be recaptured but is rejected instead, the industry needs to start building capacity where the heat is required and thankfully this process has already begun.The first data centre was plugged into a district heating system in Scandinavia in 2010, and now cities across Europe are catching on. In Denmark, Meta's campus is plugged into a local heating grid. In the Netherlands, 10 data centres are already plugged into District heating systems. Stockholm is aiming to have 10% of its heating met by data furnaces by 2035; 10% of Helsinki is already heated by data centres today. In the wake of that original white Microsoft white paper a number of startups then emerged to build domestic data furnaces, and there's a growing stream of good news from across the world where different operators are starting to reuse heat and decentralise their operations. The Scottish Government is planning large large data centre campuses where Industries can collocate and reuse the heat. The robots are heating swimming pools already in Oslo, Frankfurt, Paris and Copenhagen and perhaps most interestingly of all Meta and Alphabet are already starting to experiment with data centre assisted direct air capture, a solution to the fourth Wicked problem where we sequester all of that carbon out the atmosphere. 

The Hanging Gardens of Swindon

A few months back I inadvertently coined the phrase “the Hanging Gardens of Swindon.” I wanted to paint a picture of what an ordinary town centre might look like saved by the robots. 

Here is Swindon in 2074, 50 years from now. Homes are linked to a centralized heat network; everyone with a fossil fuel boiler did a simple dig to the end of their road and connected into a free heat substrate. Fuel poverty is now a thing of the past; why should anyone be cold in a world where the robots provide us with free heat? If you look out one of those windows, you’ll see an autonomous vehicle trundled by with its load of sequestered carbon on its on its way back to a centralized hub to safely store it underground. The Town Center is now a warm green leafy environment, much like the Eden Project. Hospitals, schools, libraries and municipal buildings are all provided with free heat. Urban agriculture is ubiquitous; produce is grown without food miles and those Industries have created good jobs for local happier, healthier and wealthier populations.  And swimming pools? We cannot present a vision of the future without talking about swimming pools! The many that have closed since 2015 have reopened, new ones have been built and all are 30° all year round, where the community can congregate even on the coldest of winter days. Isn't this what we want our towns and cities to be like? Isn't this what we want our lives to be like? Isn't this the mission we really all want to be on?When we allow ourselves to embrace bold practical solutions to the climate emergency, we can take control of the crisis. In fact I'll go further, we can take control of the narrative and enact change. Yes, we're facing down the barrel of a very bad situation. Many of our elected leaders aren't up to the job but they will catch up after we as individuals and businesses get started regardless. We don't need to cast our vote for the least worst option. 

An inconvenient truth

There is an inconvenience truth. Our thesis is ‘cathedral thinking.’ Many of us won't live to see the robots’ quest completed. What goal does our generation set itself, what metric can we identify that will help give our own efforts meaning? It’s 15 years since I watched the Inconvenient Truth and I keep on coming back to this place. 

This is Mauna Loa, a laboratory of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and it's here that they measure parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere, where our climate homework is marked. Whilst we may never get to see the spire set on top of the cathedral, and we may never even get to see Swindon transformed, we can get to see this Observatory reporting that parts per million of carbon have at least stabilised. If we allow our hero to do her job quickly we may even see it decline. To me that seems like a really good waypoint to anchor ourselves on in the long journey ahead. 

An expected elixir

We are at the end of our hero's journey and the robots have played their role in averting climate catastrophe. The final stage in any hero's journey is the return with an elixir, a magic ingredient, something that will rebirth a new ordinary world. On the face of it in our story that elixir is heat. As I've worked on this problem, I'm not sure it is. To paraphrase Churchill, ‘capitalism is the worst economic system we have except for all the others’ and I wonder whether the elixir is actually a new form of economic organisation? The robots will have taught us that reciprocity - love even - in a business model makes us economically, existentially and certainly environmentally richer, and if a kind of form of capitalism is the elixir that's bestowed upon us from this hero's journey, then I for one am happy to be a part of it.

Prefer to watch the video? It's here