Chief Technical Advisor at Anthesis, Craig Simmons, reflects on the lasting impact made by one of his sustainability heroes.

Everyone seems to have lost a hero in 2016. Mine included many who have made me laugh, cry and kept me otherwise entertained during my own modest lifetime; David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Richard Adams, two-thirds of the rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder… the list is tragically long. One of my heroes who didn’t make the headlines was David MacKay, author of the self-published book Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air (2008) and former chief scientific adviser (2009 to 2014) to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. He was one of the driving forces behind the publication of the Government’s 2011 Carbon Plan [1].

David, whom I had the pleasure of meeting when he chaired an experts session on Climate Change in the Houses of Parliament, died of stomach cancer aged just 48 in April 2016.

While MacKay made me neither laugh nor cry, from the moment I started reading Sustainable Energy (he made it available for free as an internet download – an approach which also impressed me) I was intrigued. He had successfully applied his brilliant mathematical mind to setting out future energy scenarios in a manner which was clear, comprehensive and informative. I had tried to do something similar, on a much smaller scale, in a book I co-wrote with the green architect Bill Dunster (The ZEDbook: solutions for a shrinking world) that was published about a year before Sustainable Energy. I thought that I had done a reasonable job. That was until I saw the level of detail, thought and research effort that MacKay had expended.

MacKay’s Sustainable Energy is necessarily technical. It contains much science, many numbers and numerous calculations. As the title suggests, the straight talking style of writing and rigorous application of scientific method leaves very little room for any ‘hot air’. Although no doubt deterred by the analytics, policy-makers could do much worse than read and absorb the fundamental lessons delivered in Sustainable Energy; that we need to match the energy demanded by our modern lifestyles with the available sustainable supply.

I think MacKay was acutely aware of the need to make the central messages of Sustainable Energy more digestible and democratic. Whilst at DECC he commissioned the development of an online calculator that ‘gamified’ the whole process of energy policy development allowing individuals and organizations to set their own energy policies and understand the impact on the climate. As a means of encouraging debate and discussion amongst stakeholders, it worked. Everyone from Friends of the Earth to the National Grid felt able to publish their own carbon reduction pathways to maintain global temperature increases below the 2⁰C threshold.

It is a testament to the interest in the original UK model [2] that it was later updated and an expanded version developed to cover global energy and climate scenarios [3]. These later versions are still available.

MacKay was alive long enough to see the Paris Climate Agreement realized but, tragically, his expertise will not be available to help implement it. Throughout his career, MacKay was careful not to side with any particular technology in the controversial fossil vs. nuclear vs. renewables debate. However, in his final, and frank, interview in April 2016 [4] (just 11 days before he died) an animated MacKay put his cards on the table and made his preferences clear.

True to his discipline, MacKay stated that he would be ‘content with any plan that added up’ while making it clear that different solutions would be needed in different parts of the world. Drawing on his time in Government, he was also astute enough to recognize that solutions were necessarily technological as well as political and behavioral. The price people were willing to pay for their energy, and the lifestyles they aspired to, was as important as the physics in determining an optimum solution.

Whilst MacKay is no longer with us, his legacy of writings, tools, methods and models has left us with a valuable guide to help navigate the next 35 years. For this we should be all be grateful.

^{[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-carbon-plan-reducing-greenhouse-gas-emissions--2}

^{[2] http://2050-calculator-tool.decc.gov.uk/}

^{[3] http://tool.globalcalculator.org/}

^{[4] https://vimeo.com/163698553/10d1bbe16e}