The Climate Challenge is an Engineering Challenge

Transcript

Michael Liebreich

Hello, I'm Michael Liebreich, and this is Cleaning Up. When it comes to climate change, we are incessantly told that we have to follow the science, but we're not told we have to follow the engineering. Addressing climate change is fundamentally an engineering challenge. How to rebuild our energy and transport systems, our infrastructure, agriculture and cities, so that they deliver the same benefits but without burning fossil fuels... It's an engineering question. Yet the voices of engineers are drowned out by politicians, activists and self-appointed experts. My guest today is doing her best to redress the balance. Dr Rosemary Barnes is a mechanical engineer who runs her own engineering consultancy in Australia, focusing on the development of clean energy technologies. She's also the host of a popular YouTube channel called Engineering with Rosie. Please welcome Rosie Barnes to Cleaning Up.

Before we get started, if you're enjoying Cleaning Up, please make sure that you like episodes. Subscribe on YouTube or your favourite podcast platform and leave a review. That really helps other people to find us. Please recommend Cleaning Up to your friends and colleagues and sign up for our free newsletter at cleaninguppod.substack.com. That's cleaninguppod.substack.com. Cleaning Up is brought to you by the Liebreich Foundation, the Gilardini Foundation and EcoPragma Capital.

Rosie, welcome to Cleaning Up.

Dr. Rosemary Barnes

Thank you so much for having me.

And this is a return engagement because, of course, I have been on Engineering with Rosie on your YouTube channel. So it's a great pleasure to be able to return the favour.

Yeah, that was a really good episode, very popular.

We should put a link actually into the show notes. So Rosie, let's get started, as we always do: could you explain, in your own words, what it is that you do?

Yeah, so I'm an engineer and I've been working with clean energy technologies for basically my whole career, which is coming up to 20 years now. Developing technologies and, most importantly, breaking them, building them back better. And so now I have my own consulting company, a small consulting company called Pardalote, and we advise on everything related to the clean energy technology development, and in particular, how all these technologies fit together and how that's changing into the future. So it includes startups who are developing clean tech and they want help with their technology roadmaps and test plans, breaking their things and building them back better. And then also people who want to invest in those technologies, or just need to understand the energy transition technology landscape better.

Okay, so you have your own energy consultancy and repeat the name.

Pardalote Consulting. It's named after a little tiny Australian bird.

Okay, and we'll put a link into the show notes. But you also have Engineering with Rosie, this very popular YouTube channel. And I think it's fair to say that I probably would not have discovered your consultancy, but I absolutely discovered your YouTube channel.

Yeah, and that's a bit of a funny story. I kind of accidentally started that YouTube channel. It was a bit of a pandemic cliche. I heard that at one point in the pandemic podcast microphones had sold out, you know, there was a global shortage in toilet paper in Australia and yeast in Denmark, where I was living, and also podcast mics. And I was one of the contributors to that shortfall. I just thought, where I was living at the time in Denmark there were all these wind turbines from the last 30 years. So you can really geek out on the evolution of the design of wind turbines. And I was like, 'well, obviously the world needs to know about this.' And so I drove around during lockdown, and ilmed a video about Denmark's wind turbine design evolution, and then just kind of got addicted to it and went from there.

Well, it's a fascinating topic. We've had Henrik Stiesdal on Cleaning Up, and he is, of course, intimately associated with pretty much every stage of the evolution of those turbines. I don't know if you've spoken to him on Engineering with Rosie.

No, I haven't. I've spoken with him off record, and I did tour one of his companies doing thermal energy storage, so I've had a little bit to do with him. But yeah, definitely, he's the father, or the grandfather, depending on your perspective, of the world's wind energy, really. People say Danish wind energy but Danish Wind energy has become the world's wind energy now.

That's right, because even Siemens Gamesa, originally, was also a Danish company bonus that became Siemens. And, of course, there's Vestas. And so yes, in the Western world,at least, wind energy is probably, you could say almost two thirds or something like that, Danish in origin. So Engineering with Rosie was your lockdown project. Cleaning Up was my lockdown project. But yours has been, at least in traffic terms, more successful. You've got some quite big audiences, haven't you?

Yeah, well, I mean, it's relative. I'm always comparing myself to the most popular YouTubers, and feel desperate to reach 100,000 subscribers, and I'm not quite getting there. So I wonder if you ever feel like, 'Yeah, this is a good, big channel.' But I've certainly been surprised at how many people are interested in watching videos that are quite technical. And it's definitely engineering. It's not just, 'Oh, wow, new shiny technology, yay.' We really dig into the real engineering, the real problems that need to be solved, and the realities of that. So it's really cool to see so many people interested in that level of depth.

So you've got your sights set on 100,000 subscribers and presumably millions of views. I've got my sight set on Engineering with Rosie because I will be celebrating when we get to 5,000 subscribers. Our top episode is around 30,000 downloads on the podcast and also on YouTube. And I think your top one is over 600,000. So to me, you're my iconic figure of success that I would like to emulate.

Well, I'd like to help you. A rising tide raises all ships, as far as YouTube is concerned.

But look, maybe this will be my breakout episode. Who knows, who knows. Your top episode has had over 600,000 views, and it was absolutely delightful because it's actually called vertical-axis wind turbines vs. horizontal-axis wind turbines. So as you say, that's real engineering, correct?

Yeah, and it took me by surprise, that one. That was the first one that took off. And I was aware that people were kind of interested in vertical-axis wind turbines, and I was aware that there wasn't really a lot of information about how they work, or the pros and cons of them, so that's why I made the video. But I was not prepared for how much that would, for a period, that was all that defined me. And I was the vertical-axis wind turbine person. And every week I'd get dozens of emails from inventors who had a new type of wind turbine and wanted my help to promote it or invest in it, or something like that.

So out there in the audience, I know that there'll be some people who'll be on the edge of their chairs because they want to know the answer: which is it? Is it the classic three turbine blade, horizontal axis? Or is it vertical axis? Or is there some fundamental engineering reason why they're a bad idea?

Oh, it's not fundamental, and there's some advantages. And it always pays to keep an eye on the reasons why we're designing things the way we are today and, when those assumptions change, to reassess. But in the 90s, there was no real consensus on whether it would be vertical-axis or horizontal-axis that would win out. And there are plenty of examples of really big vertical-axis wind turbines... They look like egg beaters. There's a few challenges: it's hard to keep them stable, so they'd often add guy ropes, which are a bit unwieldy. And then they had some issues with the flow angle changing a lot, and stall. Also turbulent flow causing fatigue problems, so they would break. But that was back in the day when we made everything out of aluminum, and now there's composites. So there's no deal breakers. And that's why, periodically, people keep on thinking that they've discovered this revolution. Every design has been come up with before. I've got this great book, it’s called Wind Machines or something, published in the early 80s, that has all these pictures of different kinds of wind turbines. And every time I see a new one presented as this big new thing that's going to revolutionize renewable energy, I look it up in my 1982 book, and it's always in there. So there's no real deal breakers, and you could make it work if you had to, but they always end up less reliable and more expensive than horizontal-axis ones so far. So that's why we see nearly all wind turbines looking the same these days.

I think I gave up answering and trying to explain in detail how these things work to people who had vertical-axis models about, I'm going to say, 10 or 15 years ago. I just assumed that if it was going to happen, it would have happened, because it's not like nobody's tried. As you said, engineers can make almost anything work, but it has to be cost effective and reliable, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, the only thing that might change things is possibly offshore, because there's a few offshore specific advantages. Like, you can put the generator right at the bottom, so then they're bottom heavy instead of top heavy. If you think of a standard wind turbine design where all the weight is right at the top of a big stick, it obviously doesn't look like something that wants to float right. So if you make it vertical-axis, then you can simplify that a little bit, and you can improve access to the generator for maintenance. So maybe there's something there, and there is at least one company, or a couple, that are working pretty hard on that. So I'd say that's a possibility, but I'd still say that odds are a little bit against them.

You also did, recently, a really nice episode where you looked at the optimal size of wind turbines, because there seems to be this assumption out there that bigger is always better and bigger is always cheaper. And so there's been a race for scale, and now it's the Chinese manufacturers that are picking up the baton. And they're going from the current scale, which is around 15-16 megawatts per turbine, and they are working on and launching models that are 18 and 20 and 21 and 22 megawatts, and therefore they must be better, and they're going to win. So what did your episode on scale and wind turbines conclude?

Yeah, I used an analogy that it's a bit like a game of tug of war, where you've got people at either end of a rope and they're trying to pull past the center. And so on one side of the rope, you have engineering factors that want turbines to be big, and that includes factors such as if you have a really big turbine, then you have fewer electrical connections, and maintenance should be a bit cheaper because you've got less towers to climb up. And yeah, a few other mostly logistical things like that. And then at the other end of the scale, you've got Team Small that wants wind turbines to be smaller, and that's mostly structural things like blades and towers. For example, if you look at a blade, the power that it can capture increases with the square of the blade length, because, you know, it sweeps out a circle of area, extracts wind from that circle. But the mass of the blade increases with the cube of the blade length, because it's in three dimensions. So as blades get longer, the materials are higher per unit of energy generated. And we do see that the blades of really big turbines are more of a proportion of the cost of the turbine. People often ask me, 'what's the optimal size for a wind turbine?' And it changes all the time, depending on what your constraints are. The simple answer is that what is selling today is the optimal for today's constraints. And then as those constraints change, then the optimal size changes. But there's a few things that people might not think of like tower diameters for onshore wind are constrained by the width of the roads that have to carry those towers to site, because they're made all in one cross-section. Big tubes are sent out. So you can't make towers that much taller with... it'll end up really, really tall and skinny, which isn't as stable as a fatter tower. So, yeah, things like that, keep the design the way it is. And transport issues are one of the big reasons why we've seen a difference now between how big the turbines are that we're installing onshore compared to offshore. So offshore, where they don't have to drive anything over roads to get there, they're getting huge. Like you said, 15 maybe 20 megawatts. Whereas onshore, around five megawatts is more the norm.

So I'm smiling because I know that the comments are now going to fill up with hydrogen fans saying 'what you're missing, and you're doing it on purpose is that we're clearly going to use blimps. We're going to use airships to deliver these turbine towers, and that's going to change the game completely. And it's also, by the way, going to ensure that we have cheap hydrogen, and the planet is going to be saved, and it's only because of people like you and me down-talking hydrogen...' And they'll go off on this whole spiral.

I thought that hydrogen proponents weren't so keen on blimps, and tried to pretend that they don't exist. But that said blimps have definitely been proposed for installing wind turbines. And I just covered on the podcast that I co host — The Uptime Wind Energy podcast for those who are interested — we did discover recently an airplane that's being designed to be the world's largest airplane that will deliver wind turbine components on site, larger than can get there on the road. I do not believe that that is a winning idea, but yeah, people are thinking about it

And I don't mean to mock blimps, or airships, because there are situations where who knows they may end up being the best way to do things. But I did want to introduce, obviously, the word 'hydrogen' into the conversation. You've also done some episodes on hydrogen, and it must be interesting to watch how popular or unpopular each individual episode is. So how does your hydrogen work compare in popularity to your wind episodes?

Actually, I haven't done one for a little while, so I am not sure today, but that was one of my first early successes. And actually my first success on LinkedIn was writing an article about hydrogen, not being a hydrogen expert at all. The point of the article was, 'Could someone please explain this to me?' Because I know the laws of thermodynamics and I don't understand how a hydrogen economy is going to work, bearing that in mind. And that kind of opened a whole new world of communication and interest.

But the people's responses are a little strange. After everything I've done, all the work I've done on all parts of the energy transition, I just know that I'm going to be most famous, known on my gravestone as the inventor of the hydrogen ladder. And hydrogen, by that time, will be far in the rear view mirror, I hope, but that's what I'll be famous for.

I'm sorry, but that is how I introduce you to people, if they don't know you. I'm like, 'Oh yeah, he's the guy who invented, popularized the hydrogen ladder.' Sorry, I'm contributing.

Mr. Hydrogen ladder. But you've also done some episodes on the overall cost of renewables versus fossil and you've done some episodes on nuclear. And I'm going to assume that those are flying off the presses as well. How are they doing?

So surprisingly, the one on Levelized Cost of Energy, LCOE, did really well for the time, because it's basically the accounting of energy, right? It didn't sound like a winner to me. I made that video because I explained it so many times that I wanted to have something to refer back to. And I did that in collaboration with a friend of mine who has these key numbers and provides really nice tools for seeing, if we change one assumption, what effect does that have on the cost of energy, or whatever other thing it is you're trying to calculate. It's so funny how controversial that is, especially recently in Australia, because we all have to talk about nuclear energy all the time now, because the opposition party has a nuclear plan now. So we're all talking about that. It's currently banned in Australia, so it's not something that's going to happen soon, but we're talking about it a lot. And people really, really take these LCOE calculations personally. I have found through so many comments on Twitter and LinkedIn about nuclear content that I've made recently, there's a lot of people who think that it's a big conspiracy. Any calculation of nuclear that doesn't end up in nuclear's favor must be because of, yeah... literal conspiracy theories about CSIRO, our national science body, and the assumptions that they use. And it is actually interesting, because CSIRO, who publish this gen cost report, I think every year, where they look at the different costs of generation for Australia's electricity, and they also look at other stuff that needs to go with it. So, obviously, when you talk about the cost of variable renewables, people always want to say, 'Yeah, but that's only part of it. The sun sets and the wind doesn't always blow, and so you need so many batteries and transmission and yeah.' The CSIRO report includes all of those firming costs for variable renewables, and still finds that renewable power is much cheaper than nuclear power for Australia. And they have a link to the spreadsheets that they use. You can actually download the spreadsheet and put in your own assumptions and say, instead of a 60-year lifetime for nuclear power we're going to use, I don't know, 100 years, 200 years, whatever you want, it doesn't make as much difference to the cost as you would think. And yeah, you can change the capacity factor, I think that there was an assumption of something around 60% in the CSIRO report. You can put it up to 92% and see what that would do to the cost of energy. So you can go through and it's strange to me that those conspiracy theories exist when you can just get the spreadsheet and do the numbers yourself. And that's what I love about engineering, is you don't really need to believe or have faith or be so religious about it. The engineering either works or it doesn't. And there's a lot of debate early on in a technology's life cycle, when we're still talking about should we do it, and could we do it? But, you know, eventually bad engineering doesn't work. And that's the reality.

That nuclear discussion is very, very heated, as you say, because the Liberal Party, the opposition party, has said that their great contribution is going to be to restart or to start building nuclear power in Australia. I just watched a video from The Center for Independent Studies. There was a debate, and it's on YouTube between the host Chris Ullman and Helen Cook, Adi Paterson and Aidan Morrison, and they debated. And it was extraordinary, because they were accusing the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), specifically the head of AEMO, the grid operator, of having a sort of religious conviction that renewables could be made to work in the absence of evidence. And the proposition, the things that they were saying were essentially, I want to be very careful here, but they were essentially, sort of religious statements. There was this assumption that nuclear would become very cheap as long as Australia built a lot of it. So the ask is not one plant, the ask is a whole lot of plants. And there's this assumption that that will somehow become cheap. Is that typical of the debate? I'm not in Australia, so I'm not following the blow by blow.

Yeah, it's a funny debate because it's literally illegal. It's banned federally, and a lot of states also have bans in place. So we can't have an open debate and nuclear isn't allowed to play for a fair playing field at the moment. And I wish that nuclear power was not banned, because there's no real need to ban it, it's just kind of a historical artifact. But the problem is that to unban it, you need to spend some political effort to reverse that ban. And if you don't believe that it's ever going to go anywhere anyway, then why would you bother doing that? I would have loved it if when the coalition government was in power up until a few years ago, if they loved nuclear so much, then it would have been fantastic if they would have removed the ban. But they chose not to expend their political capital that way, which I can understand. And so we have this weird ban, which makes the argument very strange. It also provides some cover, I think, for people who want to think that everything is just being imposed, you know that we're not giving nuclear a go. It really lends credibility to that. I would much rather see it removed, and see nuclear fight on its merits, and see who wants to invest in it.

I agree with that. And in fact, I'm on the record years ago saying get rid of the ban. Because the reason to expend political capital doing that is actually to defuse this tribal kind of culture wars argument by getting rid of the ban. But I think that the counter argument is not 'why spend political capital because it's not going to happen anyway.' To me, the counter argument and the concern I would have is that the nuclear industry is unbelievably good at promising wonderful, low-cost, clean electricity but then not delivering it. And that, to my mind, is the big concern, it's that the next thing that will happen if the ban is removed — and I think it should be — but then you've got to be very careful that the nuclear industry doesn't say, 'oh, and then we'll build this marvelous nuclear plant.' Hinkley C was originally proposed to cost £8 billion. The real number will be £45 billion. So then how do you stop that, what one of our other guests Bent Flyvbjerg came on to talk about — I think it was episode 128, and he talked about strategic deception. The same way they get Olympic Games. You say they're going to be cheap, they're going to cost nothing. They're going to pay for themselves, and as soon as you win the bid, that's when you start slathering on the extra costs, and it ends up being unaffordable.

Yeah, to be honest, I think both sides of the nuclear argument are guilty of picking out the examples that suit their narrative. So I wouldn't want to criticize you, but you've picked out a particularly egregious example. And then a pro-nuclear person would pick out the last plant that took five years in China, and use that as an example. Or they like to use the UAE as well, which is a country whose government is not very similar to Australia's, I would suggest. But what I really love about Bent Flyvbjerg's work is that he's got the data. You know, data, not drama — that's a motto that I like to live by. And the last time I looked, he had 191, I think, nuclear projects that he had looked at and measured the cost overrun and the time overrun compared to what was initially promised. I wish I had the numbers right here. I should have pulled them up, but I'm pretty sure the average is about double cost and 65% time overrun, or maybe it was the other way around, 65% cost overrun double the time.

I think it is about double the cost. And I did an episode with Professor Flyvbjerg, so we'll link to that as well. And people can follow that, because if you don't like the example of Hinckley, I've got others, and even the example of...

Yeah, yeah. The averages certainly are in favor of the cost and time blowouts. They are the norm, not the exception. And I mean, I was a project manager for quite a while in my career, and the first thing that you learn when you study project management is to make a realistic plan. Not to just fall victim to your own optimism. Of course, you need to be optimistic when you take on a big project, but you need to find examples of the most similar projects that you can find, and then look at averages. Don't cherry pick examples that you wish that you could achieve. Look at the averages, and then you'll create a plan that you might succeed at, or you have a possibility to succeed at. And nuclear advocates in Australia do the opposite. They always want to say, 'these are the global averages.' But Australia, with no history of nuclear, not even a legal framework for it, has zero experts in large-scale nuclear power generation in the country... We're going to beat that? We're going to do better than the average? We're going to do as well or better than the very best projects that have been around in the world? And the reality is that the good outcomes with nuclear, they come from countries that are committed to a long-term nuclear strategy with dozens and dozens of reactors of the same kind so that they can learn how to do it, and have the same workforce that are becoming expert and doing better and better each time. You don't get it from building, you know, I think we've got six or seven reactors in the opposition's plan for nuclear in Australia. And you know, if you build them one after the other, then we might be finished in 100 years time. If you build them all at once, then you're not learning from the first project by the time you start the last one, because they're all running in parallel. So, you know, if you look at it just from a project management point of view, it's really hard to see how we would expect to achieve these world-beating results in Australia.

It's such an interesting conversation I would love to chase up. Because you do also have, in Australia, quite a lot of the supply chain. You have a 20 megawatt facility producing medical nuclear isotopes. So you have built that. You do have a supply chain. Of course, you have the uranium. You have the Synroc technology for turning waste into synthetic rock. There's a lot of things that Australia has. Maybe what I should do is, if anybody listening knows the perfect nuclear advocate who's not some kind of swivel eyed fanatic, but is prepared to have a really good to and fro, then maybe we'll do an episode at some point on nuclear in Australia.

I know her. I know who you need to talk to. I'll introduce you to her.

Excellent, excellent. I look forward to that. I'm very struck by… There's a favorite quotation of mine by a guy called Adrian Newey, who was a Formula One car designer. He's legendary, he worked with Williams, McLaren and Red Bull. And what he said is, and this is for Formula One, where they're really on the edge of technology, "the creative goal is not to create the perfect design, it is to create a design which has the maximum amount of development potential." And actually I think that's so interesting. So instead of producing the perfect car, it's a platform which enables the maximum amount of learning and experimentation and development from there. A completely different way of thinking about engineering than most people would have.

Yeah, I think that's right, and I find it a real shame that so many people think that engineering is such a boring activity, and one of the reasons, actually, I like Formula One is because it's just unequivocally exciting, and engineers are part of the team in that sport. I used to be an athlete, and now I'm an engineer, and I really appreciate that aspect of Formula One. I think in other applications, people write off engineering as like, "Oh, it's just engineering, or engineering is the easy part." And it's been a thread throughout my career. A lot of the companies that I've worked at are very much based around a scientific discovery, like really cool, exciting science. And I remember in particular the first engineering job that I had, nearly 20 years ago now, where difficult problems were being solved by chemists all the time. Senior leadership had this habit of describing all of the cost, manufacturing, reliability, all those sorts of things as 'just engineering.' And that meant 'that's not something that we actually have to worry about. It'll take care of itself on its own.' And that's one of the real things that I tried to differentiate my Youtube channel from other clean tech reporting is not just focusing on that really exciting lab-bench discovery. So what are some examples we've seen, like radioactive diamond batteries... "we don't need lithium ion anymore, don't worry about that." Or solar panels that generate electricity at night, nuclear fusion, on and on and on. Like it's really easy to write an exciting article about that, but there's not a lot of reporting on the effort that comes after that. So my whole career has been about developing energy technologies all the way through to commercialization, that last boring bit after the lab-scale discovery. But it takes decades, sometimes many decades of development. And there's so many seemingly promising technologies that die in the process of not being able to find a scalable solution, not being able to find a cost-effective solution at scale. I think it's really important for people to understand that that's the kind of effort that is required. And I also find it a little bit counterproductive to the cause to get people too excited about the next big thing, because I think it takes attention off implementation of the current thing, which I really think we're failing at. Solar power is mature. Wind energy is mature. But wind, especially, it's not being rolled out at the scale that we need it to. We're spending so much more effort on the next part of the energy transition, like, 'what are we going to do for the last 1% or 5% of electricity generation when it's dark, it's cloudy for a week and there's no wind for a fortnight?' There's been so much effort thinking about should we do that with hydrogen, or should we do it with whatever brand new gravity energy storage, or whatever technology, but we've failed to realize that first we need to build the wind turbines that are going to charge up all of those things. I mean, even if you look at solar power, which is just such a success story, I think there's a disconnect between what people think was the role of science versus engineering. You know, it's not the science that has made them crush their way down that learning curve to far cheaper prices. It's predominantly manufacturing stuff. Little, tiny engineering changes that have just made it a little bit easier to manufacture and use a little bit less material here. Science is obviously a big part of it, I don't want to downplay the contribution, but if we had more awareness of engineering, and you some of the principles involved as well, like how technology scale and how costs reduce, it would help governments and investors to figure out where should they be strategically putting their their money so that they can get a big bang for their buck. So, yeah, that's my goal. Is to help people to understand these concepts better.

Now we're really getting into the heart of why I was so excited about this episode. Because we don't hear enough about climate change as an engineering challenge. We hear about 'follow the science', we hear about the culture war aspects, the politics of it, but actually it's fundamentally an engineering challenge. We will produce our energy, we will run our transportation industry, raw materials and so on, they'll be processed without generating emissions. That's an engineering challenge, and yet engineers seem to be absolutely way down at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to decision making, when it comes to sort of public awareness of how to deal with climate change. What's going on here?

Well, I think part of it is that some of the stereotypes about engineers are true, that they're not necessarily the most outgoing and social people. So I do find engineers often reluctant to talk about what they do. Engineers are notorious for not being succinct. They want to make sure that they talk about every... they don't say the main point, they need to say every exception to the main point so that you're 100% accurate. I'm guilty of this myself. And I think then the other thing is that it took us decades too long to start listening to scientists about climate change, right? We finally got that into our collective public minds, that we need to listen to scientists about climate science. I think we've just taken that a step too far. And now we also want to listen to scientists about technologies and how they're going to roll out. And then, of course, politicians always want to talk, so they're going to talk about engineering, regardless of expertise.

But is it just that engineers are just not taken seriously in at least Western societies? Is it really fundamental, or is it something specific about climate solutions and the technologies that you and I work on?

Not sure, but one criticism that I get a lot is that I am captured by the industry that I work for. So if I work for a wind energy company, then you can't talk to me about wind energy. And you can apply that to any other type of renewable energy. Which is kind of funny, because engineering is a field where unless you're working in industry, then you're not really working with that technology. I mean, there is engineering in academia but they're not doing the kind of engineering that I do. They're not developing products and selling them commercially, at least not as their primary purpose. So I think that that's a bit different to science, where you can really get independence. And I do face a challenge on my channel where I want to get into real projects, which means I want to get access to what a company is doing and have them show me they're only going to do that if they then get to look at the video and see if I said anything accidentally, or gave away a trade secret or that sort of thing. So that's a conflict by traditional journalist standards, but I deal with it because I want to see them.

But that's a real issue, and I've seen that. Obviously, we hang out with a lot of people working on wind and solar and batteries, and so we get lots of good data there. And I think both you and I believe that there's an enormous sort of runway of progress still ahead of us on those technologies. But I am very aware of the problem you've raised when I talk to gas engineers and we talk about hydrogen, the experts on moving gas around all work for gas companies. They are literally out of a job if hydrogen doesn't work as a solution. And so I've not yet found an independent analyst, an independent engineer who can tell me, if you repurpose a gas pipeline, how much energy can it carry? Because you have to drop the pressure if you use hydrogen and then hydrogen is very diffuse anyway to start with. And so I think there's a real problem there, but I can't find an expert to talk about it because they all work for gas companies. So that issue of capture is a very real one. But there are so many engineers who can do good systems thinking, but their voices are not being heard. So if there are engineers who don't just fall into one particular technology, why aren't they being heard?

I just don't think that we're used to listening to them yet, and I'm sure people will learn. I mean, like we said at the start of the episode, I feel like my channel is tiny compared to other big YouTubers talking about technologies all the time. There is an audience out there of people that are interested. So I think that it will take a bit of time, like it did with science. You know, it took a long time, and now everyone accepts that we listen to science every day, and the pandemic as well was another good moment for science communication. I'm hopeful the same thing will happen with engineering. I think right now is the right time for it.

I'm just worried that there's a fundamental rule that says the larger your YouTube audience, or the larger your social media audience, the less likely you are to actually know what you're talking about. And you're an outlier there, but there's so many examples of people who have got some kind of physics background, and they say the answer is definitely fusion, or the answer is building lots and lots of nuclear plants, or the answer is going to be hydrogen, or the answer is going to be collecting static electricity from raindrops... And they have these huge audiences, and very often, what they say is, sadly, nonsense.

Yeah, of course. And I mean, it's something that I face myself. Early in my channel, I talked about things that I knew very, very well. A lot of my early video topics were literally just clipped out of my PhD thesis, and I rewrote it in a way that would be more popular, but it still had rigorous research behind it. But if you want a successful YouTube channel or any kind of media, it's about volume. You have to communicate often, and so it does become really, really hard to move outside of your area of expertise and still keep on churning out the volume. And then for my channel, it's really important to me that I remain an actual engineer. I spend a lot more time engineering than I do talking about engineering, and I want to keep it that way, because I think that if you stop practicing and just talk about it, then your ideas get outdated. And especially with the energy transition, we can see without naming names, that there's some very popular thinkers who I feel like they came up with their energy transition ideas in the 1990s and thought, 'hey, wind and solar are not good enough, batteries didn't even figure back then, and we need a big new breakthrough in energy technology, a new thing to save us.' And haven't updated that thinking. So the last thing I want to do is to cut off at 2024 thinking and still be talking about those same points in 10 to 20 years. But if I spend four and a half days out of my week engineering then that leaves even less time for communication. And it makes it hard to capture the rigor that you need to communicate accurately, but the volume that you need to grow your audience... one without the other isn't really where it's at.

I think you're being very charitable and saying, 'Maybe engineers don't communicate well, or maybe we've been captured by our own vertical segments of the transition. Or maybe we don't have time because we want to stay grounded.' But you know, there is also a kind of societal problem that we just don't take engineering seriously. And I've got this marvelous chart in preparation. I had a look at the incidence of the words 'philosophy of science' versus 'philosophy of engineering' using Google Ngram. Now I'm going to hold this up so you can see it, Rosie, but what we'll do when we make the video is we'll edit it into the video and also pop it on the website. But can you see that there? The blue line, so this is philosophy of science. What you see is around 1940 you get people like Karl Popper, and suddenly philosophy of science becomes this enormously popular thing that everybody in society agrees is a thing we need to take seriously. But philosophy of engineering, or everything you and I have talked about, is of basically no interest. There are no books. There's very little in the way of academic research. You can't go to university and study philosophy of engineering and it's just extraordinary, we've got this existential crisis for the planet and society and the solution is going to be delivered by a sector we don't understand.

Well hold on, because I'm probably one of very few people in the world who has actually studied both philosophy of science and philosophy of engineering. Because I did an arts degree with a major in philosophy as well as my engineering degree, my bachelor's degrees. Philosophy of science is a very normal subject to take, as you point out. And they did make us do philosophy, or ethics, of engineering, which was terrible. It was the, probably the literal worst course that I took in my university time, because the engineering lecturer was very disdainful about philosophy, and mostly based upon the fact that she didn't understand it at all. But I'm happy to write that book, so if anyone listening wants to give me a nice hefty advance to write the philosophy of engineering, I'm sure it will be a best seller based on the chart that you've just shown me.

So a fascinating discussion to my mind. Because until we really take engineering seriously, until we actually give it its role in the net zero transition, I can't see how we can do this effectively. I can't see how, as long as the narrative is just dominated by politicians and by these culture war sort of lead voices, I really don't see how we can succeed, if I'm completely honest.

Yeah. I mean, I agree with you, and I did get really sick of when you see so many panel shows where they're talking about a topic that will be solved by engineers predominantly. And there's never an engineer on the panel, you know, if you're talking about manufacturing, I'm constantly lectured about, you know, what kinds of manufacturing are possible in Australia, but by I'm lectured by people who have never set foot in a factory. And I've spent my career working in factories and with things that are made in factories. And yeah, it's almost like the engineer's opinion is the last one that you would ever seek out. And it's crazy, and it applies to nearly everything that you see on TV that should have an engineer present. So, yeah, I can only put myself out there and hope that people like you and me gradually change it.

And not just on TV, not just talking heads. We were talking about legislation, I remember there was a piece of legislation passed, I think it was in Massachusetts, that said that in the future there must be at least this much battery capacity attached to the grid. And the person who sponsored that legislation was a former nursery teacher. Look, I'm sure she was a good person, and it may even have been the right outcome. But what world do we live in where somebody who's probably a brilliant educationalist for young children is defining the energy resources that need to be connected to the grid? This most complex piece of engineering equipment ever built by humans, the electrical grid. That cannot be how we design it, surely?

Yeah, no, I agree. And we do find ourselves, I think, at a really weird point as well. Because in the past, we had an electricity grid that was already very complicated before variable renewables did anything at all. How many people off the street could tell you, when you turn on your toaster, how do they make sure that there's enough electricity to supply that at that point? No one's phoning up the coal power plant and saying, 'hey, I'm about to turn on my toaster, is that okay?' The system is complicated and has to respond in real time. But now, with the energy transition, for some reason, every single person needs to understand how the system works. Energy storage is one of the most egregious examples of this where people do these ridiculous back of the envelope calculations, which are just basically along the lines of, well winter goes for about three months, so we'll need three months worth of energy storage in our grid. And that's good enough. People seriously do make policy positions based on that level of engineering. And it also means that more complicated solutions, which are better, cheaper, faster, more reliable ones that need a lot of engineering and are complicated, they don't get a look in because people want to be able to say, 'Oh, what's the solution to this? Oh, we'll just do all of that with hydrogen. Our cars hydrogen, heating hydrogen, cooking hydrogen, energy storage hydrogen.' It's easier. And I don't know why people, I guess they don't trust engineers. And they don't trust engineers because they don't know what we do. They never hear from us. There's no trusted big, famous engineers that everybody looks up to and respects.

We could do a whole series debunking these very simple heuristics that people are using. Because if the loudest voices on social media tend to know the least about energy and engineering, it's absolutely the same with people who are ignorant about energy. Is it the Dunning-Kruger syndrome? The more ignorant they are about energy, the more convinced they are that they're the only people who really understand baseload, or that they really understand storage, or that they really understand resilience and it's literally the people who think they know the most actually know the least.

Yeah, I have been lectured and lectured and lectured on baseload the last couple of weeks by people who do not know what baseload means, and they put up a chart of today's electricity generation. See there was coal power at midday, that's baseload. Okay, one day of the year is not baseload.

The funniest thing I find about baseload is that the people who talk about it incessantly don't even understand that load is something on the demand side, but they actually think it's something on the supply side. The most basic thing they actually have got wrong about it.

Yeah, I'm bored of talking about baseload, sorry.

Rosie, you said something very interesting. You said you're going to write a book about the philosophy of engineering. That is going to be a bestseller. I'll be the first person to read it, and we'll get you back on to talk about it. But you said something very interesting. You said all that you can do is put yourself out there. So when are you going to go into politics? Because you've gone from engineering into communications, but surely the next step is to go into politics.

Yeah, no way. Never, never, ever, ever, ever. And that's, I guess, you've hit on another part of the problem, which is that engineers, they wanted to do, you know, I've chosen engineering in large part because of the impact that I can have. I just, I feel so powerful at the fact that I can, you know, be bothered by a problem, which, you know, my case is climate change, and then I work every day to solve that, and I see, you know, there are hundreds of wind turbines that have a system in it that, you know, makes them operate through the winter where it wouldn't have been able to if I didn't design that. So that's, you know, green energy that's happening because of my brain and my work. I don't believe that you can have the same impact in politics as you can as an engineer. I think that engineering is a much more impactful career to be in, and I think that that's probably a large part of the reason why we don't see a lot of engineers going into politics.

But if the core problem is that society is not taking engineers seriously, then surely one of the solutions is for engineers to go into society and fix it?

Yeah, I think we are fixing the things that we're fixing. More physical things rather than people things. That's probably a job for whoever's got the double degree in psychology and engineering, and that's the niche for them. But I also think that one of the reasons that I love social media, I can't believe I just said that because I hate social media, like everybody, but one of the great things about YouTube and Podcasts is that you don't need to be invited. No TV company executive did market research and said, 'Yeah, people really want to know about engineering, and you're the right person to give it to them.' That was on me to decide that I wanted to do it, and I thought people would watch and that I was the right person to talk about it. So I think that's a way that engineers can get out there. And you do see, gradually, there's a little bit of an engineering ecosystem, we're both in it. And there's a scene on LinkedIn and scene on Twitter, and a tiny little scene on YouTube. So it's starting, isn't it?

So I flirted quite heavily with the idea of going into politics in 2015. I nearly stood for Mayor of London, but decided for all sorts of reasons, financial, family, other opportunities, not to do it. But it is something that certainly it's not impossible. I might do it at some point. I do think people like us, at some point, are going to have to just do this, because it's not going to change otherwise.

I can imagine it more for you than for me. I don't have the tact.

Rosie, nobody has ever called me tactful before. This is a memorable, historic moment. Just to finish, I'm on the advisory board of two organizations around women in energy, women in the environment. So there's the Hawthorn Club, which is very senior women who network around energy and the net-zero transition in the energy sector. And then Women in Sustainability, Environment and Renewables, which is based in Abu Dhabi, and so that's a topic also of great interest. You're a very high profile woman engineer. What would be your message? Let's phrase it like this. If there was young Rosie coming through, let's call it high school, or maybe already starting her studies. What message would you have?

I think the biggest thing that people get wrong about women in engineering is that typical girls play is not training them to be engineers in the same way that typical boys play is. The stereotypical engineer played with Lego as a kid and developed their engineering skills that way. And I played with Lego, but I used it to make houses for my Barbies and stuff, so not really engineering stuff. But where I learned my early engineering skills was from baking, sort of cake decorating, there's structural engineering involved there, also materials engineering. And especially sewing, that to me is just far better engineering training than playing with a Lego kit is, you know, it's really creative. It's developing amazing spatial skills. And, it's really unstructured, there's not one solution, you're finding the solution. So I think that people can do a better job at recognizing engineering potential in girls, looking at more than just the stereotypical boys stuff that's actually training people to be engineers and also like displaying their aptitude for it.

So your message would be to not to be driven by the stereotypes, but to look at the experiences that you've had and actually exploit them and build on them as you go into your studies and then into your career, right?

Yeah, I think for early career women in engineering, one of the really key things is confidence. The system does tend to try and crush it out of you. I'll be honest, it's not easy. And so if you can look back and be confident that you have the skills to be there... I remember in my first year software engineering class, it was the biggest course in the whole university, there were hundreds of people in this lecture theater, and the lecturer said, 'put up your hand, who's done coding before?' And it's just everybody. And then she said, 'invert that, who hasn't done coding before.' And it was like me and one other person, and that's so, so daunting, but you know, I was actually totally fine in that course, as it turned out. What I'm trying to say is you can look back at your own life experience and have the confidence that the other activities that you did are going to give you the skills that you need. You don't need to be just like everybody else, and in fact, you will benefit from not being like everybody else if that gives you a unique angle of new solutions that you'll come up with to existing problems. Just have that confidence.

And I hope that things are getting easier as careers are becoming more diverse, there are more people taking years off, there are different skills. You know, software is now such a huge piece, when I did engineering software was tiny. We did no coding when I was at Cambridge, we're going back 40 years, but now there are just so many different ways of being an engineer that hopefully that should make it easier for women or anybody with diversity to navigate and find a route through, versus the very kind of formulaic careers that they used to be.

Yeah, I hope so and I think so. And one big point that I always tell every woman early in her career: It gets easier in your career, because when you're first graduating, that's the worst time because you're nearly identical to every other candidate, right? So that's when these little biases are really going to have an impact. But once you have done a few projects, nobody else did those same few projects that you did. So you will differentiate yourself. And so every job you do is a step away from needing to be somewhere where you're discriminated against. I think that's really key, that the hardest part in most women's engineering career is right after graduation, and from then on, it's just easier and easier as you become more and more expert.

That's a very profound thought. So you've got to get past that bottleneck point straight after studies, pretty much, and then it gets easier. And of course, once you're Rosie the Engineer, there's no looking back.

It's really nice as well to be able to choose who you work with. Having my own consulting company, I'm pretty much exclusively the public face of the company. So people don't approach us if they're a raging sexist, and if I hate working with them, I don't have to work with them again. So you know, there's something in that as well.

Fantastic, Rosie, thank you so much for spending time with us today. It's been a fantastic tour from those early episodes that you did on wind energy through the philosophy of engineering, and then some really profound and hopefully useful thoughts for anybody who's trying to follow in your footsteps, whether they be women or anybody else. So thanks so much. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's been really fun.

So that was Rosie Barnes, Dr Rosemary Barnes — engineer, engineering consultant and host of the popular YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie. As always, we'll put links in the show notes to resources that we discuss during the episode. So that's Rosie's YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie, the debate held by the Center for Independent Studies on Australia's Nuclear Future. The episode with Professor Bent Flyvbjerg on how big things get done, that's episode 128 of Cleaning Up. And also to the energy cost calculator published by CSIRO, where you can play with the numbers yourself and figure out which would be cheaper: Australia's renewable future or Australia's nuclear future. Please make sure that you like episodes. Subscribe on YouTube or your favourite podcast platform and leave a review. That really helps other people to find us. Please recommend Cleaning Up to your friends and colleagues and sign up for our free newsletter at cleaninguppod.substack.com. That's cleaninguppod.substack.com. Cleaning Up is brought to you by the Liebreich Foundation, the Gilardini Foundation and EcoPragma Capital. Please join us next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.

The Climate Challenge is an Engineering Challenge - Ep171: Dr. Rosemary Barnes

Michael Liebreich

Rosemary Barnes

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