In the early 1990s Allan Jones, an engineer in a London suburb, Woking, proposed taking the borough off the grid by establishing a system of tri-generation. Tri-generation generates power locally, eliminating the wastage associated with transmission over long distances. It also combines heat and power. Rather than throwing the heat generated from power transmission away, it is recovered to heat buildings, provide hot water, and generate chilled water for air conditioning and refrigeration.
Jones promised that, by taking Woking off the national grid, emissions would drop sharply and power would actually become cheaper. He was so successful the approach is now being rolled out across London.
The Sydney City Council employed Jones in 2009 to bring the same approach to Australia. Jones told this author in an interview that he was hoping to demonstrate the efficacy of the method in Sydney in order to roll out the idea across Asia.
Jones, as the pioneering engineer, rightly gets most of the attention. But there were some other heroes who are never mentioned, the politicians in the Woking Council who decided to take the risk with such an ambitious plan.
They are very much out of the ordinary. If there is an enduring lesson from the tri-generation story it is that the main challenges with tackling global pollution are not technical, they are political. Most politicians lack the vision, courage and skill to take such risks, especially when it involves facing down the powerful business lobbies that usually fund them.
In Sydney, Jones found that the prevailing regulations allowed installation of a tri-generation plant in a single building, but made it extremely difficult to install bigger, more efficient plants that could supply electricity to a cluster of neighbouring buildings. The way the regulations worked, the network charges to move electricity across the road could be as large as bringing it down from the Hunter Valley.
Needless to say, this arrangement greatly favoured the incumbent power companies, and is preventing any meaningful change. The Sydney Council, which had taken a lead, has been left petitioning for a relaxation of the rules.
It is a familiar tale of regulations from previous eras being a barrier. Most pollution problems have design solutions; if we really want things fixed we should put engineers like Jones in charge. But that, of course, does not happen.
In light of this, clearly we need a new way of thinking about politics and policy. More than that though,