…we’re bound to keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

About 15-20 years ago, a local regeneration body tasked the team I ran at the University of Teesside with assessing green business parks around the world to determine how to develop one on Teesside. The team googled like mad, found dozens of examples and sent out a brief questionnaire. We waited and waited – but we got a pitiful return. When the team started following up, it soon became clear that most of the parks had failed to pass the concept stage. The few that had been built had all mutated into a bog standard business park. The park might have had some green bling, but most businesses were web design companies, app developers or finance companies. I was recently passed a report on green economic development which had a section on, wait for it, green business parks. I googled a couple quoted and, guess what… yup, at least 75% of park tenants weren’t obviously ‘green’ companies.

While I was based on Teesside, the big thing locally was the hydrogen economy which was going to both revitalise the local heavy industry and solve the climate crisis. At least one of our big Sustainability projects (on using waste heat) hit the buffers because it was seen by people of influence as encroaching on the hydrogen patch. As far as I’m aware, the hydrogen economy didn’t evolve past a couple of extremely small demonstration projects like powering a sign on the Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge (which would’ve been much better sticking to electricity rather than adding a couple of energy conversion steps). And almost 20 years later, we are still told by some that we shouldn’t pursue, say, electric vehicles or heat pumps, because hydrogen is going to save the day.

I recently cycled past the vacant site of the proposed BritishVolt EV battery gigafactory (see pic). When the project was in its initial hype phase, I was asked to partner another company in pitching our combined services. I demurred, saying I had seen four or five such projects over the decades where it turned out there was nothing behind the smoke and mirrors – and I just couldn’t see what BritishVolt had to sell other than a dream. And, unfortunately, I was right – seemingly the only other people unimpressed with the BritishVolt pitch were potential customers.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to see a thriving green business sector, I would love to see the green hydrogen economy take off and we desperately need EV battery gigafactories. But we have limited time, money and energy, so making the same mistakes over and over again is an indulgence we cannot afford. Yes we have to take risks, but the most important word in ‘learn by doing’ is LEARN!