For the last two days I’ve been at the Net Zero North East England Summit, our regional annual get together. It was great to talk to so many people, old faces and new – at times it just felt I was segueing from one conversation to another with a series of people with hardly a moment to spare. Here’s some notes I took over the two days:

• Fascinating keynote from Prof Richard Dawson of Newcastle University on the need to build climate resilience into low carbon infrastructure and stress testing the target of a zero carbon grid by 2035 (spoiler: it can be done).
• In the first panel session, Paul Glendinning of Northern Power Grid dropped some amazing stats on the evolution of the grid in the North of England, suggesting a zero carbon grid could be exporting clean energy by 2028 given their current queue of supply, storage and demand projects. I would have loved a chance to dig into this in more detail as it sounded very exciting indeed.
• In a session on a regional green economy, GeoPura talked about their business replacing diesel generators with green hydrogen units. I asked a somewhat unwelcome question about whether the hydrogen economy could ever break out of such niches given its basic thermodynamic inefficiencies. The answer that “we need every tool” still doesn’t convince me that hydrogen hasn’t soaked up a huge amount of public money with very little to show from it.
• I’ve heard Andrew Jenkins of Kinewell explain before how AI can help design the layout of turbines in a wind farm to maximise output (taking into account the effect of turbulence from one turbine on its neighbours) but I still like hearing it.
• I’ve known Matthew Lumsden of Connected Energy for many, many years, but it was great to hear how his business takes EV batteries when they are past their best (70% charge retention) and uses them in static applications until they drop to 50% charge retention. Some great points about how he built a series of collaborations with EV manufacturers and users to do this.
• Another slightly awkward moment when the speaker from Equinor was asked about how much of the current business was oil and gas (90% – I guess the questioner knew the answer). He trod a careful line explaining the company’s medium term targets while making it clear he was at the company to maximise the renewables side of the business.
• The big announcement at the event was the launch of the North East Carbon Marketplace – which will sell carbon credits to regional business to fund regional net zero projects. I had a chuckle to myself as 20 years ago I was on the board of Carbon Neutral North East which tried to do the same thing until incoming ‘additionality’ guidelines ruled out projects in Kyoto-protocol countries. I believe that driving offsets overseas (and thus out of sight) was one of the factors that has led to the failure of the current offset market. It is easy to rue what could have been delivered with this mechanism over the last two decades, but great to see the concept is back.
• Fascinating discussion on climate adaptation. When Emma Wright of the National Trust explained how creating “soggy bits” at Wallington (with a little help from some beavers) was protecting the good citizens of flood-prone Morpeth 12 miles downstream, I mused that we needed to align incentives so those at risk of flooding could help fund the solutions. For example, could a market mechanism enable, say, insurance companies fund farmers and landowners to provide flood prevention services upstream of vulnerable places? I suspect that the place-based nature of adaptation would make this very difficult (he says shooting down his own idea).
• In the exhibition, I loved talking to the guys looking to extract lithium from mine water expected to be used in a low carbon heat project in the North Pennines. My kind of thinking.
• I enjoyed my site visit on Tuesday to the Gateshead Energy Company’s heat and power networks (powered by solar, mine water and gas) which I hadn’t visited before despite being a stone’s throw from home (I walked home afterwards). Interesting discussion on Wednesday on engaging the public on alternative heat sources, given gas boilers are looking like the next totem of the culture warriors.  Belinda Humphrey of the Gateshead Energy Company suggested that a heat network was a much easier sell than individual heat pumps.

So, an excellent event featuring lots of excellent ideas, projects, businesses and, of course, people. My overall impression is that the region is finally shifting from talking, planning and piloting (a cynic would say paralysis by analysis) to actually implementing proper commercial projects – the next challenge is to scale up that implementation until the low carbon/circular economy is the norm. We can do this!