Lucy Yu. Putting people and real-world data at the heart of energy research.
Data-driven climate action.
All photos courtesy of Lucy Yu
PEOPLE
From the highly competitive UK Civil Service graduate programme, to CEO of Centre for Net Zero, in just two decades Lucy Yu has gathered astounding insight into the ways the public and private sector can drive towards a better future. She talks to us about how she’s channelling her expertise into tackling the climate crisis.
Q How has your varied career evolved over the years, Lucy?
LY I initially trained as a scientist at Imperial College so I learnt a lot about scientific rigour, critical thinking and research methodology. I soon realised that I wanted to be somewhere where I could directly see the real-world impact of my work and make a difference, so I applied for a role in Government. For my first placement, I was assigned to the office of the Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for Transport right at the beginning of a wave of technology-driven transformation. It’s a wave that’s continued to the present day and ushered in innovations that the majority of us now take for granted in our daily lives: digital maps and payments; real-time transport information, journey planning and state-of-the-art retail logistics; ride-hailing and shared mobility; connected vehicles and driver assistance systems...the list goes on.
After several other posts over the next few years (including a couple of top secret clearance roles!), I was approached by an ex-colleague to join an early stage startup developing AI powered software for smartphones. I’d had an interest in startups ever since my university days (several of my lecturers had run their own spinout companies and I often found hearing about these to be more interesting than their actual lecture courses) and so the opportunity appealed to me. It was in the years before everybody had a smartphone and we could see a touchscreen interface was coming, presenting huge opportunities for software innovation. Ultimately the software we built ended up becoming the number one app worldwide for both Android and iOS and the company won countless global awards for innovation before selling to Microsoft.
During the years that followed I was involved in a variety of roles centred around the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, Agile software development, micromobility and even a brand new further education college focused on digital skills! Along the way I’ve ended up gathering an incredible entrepreneurial tech network and a vast network of global policy wonks and regulators. So, starting up Centre for Net Zero is really just a coming together of all of my experience, interests and networks, for a purpose I’ve felt strongly about since childhood.
It’s going to take unprecedented cooperation to tackle the climate challenge.
Q How do you see tech, government, and research coming together to tackle climate change, both in the UK and globally?
LY I’ve always had a keen interest in environmental and sustainability issues but it’s clear that making serious inroads into the climate crisis isn’t something that Government, research, or the tech sector can solve alone. It’s going to take unprecedented cooperation to tackle the climate challenge. I think the Covid-19 pandemic has given us some insights into what that could look like and how it could be mobilised at global scale: governments issuing ‘challenge based’ requirements; supporting through upfront funding (or contracts to purchase); and underwriting risk to support rapid innovation and market entry, and provide protections to industry. During the pandemic we saw all sorts of businesses and researchers come together to produce ventilators, PPE and, of course, vaccinations – great examples of global knowledge sharing and collaboration. We need to reproduce the best elements of that to tackle climate change.
Q What are some of the most exciting innovations or collaborations you’ve seen in the en-tech industry and how do you see the built environment fitting into that?
LY Buildings and infrastructure need to be fit for the world we’re moving into, not just based on things as they are today. Historically – and with the notable exception of a handful of countries – there hasn’t necessarily been a very close or strategic relationship between the building and energy sectors.
In the future we need to see much stronger collaboration between the energy and built environment sectors to support at least three fundamental shifts. The first is to repurpose land to take developments to the existing power grid infrastructure where it makes sense to do so, instead of building the grid out to new developments – this can avoid significant additional costs of grid infrastructure. The second is to make every building smarter and more sustainable through retrofit, modifications and good design and materials choices. And the third is to bring community and local energy planning into the design of all new developments – district heating, local solar PV and small grid-scale storage being three interesting examples of things that are yet to be exploited to their full potential.
Centre for Net Zero team
Q What’s your vision for Centre for Net Zero?
LY We’re here to move the needle on climate and energy policy, globally. We don’t have the luxury of time, so we’re moving quickly with our own research and planning solutions to scale our impact quickly. One of the ways we’re doing that is by building our climate and energy models so they can be easily adapted and reused by others around the world – and open sourcing the software. That means if you’re interested in modelling (for instance) buildings and heat (or cooling) or transport decarbonisation pathways in some specific part of the world, you can plug your own data into our models and play around with the assumptions and inputs to make them more relevant to your local environment. We’re especially interested in cities because they make a disproportionately large contribution to greenhouse gas emissions – so making inroads into decarbonising cities is particularly important. In the next 12 months we’ll work more closely with place leaders to help them develop their local Net Zero strategies.
Pretty much every person on the planet relies on heating (or cooling) and transport, so every dwelling needs to go through the transition to net zero at some point. Awareness of low carbon technologies is still low in a lot of places. Industry can help here – by educating consumers, investing in R&D to bring costs down, and building propositions that make purchasing and owning green technologies as simple and effortless as possible.
Having a model that allows for all the variety of the real world means we can model the impact of different policy decisions in a people-centred way.
Q What’s your experience of coming on board as CEO?
LY There are so many people and organisations talking about the climate emergency and the energy transition – but talking about these things is really the equivalent of level one of a 100 level game. I knew from day one that we had to be focused on having the highest impact possible, as quickly as possible. In practice this has meant being ruthless about the scope of our work and having the conviction to publish ‘good enough’ work early on, accepting and acknowledging where it has limitations.
Of course I’ve also had the unorthodox experience of building a completely new organisation from scratch in the middle of a pandemic-induced lockdown! Some weeks and months I’ve been incredibly busy while barely setting foot outside my house.
Q What are some of the most exciting innovations or collaborations you’ve seen in the en-tech industry and how do you see the built environment fitting into that?
LY Buildings and infrastructure need to be fit for the world we’re moving into, not just based on things as they are today. Historically – and with the notable exception of a handful of countries – there hasn’t necessarily been a very close or strategic relationship between the building and energy sectors.
In the future we need to see much stronger collaboration between the energy and built environment sectors to support at least three fundamental shifts. The first is to repurpose land to take developments to the existing power grid infrastructure where it makes sense to do so, instead of building the grid out to new developments – this can avoid significant additional costs of grid infrastructure. The second is to make every building smarter and more sustainable through retrofit, modifications and good design and materials choices. And the third is to bring community and local energy planning into the design of all new developments – district heating, local solar PV and small grid-scale storage being three interesting examples of things that are yet to be exploited to their full potential.
Q How important is cross-collaboration and breaking down mindset barriers when it comes to net zero?
LY A few years ago I spent some time studying change leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School. We focused on change that requires cooperation between public and private sectors and worked with the most extraordinary set of real-world case studies of people who had mobilised system-level change in their communities, cities and regions. The one common thread through them all was the sheer challenge and grit needed to go through these stages of public awareness, education, acceptance and finally support – all of these incredible public leaders doing great things but encountering such public resistance.
Winning over hearts and minds is hard, even if you’re equipped with evidence to prove it’s the right thing to do. This is why the approach that we’re taking at Centre for Net Zero is so valuable. We’re using an agent-based model for our research. The advantage is that we can have agents that are people and households. We all know that people and households are not homogeneous and they make different decisions. Having a model that allows for all the variety of the real world means we can model the impact of different policy decisions in a people-centred way, reflecting what happens when individual people and households have agency. This is an important point – nobody ever likes to have change done to them, even if they might benefit from it. If we accept that people must have agency, then it’s very useful to be able to model what the expected outcomes will be.
Nobody ever likes to have change done to them, even if they might benefit from it. If we accept that people must have agency, then it’s very useful to be able to model what the expected outcomes will be.
Q And finally, what gets you excited about the coming years?
LY For the next few years, I’m excited about the sheer scale of investment that we’ll see piling into climate and energy, both private and public. Investment unlocks ingenuity and ingenuity means innovation. So we can be very confident that we’ll see inspiring new green businesses and products coming to market for the first time and some of them will be global household names of the future.
I’m also excited about some of the technology developments and applications we’ll see over this timeframe – there is a saying that we tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long run – and it’s easy to point to examples of that in other areas of our lives. In particular, I think we’ll see very widespread application of AI right across future energy systems.
Looking into the next few decades, there are plenty of things that can give us hope and optimism. Over these timeframes, the natural churn of politics means we’ll reach the point at which today’s school children will be running the show. This generation is digitally native but adopt different and more sophisticated attitudes to resources, sustainability and consumerism compared to those of my generation, or before.
I think they might surprise us all with the boldness of the policies they introduce and their willingness to embrace data and technology to hold the most inveterate polluters to account…