Copyright: Michalis Palis – Fotolia.com

Government officials are searching for policies that will meet the twin aims of providing jobs and meeting the UK’s climate change targets. It is proving a difficult task. The easiest ways of reducing fossil fuel use will probably not create many new jobs in the UK. All large wind turbines are built abroad and although the construction work on a nuclear power station will generate a few thousand jobs, most of the key components will need to come from Europe and Japan. So where are the opportunities? I think two major areas stand out as excellent ways of generating jobs quickly without also dragging in expensive imports or sharply raising prices.

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One opportunity is well understood. The UK’s houses are the worst insulated in northern Europe and the scope for improvement is clear. The other idea is newer. I think that massively increasing the availability and use of wood for fuel can generate large numbers of jobs both in forestry and in business such as horticulture that can productively use the cheap heat from small wood-burning power stations.

Housing
Initially government seems to have hoped that the clear need for improved heat retention means that the insulation industry could be used as a way of generating large numbers of jobs as an army of installers laid thick wads of cladding in UK lofts. But once the Department of Energy and Climate Change had worked out the numbers, it looked as though the potential for extra employment was limited.

I think that the department was far too pessimistic when it looked at the opportunity. Although it is true that almost all UK houses now have loft insulation, remarkably few have a thick enough layer. Most commentators say that increasing the thickness to at least 25cm (10 inches) will save more in central heating bills than it costs. My estimate is that at least 15 million homes could profitably increase their loft insulation to this level. A large-scale programme of installation would reduce UK gas consumption and provide tens of thousands of jobs for several years.

However, lofts should not be the biggest focus of the green new deal. They are responsible for less than 10% of the heating losses of a typical house. Far more heat leaves through walls, windows, and floors. Surprisingly, almost as much energy is lost through doors as through the roof. Losses from draughts are also far more important than the loft. A sustained national programme to improve the heat retention characteristics of our housing would be hugely beneficial. It would reduce fuel bills, cut the UK’s use of insecure supplies of Russian gas, and provide the prospect of employment for hundreds of thousands of people in manufacturing and installation industries. We should be installing cavity wall insulation in millions of homes, replacing leaky single-glazed windows, carefully repairing draughty floors and walls, and hanging properly insulated well-fitting doors. All simple and straightforward measures that can be taken using British-made goods and newly trained people. More complicated schemes such as re-cladding blocks of flats make even more sense financially, but will require us to import some skills and products from Europe. For the average house, a saving of 30% of the heating bill is easily achievable.

How would we finance this programme? We can copy the successful features of the German eco-renovation policies which are now systematically reducing energy use in several hundred thousand homes each year. Through soft loans, grants for achieving energy reduction targets, and other measures, householders and landlords have been incentivised to take measures that sometimes cut domestic heat need by 80% or more. The German government claims that the cost per tonne of carbon saved is impressively low and trumpets that household emissions of greenhouse gases have fallen by a third since 1990. This finding chimes with what we already know: house insulation makes financial sense and people just need the right incentives and advice. The Energy and Climate Change people should look again at the scope of generating jobs and reducing emissions.

Woodland
The UK is one of the least forested countries in the temperate world. Only about 11% of the land area is covered by trees. Simply planting more trees would have value: they will soak up CO2, reduce the risk of catastrophic flooding in times of intense storms, and possibly help reduce summer peak temperatures. Of course people would be employed planting and looking after the trees. But the even more important objective is to reduce fossil fuel use by replacing coal and gas. In other northern countries, wood fuel provides a substantial fraction of total heat needs through district heating systems that burn the wood in central plants and then distribute hot water to local homes. This replaces the need to use gas or oil. Increasingly, these wood-fuelled heating plants are also generating electricity as well using turbines. The UK could aim to install thousands of small-scale wood-burning (or, more likely, wood gasification) plants dotted around forested areas.

There’s little competition from other users for wood in many areas of the country. Even in woodlands close to major cities, such as the Chilterns, prime wood is increasingly left unused. Beautiful wooded areas won’t stay that way if we don’t manage them properly. Creating a market for wood by encouraging the growth of small-scale local electricity generators is an excellent way of incentivising proper care of our woodlands.

How much difference could a major reforestation plan make? Moving the UK from 11 to 12% forest cover would add 250,000 hectares of woodland. Fast-growing species might produce a yearly yield of up to 10 tonnes per hectare, with enough energy to replace over 5% of our electricity need for ever, as well as huge amounts of useful heat. The reduction in UK emissions is potentially worth tens of millions of tonnes a year. But is it a feasible target to increase woodlands by 250,000 hectares? Think of it this way: China has reforested 4 million hectares every year for the last two decades. So of course it is possible and, moreover, much of the employment would be in areas of low incomes and poor job prospects. Planting and nurturing young trees is a skilled job, and these skills have atrophied in the UK in recent years. But given the right incentives, traditional farmers could hire and train the people needed to plant large areas of fast-growing coppices.

The best use for the heat from wood-using power plants would be in homes and other buildings such as offices and schools. But we should also use spare heat for a new generation of horticultural greenhouses. The fall in the value of the pound has made imported fruit and vegetables expensive. We could grow much more food in the UK using cheap heat and some electricity from small wood power stations for glasshouses. The great advantage of this is that horticulture is highly labour intensive and so it can revive areas of limited prosperity such as Cornwall. Replacing Dutch and Spanish fruit and vegetables with home-produced products in greenhouses heated by local wood could transform the economic prospects of parts of the UK. The percentage of the Dutch labour force working in agriculture is almost three times the level here and widely available cheap heat could pull the UK back up towards the Dutch employment level.

Is such a plan financially possible? I think that at current prices for advanced small-scale electricity plants wood is probably just about economic as a source of heat and electricity. As with other low-carbon technologies, we need to reduce further the cost of the plant and equipment. This will happen as more small wood power stations are installed and manufacturing costs are reduced. With some sensible government support, a plan to reforest 1 or 2% of the UK clearly makes economic sense, not least because of its potential employment impact and for its effect on carbon reduction.

Video conferencing has been around for a surprisingly long time. AT&T ran the first call in 1927. Since then, pundits have been consistently predicting that video conferencing was just about to take off. They have been wrong for eighty years. Why should we believe the techno-optimists now?

In the last year, several companies have launched video conferencing products that provide an experience similar to real meetings. The quality is surprising and even sceptics have begun to see the advantages of using a meeting room for an hour rather than spending three days going to Hong Kong and back. Cisco’s Telepresence product is generating enthusiasm that is tempered by the enormous costs of setting up the equipment and providing the bandwidth. But the company says that prices will fall dramatically over the next few years.

Is this going to be enough to get people out of planes? The signs are good. Even low bandwidth alternatives suitable for home use are getting praise from the experts. So if Cisco doesn’t make video conferencing work, Bay Area start-ups like VSee will probably start eating into the market for lower cost products.

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Video conferencing: why we need it to work
UK companies are increasingly promising ‘carbon neutrality’ to their stakeholders. Electricity consumption can be neutralised by the purchase of energy from renewable sources. Gas is more difficult to counter-balance, but is a small element in most firms’ carbon emissions.

Carbon produced by travel is an increasingly important part of the budget of most large companies. Amongst the very largest companies, business flights dominate the total emissions from employee travel. And as air travel is perceived to get more time-consuming, stressful and unproductive, some companies are beginning to investigate much more extensive use of video conferencing. Other than investing in dubious ‘offsetting’ projects, video conferencing may be the most plausible way of beginning to hold down the apparently inexorable rise in air travel.

The previous generation of video conferencing products are widely regarded as wholly unsuitable replacements for meetings. The experience seems to be that only groups well know to each other with similar professional backgrounds can work around the deficiencies in older conferencing products. The new generation of video conferencing, universally called ‘telepresence’, is clearly a huge advance on the old systems. First reports from companies that have installed the expensive technology are extremely favourable. The computing press reports a Wachovia bank executive saying that telepresence suites were already in use 45% of the time within two months of installation. The previous kit had never got above 20%. Tate and Lyle is quoted as saying that the new service makes good financial sense because the typical trip between the UK and US headquarters costs $25,000 and three days of senior executive time.

Video conferencing still has a long way to go. I have only found two large UK companies that report their hours of video conferencing use: Pearson and Reed Elsevier. Both companies are diversified publishing companies with widely dispersed operations and very high levels of air travel per employee. Pearson employees travel an average of 4,000 miles a year by air, down slightly last year but still rising at approximately 1% a year over a longer period. Air travel represents over two thirds of all business travel. The company used its video conferencing suites for a total of 9,000 hours last year, up significantly in 2006, but still a tiny fraction of the time spent travelling by air. The average employee spend less than 20 minutes in video conferencing last year. The time taken to travel the average 4,000 miles by air was probably the best part of a working week.

The air travel of Reed employees was up 5% last year, and accounted for 45,000 tonnes of emissions or about a tonne and a half per employee. Its advanced ‘collaboration’ suites saved about 323 tonnes, or less than 1% of the air travel figure.

We are not going to stop the need for international collaboration. The general quality of these collaborations is widely thought to be poor, largely because people don’t spend enough time together. The impulse to travel more and more will remain unless we can really get video conferencing to work.

The problems with video conferencing
One source describes working with another person over a video conferencing link as being similar to collaborating with a ‘mentally defective foreigner’. What goes wrong?

• Audio needs to be synched with video. But sound is easier to process and tends to arrive first. If the voice reaches the listener too early, the speaker tends to be perceived as untrustworthy and glib. If an adjustment is made to correct this and the video arrives first, the remote person is seen as stupid and slow-witted.
• Social protocols demand that people look at each other directly. A conferencing system that gives the user an impression that his or her interlocutor is looking more than 3 degrees away from the eyes will make the user uncomfortable, and give an impression of disrespect.
• Successful oral communication demands rapid and seamless switching between people in the conversation. Bad videoconferencing makes this more difficult than in an audio call.
• Most clues to the speaker that he or she is boring the audience, confusing them or patronising them are non-verbal. For example, few people actually say that a conversation bores them; they give subtle and not so subtle clues to their conversation partner. Video conferencing prompts the bored person to offer these clues, but they are not received by the other person. The speaker does not adjust his or her communication style. Irritation ensues.
• Similarly, people implicitly expect video conferencing technologies to make their speech persuasive (which is one of the reasons why one wants to speak face-to-face). It does not and everybody finds the interchange unsatisfactory.

In summary, bad video is worse than no video. The availability of a picture sets up an expectation that normal free-flowing conversation is going to take place. So both parties behave as if they were in a conventional face-to-face meeting, in which verbal and non-verbal clues are being unconsciously processed. A phone conversation would have been better because we would have adjusted to the well-understood restrictions on our communications ability.

What Cisco, Teliris, and others have done
Cisco’s telepresence product has been on the market for a year or so. Most users speak glowingly of its usefulness. Other products such as the one from Teliris also get enthusiastic reviews. People say that these new products both reduce travel and increase the number of meetings across geographically remote teams. If this first flush of success is maintained, we can hope that video conferencing will eventually reduce the need for business travel.

What are the key features of these products?

• Video conferencing takes place in a specially designed room. Each room around the world looks the same, even down to the wallpaper and light fittings. Each ‘side’ of a video conference has half an oval table – the other half is in the remote room.
• High definition plasma screens fill the opposite wall. Very clear images of the people in the other room are shown.
• Video and audio are precisely synched. People look directly at each other. The sound of speech comes from the direction of the other person. One set of user comments suggests that the Teliris product is better than the Cisco version because it gives equal visual ‘weight’ to people across the remote room while Cisco emphasises the centre of the screen.
• People are life-size.
• Video frame refresh rates are extremely high. Cisco mentions 30 new frames a second.
• Unusually for Cisco, it developed the technology internally. Cisco sees the product as an enhancement to its existing VoIP product. It has simply added video. This seems a strange comment, but Cisco was clearly determined to avoid the poor image of conventional video conferencing. It decided to sell the product as in some sense an enhancement of its existing easy-to-use network VoIP offering.
• Cisco’s product works over the corporation’s existing data network (powered by Cisco routers, of course). Teleris offers users its own data network.

The costs are intimidating. To prepare a full room, with several plasma screens on the remote wall, Cisco charge $300,000 (and the same for the other end). A much more restricted product with just one screen sells for $80,000. The monthly cost is said to be ‘$3-5,000’.

All the evidence so far points to successful introductions of the new range of telepresence products, whether from Cisco, Teliris, HP or Tandberg. Data is scarce, but Teliris says that its customers added 50 rooms in the second quarter of this year.

What is going to happen to the costs in the future? Cisco claims that good telepresence products will eventually become viable in the home office. (CEO John Chambers already has one at home.) We expect outrageous techno-optimism from Cisco, and this looks a little on the unrealistic side. Others say that the cost will never fall below $10,000 a room. At this level, it may not make sense for many home workers, but for a senior executive it seems perfectly possible that he or she will eventually equip a room. Bandwidth may be a more intractable issue.

Early results on the sociology of use
One large bank I spoke to said that the telepresence room was in high demand, and much liked by those who used it. The bank was seeing demand from people who didn’t really need the video element of the conversation and was restricting its use to the most senior executives. A board meeting had taken place via telepresence with one senior member calling in from London, thus avoiding a long international flight. These signs look good – if the heavy hitters want to stop the middle ranks from using the rooms, there is clearly a high status attached to making a video call. If a board meeting can take place in the rooms, we can see this as a further endorsement of its acceptability for important discussions. But true success will only come when the senior investment bankers get a new deal mandate via telepresence. Then the barriers really will come down.

Other anecdotal material suggests that exposing junior team members to each other via telepresence has had a good effect on trust and morale. Many international collaborations run into the sand because team members do not trust the other parties to deliver on what they promised. The possibility of holding every participant to account via a telepresence conversation seems to be improving productivity and providing a sense that people are genuinely working together.

The cheaper alternatives
Cisco and its competitors are focusing on offering a product that tries to replicate face-to-face meetings with as much fidelity as possible. Low latency life-size images are extremely expensive in bandwidth to transmit. Other companies such as VSee believe that we can solve the psychological problems with conventional video conferencing by understanding what really impedes communication. VSee says, for example, that we don’t need high frame rates to offer real improvements over existing products. Cisco gives us 30 a second, but VSee says that only 5 is perfectly satisfactory, provided we get good synch between audio and video. Similarly VSee says that we don’t need a life-size image to talk to, but we do need to offer the ability to look straight into the eye. By careful research into what really makes a video conversation work, VSee says it has hugely reduced bandwidth requirements. It has also incorporated true collaboration tools, such as ‘laser pens’ for PowerPoint presentations, that enable more immediate and compelling mutual understanding. VSee says it can operate effectively at conventional broadband speeds.

I don’t know whether VSee will work: I couldn’t find another user with whom to try out the product. But for close collaborators who know each other well, I suspect an intelligent product that works round the old problems with video conferencing can operate at surprisingly low data speeds. We won’t always need a glossy room costing $300,000 for our conversations across the world.