A New Space Race in the UK

Six months before hosting the COP26 event in 2021, the UK Government made what it described as “the world’s most ambitious climate change target”: to cut emissions by 78% before 2035 (relative to 1990 levels).

This ambitious target follows considerable progress on energy decarbonization in recent years. Only 1.8% of the UK’s electricity was from coal-fired power plants in 2020, down from 40% a decade ago,

while wind power has grown by 715% over a similar period.

Infrastructure owners, developers and operators have played a key role in the UK’s progress, both in the development of more sustainable assets and in greening their own practices. In our survey, 64% of UK respondents say their organization adopted significant low-carbon or net zero targets for the first time within the past five years, and a similar proportion (66%) believe their organization will become a net zero contributor to global carbon emissions in, or before, 2025.

“Attitudes to sustainability, environmental performance and renewable energy have probably changed in advance of legislation in recent years,” says Ewan Jones, Partner at Grimshaw, a multinational architectural firm, headquartered in London. “In the building context, developers have adopted their own targets, while buyers and tenants have also started demanding more sustainable places in which to live and work.”

In fact, UK respondents to our survey consider carbon emissions and sustainability to be the joint second highest priority for future infrastructure investments and/or projects (alongside market competitiveness and behind only cost efficiency).  

Across all the countries we surveyed, two thirds (67%) of energy industry respondents said that net zero energy is impossible without digitalization. This makes it somewhat concerning that a moderate majority of UK respondents (63%) believe that the digitalization of buildings and power networks is lagging the progress of digitalization in of most other industries, while only 21% say that their organization is making full use of the data they have available – a figure that is quite a lot lower than the all-country average of 31%.

This result indicates that there is enormous potential for digitalization and data-driven strategies to start to – or continue to – transform infrastructure performance. UK respondents expect blockchain secured data flows, contracts, and transactions to have the biggest impact on infrastructure assets, projects, or investments over the next five years. There are several roles for blockchain in energy trading and grid coordination as the UK continues to evolve towards a distributed, decarbonized, and digitalized energy system. These include authenticating renewable energy, helping consumers trade electricity with each other directly, and allowing for two-way, dynamic tariffs between prosumers and the wholesale energy market. 

Greater data availability, exchange, and integration are fundamental to the digitalization of infrastructure, but these are also areas that involve several industry-specific challenges. Simulations exemplify this: “Building information modelling is often pretty crude compared to, for example, what you might find in the automotive industry, because buildings are not mass-produced and the scale of buildings also means that it takes a massive quantity of data to create a detailed, digital model,” says Jones. “At the moment, there are multiple models built for different purposes by different stakeholders – it is a fragmented industry, and so we have fragmented models. There is a lot of scope for that to get better.”