Nothing Unknown or Reasonably Unknowable

How a deadly fire can inform the energy transition.

New Fear Unlocked

My son recently shared a video-short of fish swarming as food is dropped off an oil rig.  In true gamer-speak this was entitled “New Fear Unlocked” – I pointed out that in many locations such as offshore Angola, you’d see a whole bunch of sharks also - adding to my store of “Dad Lore”.  But this got me thinking that when drilling offshore for oil, the fish swarming and even the sharks are not your primary risk/concern.  With some very tragic exceptions, safety is paramount; with regulations, work rules and procedures, training and individual responsibility all building a safety culture.  You mointor rule-breaking, near-misses and minor incidents as leading-indicators of problems ahead. You are invested because you are directly at risk.

Risk vs Utility

We have become so good at reducing risks that we (as a society) seem to think that there should be no risks.   Of course this isn’t really true – we all know that, for example, driving has inherent risk – yet we do it anyway.  This is because the utility provided outweighs the risk (or the perceived risk).   France had particularly bad stats on per-capita death rates until they plastered the country with speed cameras.   Taking this logic to an absurd end-point one could argue that the only way to make driving 100% safe would be to have a speed limit of zero.  Since this then also reduces the utility to zero it is not a solution, but there is some function equating speed-limits and accident rates – and somehow society has decided that there is an acceptable balance – we accept a level of risk for some level of utility - we accept that there are “trade-offs”.

Burning Down The House

I have just listened to a short, but very thought-provoking BBC podcast (“Building a Disaster”) which discusses the Grenfell disaster in the UK in 2017.  For those outside the UK, this was an horrific building fire in which 72 people perished. 

Link

Grenfell Tower was a social housing building in the (very) wealthy London borough of Kensington and Chelsea (“RBKC”) that caught fire in the middle of the night from a banal electrical problem with a refrigerator.  Tragically the fire, instead of being contained with the apartment, spread rapidly via the insulation and cladding on the outside of the building.  It is not my intention to repeat the content of the podcast (which is an impressive distilation of a very complex event and inquiry – it is well worth the time), but look at certain aspects of the events that combined to create this disaster.  Those that know my writing will have already understood that this post is really about Energy Security.  Read on!

Nothing “Unknown or Reasonably Unknowable”

As part of the summation of the Public Enquiry it was noted that “there was nothing unknown or reasonably unknowable” in the causes.  There was of course a tragic series of events, including laziness, incompetence, fraud and potentially criminal liability (legal cases are on-going) that combined – but as per the above quote – there was no “unknown unknown”, no “Black Swan” event to blame.

Indeed, for me the most shocking part of all is the clear evidence that people knew that there was an accident waiting to happen.

Major fires turning high-rise buildings into “towering infernos” had occurred in other countries, China, UAE etc – but there was a view that thanks to our supposed better regulations and rules – “it couldn’t happen here”.

But then it did.

Garnock Court in Irvine in Scotland caught fire from a cigarette butt on the 11^th of June 1999.  Fire spread rapidly via plastic cladding, resulting in one death.  A parliamentary inquiry was set up, and local politicians pushed to have all flammable cladding removed.  Scotland enforced strict codes, England and Wales didn’t.

And then again.

In 2009 there was a fire in an different tower block in London.  The Lackanal House fire killed 6 people because it spread rapidly up the 14 story edifice. Significantly the fire started at four o’clock in the afternoon, which meant a lot of people were out and not sleeping.

In 2014, a Barbara Lane, a Chartered Fire Safety Engineer, referred to the on-going use of flammable cladding as “an accident waiting to happen”.

In 2016  a member of the All Party Group on Fire Safety (“APGFS”)¹ told senior civil servants that: “If a fire like Lakanal house happened at night and residents were asleep, there could be ten-times as many deaths”.  The reply he reports from a civil servant is shockingly dismissive (“Where’s the evidence? Show me the bodies”)

The Signs Were There

The podcast reports that despite multiple clear warnings no action was taken.  Various explanations are mooted.

At the political level, there was no focus on lessons-learned and whether regulations were fit-for-purpose.  In addition, there was a great deal of churn, with ministers responsible for fire safety changing three times in three years leading up to Grenfell.²

The pod-cast notes that despite the Lakanal house deaths, overall fire-related accidents and deaths were declining – leading to a false sense of security and justification for inaction.

However - and this is the biggest flag linking this story to Energy Security – the inquiry noted that this complacent view was held by senior politicians despite a litany of “near misses”.   This is like the old anecdote (used as the opening to the iconic French film “La Haine”) about someone falling from a tall building, and as each floor whips past, they say to themselves – “so far, so good”!

Beyond the political oversight and problems with regulations, the Grenfell tragedy was caused by fire spreading up the outside of the building via insulation and cladding materials.  The speed and spread of the fire made the standard advice of “stay put” a death sentence for those on the upper floors.  The standard procedure works when a fire remains contained within an individual apartment (which can be up to 60 minutes).

Why Did The Fire Spread So Fast?

The most egregious cause was the deliberate manipulation of fire-testing to obtain certificates, combined with deliberate misrepresentation of these tests (done in extremely favourable and specific circumstances, but applied to all situations).   The manufacturers were 100% focused on sales targets, despite their own damning evidence of fire safety issues.³

In addition, the ultimate choice of insulation and cladding was based on cost not safety, not unsurprisingly, the most expensive materials were the ones that had adequate fire-safety test results.

Smaller, almost insignificant decisions played their part – the building owners had prevaricated on fixing automatic door-closers on apartment front-doors.  Fleeing residents unwittingly left doors open accelerating the spread of the fire.  Cost was cited.

In addition to this, there is a theme running through the pod-cast of the complexity of the system and no-one having an overall responsibility.  Manufactures of catastrophically inflammable materials, dodgy certification, architects relying on the certification and not checking the details, regulations being relaxed⁴ as part of a policy of “ripping up the red-tape holding back growth”, regulators being lazy or incompetent, building firms using layers of sub-contractors – everyone assuming someone else was responsible for safety.  The complete opposite of the safety culture on oil rigs I noted in the introduction.

There were examples of individuals standing up and asking the right questions – notably Nick Jenkins from Euroclad at an industry conference – as well as the Fire-Chief quoted above with his warning via the APGFS.

Managing The Aftermath

One of the interviewees refers to Grenfell as a “tragedy in three acts”.  The failure of manufacturers, architects, regulators to anticipate, the violence of the fire itself and the way in which the victims were abandoned by the relevant authorities during and after the fire.  As I noted in the introduction. The RBKC is one of the UK’s wealthiest boroughs – and even with a well structured “Mutual Assistance” agreement with neighbouring boroughs, it couldn’t cope with this single building fire.  A major energy outage would be a disaster on a completely different scale, with the potential for rapid breakdown of civil society.  Be afriad.

Trade-offs

Throughout the podcast we are reminded of the “trade-offs” that cost 72 lives. In the case of Grenfell, this was almost always profit vs safety. Although we can also note the trade-off between “excessive” vs “inadequate” regulations, and the trade-off of “business as usual” vs admitting there was a serious problem (- this is the one Scotland acted on).

When thinking about the Energy Transition, Net-Zero ambitions and Energy Security - we have to consider a very broad range of trade-offs. For some people this is simple: we should “Just Stop Oil” because the climate is an immediate and existential threat. For others there is simply no trade-off: the future energy system will cleaner, greener and cheaper. My view is that there are complex trade-offs, and simply denying them is a sure way to go quickly down the road to ruin.

Despite MSM activism, the public is beginning to understand that economic decline may be a price not worth paying; certainly not on a unilateral basis.

Lessons

• The most relevant lesson is that the noted “increasing frequency of near misses” was a leading indicator of an imminent tragedy.  With the benefit of hindsight, this looks almost criminal in relation to Grenfell. However, we can see this is happening now in electricity grids in developed nations and it should be a massive red flag.

• Seeing problems in other jurisdictions and thinking that “it couldn’t happen here” should be strongly challenged

• Allow, and listen to, dissenting opinions. The complexity of a system ensures root-causes are hard to identify, and individual voices calling out issues can easily be ignored.  In the case of Grenfell the political move to weaken regulations was exploited by the oldest bug-bear of greed.  In the case of our energy systems the myopic obsession with carbon emissions drowns out anyone who questions the path being taken⁵.

Sadly, I don't think we will have a reasonable conversation about energy fragility until there is a major failure.

Dias Irae

When listening to the story of Grenfell I was led to thinking about what the inquiry will look like after a major grid failure.

Lots of anger, lots of blame, lots of people saying hey I was just doing “X”- the system failure isn’t my fault, lots of people saying we couldn’t have known…

But there will be no prizes for having an “I told you so” T-shirt.  The retired fire-chief who gave the prophetic warning about “ten times more deaths” to the APGFS in 2016 one year before Grenfell, remains traumatized by the tragedy, by the “what ifs”, the missed opportunities.

We can see our energy systems and specifically the critical electricity grids becoming  increasingly fragile.  Capacity warnings, price spikes, frequency-events, DSR events and even small black-outs are happening with increasing frequency.

Incredibly, the retirement of reliable thermal powerplants, whether they be coal, gas or nuclear are celebrated. The increasing “near-misses” on our increasingly fragile grids are seen as evidence that we need more unreliable inputs, or that “batteries saved the day” (when batteries clearly were not needed when well designed grids had adequate reserve margins).

The only thing missing is for advocates of the unrealistic Net Zero ambitions to push back and say “so far, so good”, “where’s the evidence”, or “show me the bodies”.

1. Parliamentary Groups are cross-party advisory groups with specific interest focuses.  They have no power, but seek to inform, influence and raise attention to issues.  I had the opportunity to present my views on UK energy security to the All Party Group on Energy Studies in July 2021 (link to my presentation)

2. We might note a similar pattern, as well as a worring pattren of Energy Ministers having no background in energy or even STEM, and civil servants coming from climate think-tanks rather than the energy industry….

3. It is important to note that while I am making an overal analogy between the events leading up to the Grenfell tradgedy and the events on-going that could lead to an energy supply issue, I am not suggesting that there is any fraud or illegal activities in the energy sector - simply that choices are being made without due consideration of the trade-offs that are implicit.

4. This removal of regulations and weak guidelines that were exploited – which is an interesting contrast to my views on the recent overturning of the Chevron Deference in the USA. The point here is that the regulators were emasculated – which allowed bad behaviour by manufacturers.  In the case of the energy system and the focus on carbon emissions, regulators have a more active (if ununtentional) role in weakening the energy systems – hence my position is that one can be in favour of more regulation (to ensure better safety standards), but be against more regulation when the regulators themselves are part of the unsafe behavior due to blinkered vision.

5. Indeed, in the UK there are rumours that the new Labour government is making noise about criminalizing “climate deniers” – and I have no doubt that if this were to happen, it will be broadly interpreted such that anyone who questions the effect of Net Zero energy policy will be in the cross-hairs