The Lucas plan revisited- ahead of the curve

With the 40^th anniversary of the Lucas workers celebrated alternative plan coming up, the Breaking the Frame group, has, with others, organized a conference in Birmingham in November. It aims to link the experience of radical trade union groups then, trying to redirect the technology focus of their companies to create sustainable, socially useful work, with similar current campaigns: http://lucasplan.org.uk 

The Alternative Corporate Plan produced by shop stewards from the 13 Lucas Aerospace plants in the mid 1970s outlined a series of socially useful projects that they felt could secure employment on a sustainable basis. The company was heavily reliant on defence orders and the Labour government of the time was cutting back and there were threats of large scale redundancies. The cross-plant cross-union shop stewards ‘Combine’ committee thought that, to avoid that, the companies resources and their skills could be used on alternative products. The diversification plan they produced included medical aids, new transport systems and a range of alternative energy technologies, then very novel, including solar and wind technologies. The idea was that the public funding saved from the defence cuts could be retargeted to socially useful production along these lines.

The overall plan was resisted by the company management, who objected to being told what to produce, although some prototypes were developed under pressure from the trade unionists or by supporters independently. For example, an absorption cycle gas-fired heat pump, based on an early Open University idea, was built by Lucas at its plant in Burnley, with some middle management actually being quite keen since there were prospects of a joint OU/Lucas research grant from the (then) Department of Energy. A 15kW prototype was tested, but no funding emerged and the idea was not followed up. See p22/23 in this report:  http://oro.open.ac.uk/19946/1/EPMK_Aug_09.pdf 

Heat pumps are nowadays very widely used, although very few gas fired heat pumps have been built - the 150kW (th) one currently used at the OU is a rare example. See: http://modbs.co.uk/news/archivestory.php/aid/9841/__65279;Ener-G_teams_up_boreholes_with_absorption_heat_pumps_.html

Most heat pumps are electric powered and designed for use in individual homes (and the OU has surveyed them). That approach is backed by government, partly as a way to use the excess nuclear electricity they will have at night from the proposed new nuclear plants at Hinkley etc.  There are all sorts of problems with that- the power grid couldn't supply enough power to take over from ordinary gas central heating (which is their plan)! Gas heat pumps would be better- the gas grid is already there. And they would also be bigger, and more suited to community heating. That was very much to Lucas plan’s credo - not small eco-toys for middle class houses, but large efficient systems for council high rises.  It’s arguably what we should be doing now. It’s the same for many of the other ideas that were in the plan.

The political point is that this group of workers could identify what was needed in the communities to which they belonged- and they had the skills to make the technology. But they didn’t have the power or money to make it happen-and the Labour government offered warm words but little practical help. The official trade union bureaucracy was also less than helpful- the Combine committee was an unofficial grass roots organisation which they did not recognize. Then, in 1979, Maggie Thatcher was elected and launched a major attack on  the trade union movement, culminating in the defeat of the Miners. Many of the Lucas activists were sacked or moved on and the battle for radical product diversification was lost. There had been some other similar ‘workers plans’, following on from the Lucas plan, for example in power engineering (Clarke Chapman and Parsons in Newcastle, backing CHP) and in defence (Vickers in Barrow, with wave power being one idea), but they too were side-tracked.  40 years on it’s still the same. What actually emerges is what government and corporate leaders think is best. Though some now do think that renewables are a good idea!

The Lucas campaign may have failed, but the idea lives on, with, in the current context, one focus being the development of alternatives to employment on projects like the proposed Trident nuclear submarine system renewal.  With UK coal plants closing there is also a need to develop alternative employment options for staff in that sector, and the same would be true when and if the nuclear programme is abandoned. What the Lucas campaign showed was that it is possible for the workforce themselves, rather than external experts or technocrats, to develop plans for the future, and arguably better plans, more attuned to needs rather than profits.

The need for better plans for sustainable energy and other environmentally appropriate technologies is now if anything even clearer. But are we any more ready for that politically than in the 1970s?  Some of the ideas from the Lucas plan had been taken up by radical local authorities, notable the GLC via its local Technology Networks, but they too were seen off as politics swung to the right in the 1980s. With trade union power much diminished and local councils on the defensive, as yet, no new power base exists, although the renewal of grass roots support for Labour, and the growth of wider green movement, may change that.  We may see at the Birmingham conference…

Catch up on Lucas: www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2014/jan/22/remembering-the-lucas-plan-what-can-it-tell-us-about-democratising-technology-today

The academic journal Science as Culture recently had a special issue on ‘Contested Technology’ (Vol. 25 No.3), which includes my paper on ‘The Alternative Technology movement: an early green radical challenge’ identifying links to and conflicts with the Lucas workers plan campaign and practical focus.  There were some ideological differences, with the ‘AT’ movement more inclined to small-scale experimental projects, the Lucas plan more concerned with meeting the needs of existing mainstream communities. In the extreme this revealed a class-based conflict, with one Lucas Combine member disparaging some of the AT movements proposals as ‘gimmicks for individual architect built houses’ and ‘playthings for the middle class’. Is that still the case? Or have both sides now moved on?

 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09505431.2016.1164400:

Community-scale Energy

Most people say small scale energy project are a good idea-  inherently better than large inflexible centralized corporately owned projects, allowing for local ownership and control. However, there can be economies of scale. Some renewable energy projects are best technically and economically at larger scale- wind turbines for example, due to the basic physics of wind energy capture and conversion.  Certainly since the power available is proportional to the square of the bade size and the cube of the wind speed, a large diameter 1MW wind turbine on a good elevated site with good wind speeds will produce far more electricity than 1000 small diameter 1kW domestic-scale micro turbines in low wind speed urban environments. Moreover, in a multi-MW wind farm with a lot of MW units, the cost of linking them to the grid and maintaining them can be shared. Similarly, for wave and tidal projects, their location is geographically defined and they will more efficient at multi-MW scale.

Some individual domestic scale energy technology can be efficient, PV solar for example, with power delivered direct from the user’s roof, but even in that case there are economies in bulk buying, installation and operational scale. Despite the need for grid links, it is cheaper and easier to buy and install a lot of units together at the same time in a large solar farm. Or possibly as part of a major roof-top deployment programme in a collective housing project.

So, although there may be exceptions, it is usually best to go for larger scale. But how large? 

Community scale projects may be a sensible compromise between scale and efficiency- small enough to be locally owned and controlled, but large enough to be efficient.  Local ownership of wind farms has proved to be a good way forward in many countries, not least in avoiding opposition to projects imposed by remote corporate owners. That is how wind took off so dramatically in Denmark, with most of the projects being locally owned. Energy co-ops are now spreading across Germany, with about 40% of German renewable energy capacity being locally owned- although some of that is domestic PV, owned by individuals.

While there is clearly a strong environmental sentiment at work, the main driver for this expansion has been economics and the availability of attractive rates from Feed-In Tariffs.

Policy changes can slow progress, although the momentum and new market that has been created means that unit costs are falling and new cheaper technology is emerging, making subsidies less vital. So it’s a success story, both in terms of capacity and the expansion of local control, to the extent that conventional energy suppliers have now lost control of much of the market. There are however some issues. The spread of distributed self-generation makes it harder to manage the overall energy system, balancing supply and demand.

Most renewables are variable, and most individual PV self-generators still top up from the grid to meet their needs when there are lulls in local solar availability and at night. So they still need grid links, which also allow them to export any excesses, and offset the costs of their system.  Some may now be installing battery storage, as an alternative, and some may even try to go off grid, but then they loose the export earnings and it maybe be hard to meet all their energy needs in this way. Arguably it makes more sense to retain grid links and import power when needed, especially since, as noted above, it can be generated by larger more efficient projects elsewhere. Grid links make it possible to use power generated at the best sites, and if suitably extended, help balance and smooth out local variations in supply across wide areas. On that basis, sticking just to autarchic local generation maybe suboptimal, whether by individuals or communities. It may require much more local capacity than otherwise needed and also more local storage, with in many case small storage systems being less efficient than large ones.  Set against that is the possibility than local grid linked storage could be seen as a form of distributed storage, taking power from the grid when available, and, along with local generation, reducing the need for large grid power exchanges at peak demand times. The need for more grids to handle variable renewables and their local impacts, is certainly an issue in some countries. That’s one reason why Greenpeace has suggested that the ratio between small/local and large/remote generation should be 70:30. That’s optimistic, depending on the location. Given the high energy use and their spatial constraints, few cities  could meet 70% of their energy needs from renewable energy generated within their boundaries: they would have to import power from rural and offshore areas. The best achieved so far, in a survey of 13 leading EU city initiatives, has been around a 7% contribution from ‘internal’ urban renewables sources: http://www.energy-cities.eu/Energy-Cities-Members-delivering

None of this means that local generation projects are a bad idea. They can play a significant role, especially at the community/municipal scale. But aiming for high levels of local self sufficiency may not be sensible or needed. Instead we need to consider the system as a whole, while opting for local generation wherever possible, so as to gain the local social benefits.  A strict interpretation of ‘local generation’ would imply near total self-sufficiency e.g. for villages and town, but in a more realistic version they could import power from projects nearby e.g. local wind farms. However, as argued above, even that seems unnecessarily restrictive- what is wrong with trading local excesses to where there is a need and at other times importing power from locations where it is best generated? 

That implies that there will still be some large scale possibly corporate led projects, run to top the system up, although in principle some of these could be municipally owned and controlled. So could the local energy distribution system, including heat supply via biomass fired CHP/ district heating networks and large heat stores, topped up with solar heat. That would still leave conventional companies supplying the energy hardware, unless new co-operative/locally owned manufacturing enterprises emerge. Or even nationalised companies, taking over the whole thing, including transmission. How far we might or should go in this ‘socialised energy economy’ direction obviously depends on your political views! But in the end it all comes down to money and power. Community groups have little of either at present, local councils not much more. So there is a way to go. However, we have seen the growth of grass roots power and local projects in Germany, and that has changed the situation. Similar initiatives may emerge in the UK: the GIFT campaign looks exciting, with, potentially, municipal involvement: www.nuclearpolicy.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/GIFTS_initiative.pdf

Bottom-up grass roots initiatives may look weak when faced with corporate power, but with conventional politics all but frozen in many countries, they offer one of the few signs of life. See this excellent review: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032115013477

There is much to do at national level and policy changes are needed, but grass roots activism may help to open up new possibilities. For helpful updates on local green energy projects around the UK see: http://www.microgenscotland.org.uk

Radical Technology Revisited

In the early 1970s there appeared a magazine called Undercurrents: The journal of radical science and people’s technology. It challenged the directions and uses of technology in modern societies, suggesting alternative, more humane pathways. In 1976 it spun off a book, Radical Technology, describing radical approaches to shelter, energy, food, materials, communications, autonomy and other perspectives. It inspired many people and many of the ideas have entered the mainstream. Energy was a key issue, with wind mills, biogas and solar power much to the fore, but it was clearly not the only one.

Forty years on, are any of those ideas still relevant today? The Radical Technology 2.0 conference in Bristol, September 2nd-4^th, will revisit Radical Technology, asking where it was right, where wrong, and what can be learned from its successes and failures. It looks like being an interesting event, ranging widely as might be expected and opening up many issues.

The1976 Radical Technology argued for radical decentralisation, small and simple local technologies, dispersed populations and cooperative communities. But are these decentral approaches still appropriate? Many of the original authors and practitioners of radical technology appear to have moved to embrace the need for some engagement with large-scale, sophisticated technologies. However, is ‘technology’ still a useful focus? Or should the focus now be on political change and social technologies? Why is innovation predominantly used to expand consumption, rather than to solve urgent problems? Was trying to ‘keep it simple’ a lost cause? Can ‘alternatives’ only survive in ghettoes and protected niches? Can we go ‘Back’? Or are technological ‘progress’ and economic growth the only options?

That’s certainly the high tech, high growth eco-moderniser’s view, contrasting strongly with  the ‘deep green’ stable-state decentralists view, with both usually saying the other view won’t deliver. Though not many of the former are likely to be at the event! Most people may well want something in the middle, although the issue then is will that be radical enough to deal with the various eco and energy crises, with the nuclear issue being a likely stumbling block.... For detail of the RT 2.0 event: www.radicaltechnology.org

‘Radical Alternatives’ were not just a fringe environmental concern or the preserve of communes and local co-ops. There was also the Lucas Aerospace workers Alternative Plan, with its 40^th anniversary gathering coming up in Birmingham in November. That gathering, organized by the Breaking the Frame New Luddite group, aims to link the experience of radical trade union groups then, trying to redirect the technology focus of their companies to create sustainable, socially useful work, with similar current campaigns: http://lucasplan.org.uk 

That follows on from the recent launch at the TUC of a new edition of Mike Cooley’s influential 1970’s book, ‘Architect or Bee? The Human Price of Technology’. Cooley was leading member of the Lucas workers campaign. Frances O’Grady, the current TUC General Secretary, in her new introduction to the book, asks ‘How do we maximise the upsides and minimise the downsides of technological change? How do we make sure rapid scientific advances empower rather than enslave working people? And how do we mould this progress towards socially useful purposes such as the fight against climate change, or public services tailored towards the needs of disadvantaged groups? Ultimately, how do we win the political and industrial battle for control?’ 

http://www.spokesmanbooks.com/acatalog/Trade_Union_Classics.html#a872

The world has of course moved on since the 1970s, with many of the technology ideas that emerged then now commonplace, but as that quote suggests, the issue are still the same. So looking back at these early initiatives may still be valuable. The mood then was very hopeful, with old structures breaking up and new ideas spreading. But it’s not that different now: progressive movements are still enthusiastic about the possibilities of change and the changes that have occurred since the 1970s, for example in the energy area, would  have amazed the activists then. Wind and solar power were just dreams, now both are major energy suppliers globally. The political battles however are much the same. And now the word ‘radical’ has new less appealing associations, implying the imposition of narrow fundamentalist views.  But, in all areas, there are non-dogmatic challenges to the status quo and, as ever, resistance to that.

The challenge is thus both technological and political. As Lund emphasized in his book Renewable Energy Systems (Elsevier 2104), what is needed is not is just a technological change, it also involves a social choice process, without which the technical side will flounder or be side tracked. He looks at how to enhance ‘choice awareness’, moving beyond the paralyzing status quo view that ‘there are no choices’– or only one choice. He notes that ‘existing organizations will often seek to create the perception that the radical change in technologies is not an option and that society has no choice but to implement a solution involving the technologies that will save and constitute existing positions’.  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629614000838     

Even if we limit ourselves to just energy issues, as Miller et al put it, ‘the key choices involved in energy transitions are not so much between different fuels but between different forms of social, economic, and political arrangements built in combination with new energy technologies’: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/csac20/22/2#.VSp3DIX1uv8 

Of course, energy is only one issue, linked to many larger ones, such as economic growth and social equity. And as deep greens often say, technology is not the key thing: we need social and political change first. Although others say it has to be a coevolution process: technical change can help social change and vice versa.  Then again, some say that technology can potentially be liberatory, undermining capitalism: http://isa-global-dialogue.net/the-end-of-the-world-the-end-of-capitalism-and-the-start-of-a-new-radical-sociology/

All of which, still begs the question of who make the changes? Unless that is you think the process will be automatic, as technology evolves.  Plenty to debate at the 40^th anniversaries!

*The newsletter I edit, Renew, is also approaching its fortieth anniversary- although there’s still some way to go. It started life as as the Newsletter of the NATTA network, which was set up in 1976. But the first issue didn’t emerge until 1979. Though it has come out bimonthly in various formats ever since: https://renewnatta.wordpress.com