In my last piece, I highlighted two examples that illustrated what we might call the paradox of efficiency: that making something cheaper doesn’t merely lead to a lower overall cost for however much of that thing we already use, but actually encourages use.
The invention of LEDs directly enabled the creation of the Las Vegas Sphere, the surface of which sports no fewer than 1.2m of them. Make it cheaper to heat a home and people don’t settle for shivering for less – they crank up the heating. They are heat-rich.
On the face of it, this is bad news for Net Zero planners; it certainly means that the face value of projected carbon savings from new technology needs to be heavily qualified. But it is, I argued, a fundamentally good thing. The impulse to do more, rather than do the same with less, is precisely the spirit that has propelled us from the Stone Age to where we are today.
Now we have another counter-intuitive example, this time from the world of water. In yet another fascinating thread, Ian Walker, a professor of environmental psychology, describes new research that suggests high-pressure flows – power showers, to you and I – actually save water. He suggests an explanation:
‘This graph probably tells us something important behaviourally. It suggests that people turn the shower off when they have achieved a desired sensation, not just when they have completed a certain set of actions’.
It’s a fascinating insight, and should be good news. Rather than resorting to hard caps, we can reduce organic demand for water by going with the flow (no pun intended) of consumer behaviour.
Sadly, however, such research is swimming against the current of government policy. In 2021, ministers announced a new package of measures aiming to ‘safeguard supplies’ of water – and nestled in amongst several perfectly sensible proposals was this:
‘Encouraging local authorities to adopt a tighter standard of 110 litres per person per day, compared with the current standard of 125 litres, for new homes where appropriate, requiring developers to install more efficient fixtures and fittings’.
In theory, that’s fine, right? Especially in light of Professor Walker’s findings. So long as they do the same work and meet consumer needs, nobody could object to pushing for the installation of the most efficient fixtures and fittings available.
Yet that goal must be read in light of other reports, from April last year, that the Government is mulling a ban on power showers. Per The Daily Telegraph:
‘It comes as ministers want to cut individual demand from 144 litres a day to 122 litres a day by 2038 to protect supplies.’
‘The plans include the development of new standards for showers and taps which restrict how much water they can use.’
Nor might the policy be restricted to showers alone:
‘It may also result in restrictions on certain models of toilet, amid concerns over how hundreds of litres a day are lost to leaks, mostly from dual-flush loos.’
Local authorities are already taking their cue from this approach. Although it has since been walked back to an aim, Cambridge City Council originally indicated that residents of a new development would be restricted to 99 litres per day.
This is rationing, plain and simple – and sadly, there is a political constituency for it, both the type of green for whom individual sacrifice and flagellation is part of the point and the sort of Boomer for whom no sacrifice is too great (for other people to make) if it spares us the need to invest in infrastructure.
And new infrastructure is the obvious thing missing from Rebecca Pow’s announcement in 2021. The United Kingdom has the fifth-highest average annual rainfall in Europe. For such a country to be even thinking about rationing water is a complete joke.
Yet here we are. Ministers have not yet had the courage of their convictions on imposing hard limits, although we know from the new legal maxima on window sizes that they are perfectly happy to regulate for lower living standards if they think they can get away with it. But the debate on water policy is already poisoned by the toxic politics of shortage.
Consider the huge fuss over leaks. The execration aimed at water companies (on this matter, at least) is entirely misplaced: as Robert Colvile has set out, they stick to leakage rates agreed with the regulator. But is there really a right target for such anger? In a country as wet as ours, water should be plentiful; a degree of leakage (which simply means water returning to the soil and the water cycle) should not be a problem.
That it is so is entirely because generations of politicians have refused to make what ought not even to be hard decisions: to build new reservoirs to meet growing demand.
Yes, the planning system makes building anything in this country a nightmare. But here it is no excuse: the Planning Act 2008 grants the Secretary of State powers to expedite permission for ‘nationally significant infrastructure projects’. In Section 14, it lists among these:
(m) the construction or alteration of a dam or reservoir;
(n) development relating to the transfer of water resources;
(na) the construction or alteration of a desalination plant;
In Section 27, it provides more detail on what water projects qualify, which includes if ‘it is expected that the volume of water to be held back by the dam or stored in the reservoir will exceed 30 million cubic metres’. For reference, that is one-fifth the planned capacity of the Abingdon Reservoir, the absurd campaign against which Jonn Elledge recently chronicled on this site.
There is no excuse for Britain being water-poor; it is entirely down to inadequate politicians. The storage capacity is buildable and should have been built, decades ago – especially given that these same politicians have deliberately driven up net migration for the sake of keeping their economic model afloat.
Moving water around, and treating it, does use energy (although it’s worth noting that people in ancient times found ways to do it). So too do desalination plants, which would be another excellent pathway out of water shortages for a country with our abundant coastline.
But that doesn’t absolve the blame, it just expands the charges. Our energy infrastructure is scarcely less neglected than our water infrastructure; Jeremy Hunt’s goal of generating a quarter of Britain’s power from nuclear by 2050 is a step in the right direction, but taken decades late.
Besides which, surely the whole point of Net Zero is that a wholesale shift to clean energy means guilt-free energy – which means, in turn, abundant energy. Blocking water investments on energy grounds is a betrayal of the very promise of the green industrial revolution.
Too many politicians, however, seem fine with that, happy to use the phrase ‘green industrial revolution’, but unable to see or unwilling to admit that any real revolution would transform our built environment just as the first industrial revolution did – and to the same ultimate purpose: improving our quality of life.
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