Decarbonising our energy system is a key engineering challenge on the path to net zero. This will also impact publics and consumers in many ways, from the built infrastructure required to the ways consumers engage with their energy use. Energy decarbonisation is therefore a key area in which we need discussions that involve wider publics about the futures we need to build and how we get there.
We are delighted to welcome Professor Patrick Devine-Wright, Professor Laura Watts and Nick Winser CBE FREng as panellists for this Critical Conversation, chaired by Academy CEO Dr Hayaatun Sillem CBE. This event will explore the need for and role of public dialogue in informing the energy decarbonisation challenge in the UK.
Mini series: Engineering and a just transition to net zero
Engineers play a critical role in showing how we can achieve socially beneficial outcomes, however, these must be shaped by wider society. Identifying these outcomes and their challenges needs conversations between publics, policymakers, researchers, innovators, and those that build the infrastructures we rely on. Having discussions about the futures we need to build, in relation to net zero, involves actively involving wider publics in the engineering sphere, and having real dialogue about what that is and how we get there.
This Critical Conversations mini series will explore the role of public dialogue in informing engineering’s response to the net zero transition and what pathways should be taken. The three topics will be energy, transport and built environment.
Critical Conversations
Bringing together the thoughts of leading experts from across the Academy’s networks, our Critical Conversations explore issues of relevance to global professional engineering community and wider society. Fellows, awardees, and engineering partners gather to tackle topical issues of relevance to the global professional engineering community and wider society.
You will be able to pose your questions to the panel during the live event via the comments section on LinkedIn.
Dr Hayaatun Sillem CBE
Hayaatun is CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation. She co-chairs with the Science Minister the government’s Business Innovation Forum and co-chaired with Sir Lewis Hamilton his Commission on improving Black representation in motorsport. She is a trustee of various charities, member of the government’s Levelling Up Advisory Council and Digital Skills Council and NXD at construction company Laing O’Rourke. She has been named as one of the ‘Inspiring 50’ women in tech in Europe and one of the most influential women in both UK engineering and UK tech. She has a Masters in Biochemistry (MBiochem) from Oxford and a PhD from Cancer Research UK/UCL. She is a Fellow of the IET, Honorary Professor at UCL and Honorary Fellow at The Queen’s College, Oxford. She has received honorary doctorates from UCL, Imperial College London, Newcastle, Brunel, Huddersfield and Southampton, as well as a Science Suffrage Award and the Engineering Professor’s Council President’s Medal. She was a finalist for the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award and was made a CBE for services to International Engineering in 2019. Prior to her current roles, she was Deputy CEO at the Academy and served as Committee Specialist and later Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee.
Professor Patrick Devine-Wright
Patrick Devine-Wright is Professor of Geography at the University of Exeter with a primary research interest in societal and community dimensions of low carbon energy transitions, specifically social acceptance of energy infrastructures such as wind farms and power lines. He is Director of the £6.25m ESRC-funded ACCESS (Advancing Capacity for Climate and Environment Social Science) project that aims to increase the visibility, impact and use of environmental social science. With expertise spanning the disciplines of human geography and environmental psychology, he was cited in the top 1% of social science scholars globally in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. He was an IPCC Lead Author in AR6, a member of the Defra/DECC Social Science Expert Panel, Chair of the Devon Net Zero Task Force and Chair of Exeter Community Energy. He received a Distinguished Visiting Scientist award from CSIRO, Australia and an achievement award from EDRA for the edited book ‘Place Attachment’. A board member of several academic journals, he acts as an advisor to the UK government and Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, and has collaborated with energy companies in the UK and Ireland including National Grid and EirGrid.
Professor Laura Watts
Professor Laura Watts is a writer, author, ‘ethnographer of green futures’ and Visiting Professor at Center for Applied Ecological Thinking at University of Copenhagen, as well as at Department for Thematic Studies, Linköping University. Her research and writing explores how sustainable futures are imagined and made in landscapes at the edge, and how the future can be otherwise. Her last book, Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga (MIT Press), won the 4S Rachel Carson Prize for its social and political relevance, and was shortlisted for the Saltire Research Book of the Year. For the last fifteen years she has been collaborating with renewable energy organisations and communities in Orkney, Scotland, and consults for the Islands Centre for Net Zero. Her portfolio is at sand14.com
Nick Winser CBE FREng
Nick Winser CBE has enjoyed a 30-year career in the energy sector which included being CEO of National Grid across UK and Europe, President of the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity, and CIGRE UK Chair. Inaugural Chair of Energy Systems Catapult from 2015-2024, Nick was appointed Chair of the Advisory Board for the Energy Revolution ISCF programme in 2018. This was followed by his appointment in 2022 as the Government’s Electricity Networks Commissioner. In 2022 he also joined the Board of Greencoat UK Wind, where he acts as the Senior Independent Director, and was appointed Energy Commissioner at the National Infrastructure Commission. Nick is both a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, serving as its President in 2017/18, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Additionally, is also a former Chair of the MS Society and a former member of the Board of the Kier Group.