carbon limited

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there is a skills gap among heat network designers and that by filling this gap we will improve network performance. In other words, if we provide more training to engineers, heat networks will get better.

There’s no doubt that some heat networks are plagued by performance problems, costing customers too much and delivering poor quality of service. But can this be fixed with additional training for consultants? Are heat networks really so complicated that engineers already trained to master’s degree level can’t design them well?

In fact, the skills gap is a red herring and providing more training to engineers won’t help. Here’s why:

Good projects start with good employer’s requirements. These are the foundation to the suite of contracts that will cover design and delivery.

When requirements are vague, heat network designers tend to focus on their biggest perceived risk: will this design deliver enough heat to everyone on the network? In this situation, the designer might get sued if flats don’t get sufficient heat from a DH network, but she’s unlikely to get sued if her design leads to flats getting an abundance of heat. As a result, engineers have an incentive to interpret client requirements in the most conservative way possible.

To make things worse, building services design is a fiercely competitive market and work is usually awarded to the lowest bidder. The resulting desperation among designers to get projects out the door as quickly and cheaply as possible encourages a culture of recycling previous network designs as well as designing by catalogue – basically cutting and pasting standard details from manufacturers straight into project designs. Heat networks require real engineering, and in too many cases it simply isn’t done.

Finally, clients almost never pay for designers to stick around and see the results of their work, so designers don’t get the chance to learn from mistakes and incorporate key lessons into subsequent projects. Imagine an aeronautics engineer who designed a series of airplanes but never saw whether any actually got airborne. – it would be absurd! Yet that’s what happens on heat network projects every day.

These dysfunctions are leading to bad heat networks, but training won’t address them for several reasons:

• Engineers want to design good systems, but contractors exert enormous pressure during value engineering. Anything not explicitly required in the contract suite is ripe for the chop regardless of how well the engineer is trained.
• In a market where clients assume they’re getting real engineering no matter how little they pay, conscientious engineers will always be vulnerable to undercutting by those willing to cut and paste from catalogues or previous jobs.
• Without closing the information loop by obtaining real-world feedback from projects, engineers will struggle to improve their designs.

So if training isn’t the solution, how do we fix this?

The first fix is contractual. Clients must ask for specific, measurable requirements and these must be baked into the contract suite from the start of the project. That way everyone in the project team knows what will be measured, how and when – and that they’ll be contractually held to achieving it.*

With the shift in contractual requirements and attendant risk, designers will have to carry out fundamental engineering tasks, employing skills they developed at university. This will take more time, which will be reflected in the price of engineering services – but crucially it will take place on a level playing field. While there’s nothing to prevent an overconfident engineering firm from undercutting, the winning bidder will be forced to deliver a good network… or die trying.

Finally, engineers must see the results of their work. This visibility should be gained by measuring performance at commissioning and operation phases and ensuring the engineers see the data. We’re already helping this to happen on projects at work, so we know it can be done at relatively low cost.

To sum up: some heat networks suffer from serious performance issues, but these can be traced back to  dysfunctions in procurement, design and delivery. These dysfunctions are systemic rather than due to a lack of training.

The theory of constraints says that a manageable system is governed by a small number of constraints (often just one) and that focusing attention anywhere other than the key constraint is wasted effort. This means we must focus on addressing the issues relating to contract, accountability and visibility before it makes sense to provide extra training to designers.

Of course, you could argue that training is a good way to address these dysfunctions – but it means providing additional training for clients, not for engineers!

*A logical conclusion is that we should treat the delivery of heat networks like other energy infrastructure projects, using an EPC approach with liquidated damages.