There’s an old Chinese proverb ‘the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’.

When it comes to meeting the UK Government’s climate change targets, it would be easy to be daunted by the scale of the journey ahead.

With little global agreement apparently having been achieved during the Copenhagen Summit, the UK Government seems keen to prove its own environmental credentials by pressing ahead with its plans to tackle climate change.

The Committee on Climate Change is anxious to see an improvement on UK emissions from the current annual level of 1% below 1990 levels to at least 2-3%. With industrial companies continuing to account for a large proportion of the UK’s environmental emissions, the sector continues to bear much of the burden in improving the country’s environmental performance.

Not surprisingly, many UK companies are aggrieved by what they see as costly and stringent targets set down by the UK and EU governments which do not appear to also apply to their global competitors. Indeed, it was this lack of a global agreement that largely scuppered the Copenhagen Summit. Understandably, no economically savvy country is willing to undertake drastic measures that could affect their competitiveness without seeing other countries doing the same.

A recent report by the EEF on Climate change and the UK steel industry, published last year, neatly encapsulates the problem for UK industry as a whole:

“The government estimated last year that existing climate change policies…have increased industrial electricity bills by 21%, rising to 55% by 2020. Since then the government has announced a new tax on the combustion of fossil fuels to fund the Renewable Heat Initiative and an additional levy on electricity to finance carbon capture and storage demonstration plants. Each new measure, albeit with the best of intentions, is a further wound in the side of UK industry.”

A different sort of measure

Ironically, the answer actually lies in the word ‘measure’. Though it’s an oft-used phrase in industrial circles, the adage ‘you cannot manage what you don’t measure’ has never rung truer than it does today.

Despite the huge advances in instrumentation technology, a surprising number of plant operators in the UK still continue to run their processes either with devices which are outdated or poorly maintained or with insufficient devices for the size and complexity of the application.

Compared to the often significant investments associated with meeting environmental legislation, properly instrumenting a plant to measure crucial aspects of a process can offer significant benefits.

Take the Large Combustion Plants Directive (LCPD) for example. The requirements under the regime are complex, involving a novel emissions trading scheme between power plants, as well as some major investments in technology such as flue gas desulphurisation.

Yet for all this high-profile novelty, the potential impact of what might be called ‘good housekeeping’ should not be overlooked. Simple measures such as installing in-situ gas analysers to monitor flue gas emissions and using electric actuators to ensure accurate control of boiler fans can have a huge impact on plant performance and significantly reduce operating costs.

This holds true across other industries too, where gaining every shred of intelligence from plant can have major benefits on performance.

It might seem an over-simplification to advocate the humble instrument as the answer to the UK’s climate change challenges. But, to take the proverb that opened this piece, without knowing the starting point of your journey, how will you ever know when you’re near to achieving your destination?