A truly beautiful mind: The radical engineer TGN Haldane, 1897-1981 (Part 2 of 2)

This is part two of the story of one of Britain’s greatest engineers. In the last part we discovered how TGN Haldane developed one of the world’s first heat pumps (in the 1920s), played a key role in the design of the original National Grid (in the 1920s and 30s), and was one of the major voices within the electricity industry driving nationalisation (in the 1930s and 1940s). In a strange twist of fate Haldane’s cousin was one of the first to articulate a vision (i.e. hallucination) about the widespread use of hydrogen as an energy carrier.

In this blog we will follow TGN Haldane’s life from the late 1940s until his death in 1981. Over these years Haldane played a key role in the development of the 275kV ‘SuperGrid’, became a renewables pioneer, and spotted the role subsea interconnectors would play in the energy system of today. We will close by exploring the philosophical ideas that animated this radical engineer.

Nationalisation and the first ‘SuperGrid’

In January 1949 Haldane gave his inaugural address as President of the Institute of Electrical Engineers. In the preceding decade he had argued passionately for the nationalisation of the electricity industry. In 1948 the entire industry was brought under common ownership, peacefully and without much of a fuss. For Haldane, the ‘decision having been taken and the transfer having been made… I think we can justly be proud of the way in which the changes have been loyally accepted’. He saw ‘in this something very characteristic of our form of democracy’. Haldane was on the winning side. But didn’t use his speech to gloat. What mattered now was ‘how to achieve maximum success under the new regime’.

The first task was to end the rolling blackouts that plagued the industry in late 1940s. The program to expand power station capacity was run with military precision by Group Captain Charles Verity (see here for that story) and the blackouts were stopped. But the effort left questions about whether the existing 132kV transmission grid could really bear the projected increases in demand for electricity. Industry leaders started to discuss the idea of a new higher voltage grid.

The earliest months of the British Electrical Authority (BEA - the central body in charge of the newly nationalized electricity industry) were marked by caution. Some leading engineers favored a plan to simply break up the existing 132kV grid into three rather than raise the voltage. Ever the radical, Haldane was determined to challenge conservatism. In two papers he argued that building a new grid with a higher voltage would be much more effective; it would extend the benefits of pooling generation capacity which would drive up the ‘load factor’. Load factor is a measure of an electricity systems efficiency - the actual amount of kilowatt-hours (kWh) delivered by the generating stations over a given period of time, as opposed to the total possible kWh that could be delivered over the same period of time. Load factor and efficiency was the obsession of Haldane’s mentors Charles Merz and William McLellan, as well as other early 20^th century electrical pioneers like Samuel Insull. Haldane saw other benefits to a new grid – it would reduce the spare plant ‘margin’ and improve reliability.

Haldane made another argument for a new grid; it would reduce the cost of moving coal by train. Generation stations could go to where the coal was, and the electricity could be carried to centers of demand with high voltage grid infrastructure. This was a great example of what today we would call ‘whole system thinking’.

Figure 1: Haldane’s visual representation of the role of the 275kV ‘SuperGrid’, January 1949.

In his January 1949 Presidential address to the Institute of Electrical Engineers Haldane included a simple diagram to illustrate the concept (see figure 1). He explained:

The first alternative assumed that future stations (after all available estuary sites have been used) will be situated near the load centre and receive rail borne coal at a transport cost slightly exceeding 1.5d [1.5 pence] per ton-mile… The second alternative assumed that these future stations be at or near the coalfield with 275kV transmission to the load centre 125 miles away… Such peak load plant at the load centres as may be required in the future will very possibly consist largely of gas turbines.

The last line shows remarkable foresight; Haldane had spotted the role gas would end up playing in the system from the 1990s.

Haldane’s intervention was critical, according to Leslie Hannah, the great historian of the British electricity industry, John Hacking (Deputy Chairman of the BEA) and VA Pask (Chief Engineer of the BEA) were annoyed at being upstaged by an outside consultant engineer. They changed tact and started to lobby for building a new 275kV network. DP Sawyers, Head of Transmission, capitalized on the momentum and in 1950 took the idea to Lord Citrine, Chairman of the BEA. Citrine loved the idea but insisted on a catchier name. Thus, the ‘SuperGrid’ was born. It was a plan so outlandish that visiting American engineers called it ‘unnecessarily ambitious’. But it was a staggering success. On time, on budget, and still in service today.

An early renewable pioneer: Hydro-electric, tidal, wind and geothermal

One of the things I find so fascinating about Haldane was his willingness to follow a train of thought to its logical conclusion.  In grappling with the idea of the ‘SuperGrid’ he began to think about what the electricity system would need to look like over the next century as demand for electricity grew and new technologies for producing power emerged. The goal was to have sufficient capacity and to produce more power, or ‘more kilowatts and kilowatt-hours’. For Haldane these two problems could be ‘to some extent… considered separately since there are means whereby, we can increase our capacity to meet peak loads without much increase in our kilowatt hour capacity and vice versa’. Peak load is the highest electrical power demand that occurs over a specified time. For example, like when everyone turns on their kettle at the end of a world cup final.

Haldane had identified a contradiction in the established thinking which he began to play around with. He used an example of a type of renewable generation to illustrate the conundrum. The total output of a water powered plant (i.e. hydro-electric) would be limited by natural factors. The amount of water that could be marshaled either naturally from the run of a river or by damning. This generator might not make a great contribution to overall electricity supplied (kilowatt-hours). But the generator could potentially make a very significant contribution to meeting peak demand (i.e. peak load), if it could be switched on at the right points in time. The downside was that the plant would look bad on one of the ‘key performance indicators’ that engineers focused on. The overall ‘load factor’ of the system would fall because a bunch of water powered generation capacity (i.e. kilowatts) would be sat idle for long periods of time (i.e. not producing kilowatt hours). As mentioned, Haldane’s generation of engineers were obsessed with load factor. But Haldane had started to think beyond this framework. In doing so, he had opened the pandora’s box of renewable generation.

Haldane had long been fascinated by harnessing natural resources to generate power. His first apprenticeship in the mid 1920s was with Charles Parsons, inventor of the steam turbine, who was obsessed with geo-thermal. Haldane developed and tested the world’s first ground source heat pumps at his home in Scotland in the late 1920s, using the estates water supply as the environmental heat source (see part 1 of this blog). His research into new technologies was put on hold in the 1930s and 1940s as he became preoccupied with the campaign to nationalise the electricity system. But from the later 1940s he picked up where he left off.

In his presidential address to the Institute in 1949 he explored the potential of hydroelectric, tidal and wind powered generation. These technologies could be valuable but only if linked with energy storage. Haldane wrote ‘unless associated with pumped storage… [these technologies] cannot be relied on… because of their intermittent character’. In a visionary turn of phrase, he noted ‘similarly large-scale wind generation might make an appreciable contribution to kilowatt hours, but has no kilowatt value unless developed in conjunction with pumped waterpower or on such a wide scale as to permit of some reliance on the diversity of winds in different regions’. As early as 1949 Haldane had spotted the critical link between renewable generation and energy storage.

Wind powered technologies were of course centuries old, but in the late 1940s there was a resurgence of interest. Acute coal shortages and improved understanding of aerodynamics contributed. The other reason was the ‘SuperGrid’. As Haldane explained, ‘the existence of extensive grid systems into which intermittent supplies of energy, wherever produced, could be fed’ fundamentally changed the art of the possible. As I have explained in other posts (here and here), it is helpful to think of electricity grids as platforms which enable optionality.

Haldane used his elevated position in the industry to sponsor further research into wind. The British Electrical and Allied Industries Research Association formed a new ‘Section on Power Generation’ in 1948. Haldane was the chairman of this committee. The principal research officer was E.W Golding, who was also a leading engineer on rural electrification. Haldane and Golding went on to present a paper to the 4^th World Power conference on ‘Recent Developments in Large Scale Wind Power Generation’ in 1952.  Sadly it took another 39 years for the first commercial onshore wind farm to be built in the UK. In an upcoming blog I will explain why.

In the 1950s and 1960s Haldane returned to geo-thermal, the technology that had beguiled his first mentor Charles Parsons. He wrote various papers on the topic of using ‘the earth as a power station boiler’ and visited New Zealand to see the geo-thermal Wairakei plant in 1958. Thereafter he wrote a textbook on the topic in 1970. This would be one of his last publications. He never realized Parson’s dream of a sinking a twelve-mile-deep shaft over a period of 85 years to unlock geo-thermal.

Figure 2: Energy resources of Europe, from Haldane’s Presidential Address to the Institute for Electrical Engineering in January 1949.

Subsea interconnectors

Haldane realized ‘interconnection’ would be vital to building an energy system around a combination of hydrocarbons and renewable resources. Water, tidal, wind and coal were unevenly distributed, as his sketch in figure 2 showed. Curiously he missed the potential for wind in the North Sea. A truly efficient pan-European energy system would have to be designed around this fact. In his Presidential address he suggested:

‘Technically it should be possible to have high-capacity interconnection extending eventually from Scandinavia in the North to France in the south, with further connection to Austria, Switzerland and Italy. Economically it seems likely that this would be highly beneficial’.

Haldane speculated that ‘high voltage cables could be laid across the channel’. Operation Pluto, a project to lay a subsea oil pipeline under the channel sea during the war, had greatly advanced technological understanding. Haldane estimated an interconnector to France would cost about £15 million, or £450 million in today’s prices. He undershot. A quick google suggests that the IFA2 interconnector cost more like £700 million.

In the 1950’s Haldane turned his attention to hydro-electric power and pumped storage. In a 1954 paper he bemoaned the poor levels of mutual understanding between thermal and hydro-electric engineers. For Haldane, the beauty of hydro power, especially when paired with pumped storage, was the extraordinary ability to ramp up very quickly. The 102MW Galloway Scheme in Scotland could be brought to full tilt in just fifteen minutes. With more nuclear power coming online, which would cater to ‘base load’, he believed hydro could fill an important gap.

The problem with hydro was that it was located far away from urban centers of demand. Grid infrastructure would be needed to carry the power to where it was needed. Haldane argued the existing 132kV and 275kV grid wouldn’t be enough. Both networks used alternating current. Direct current transmission would be more suitable for ‘transmitting very large blocks of power over distances beyond the capacity of alternative current transmission’. And given the restrictions on building more overhead lines, Haldane predicted that ‘it seems likely that direct current transmission will in the first instance be developed for submarine of underground routes’.

Once again, Haldane’s vision is mind-blowing. In 1954 he had articulated the role that high voltage direct current cables would play in an energy system built around renewables. Between 2022 and 2024 Britain’s Electricity System Operator, the organisation responsible for designing the electricity Grid, came to the same conclusion. Figure 3 shows the now famous map of the proposed network, with the long subsea cables ‘bootstraps’ around the country, knitting together renewables in Scotland with the south.

Figure 3: Map of electricity network infrastructure beyond 2030. Note the long purple lines, which will be high voltage direct current subsea cables, as Haldane guessed in 1954.

The making of a beautiful mind

In the twilight of his career Haldane’s genius finally began to be recognised. He was presented with the prestigious James Watt Gold Medal by the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1953. Then appointed to governing body of Imperial College and awarded a Doctor of Science at Cambridge University in recognition of his scientific contributions. Finally, Haldane could rest. He retired in 1972 and enjoyed the quiet life. In 1981 he passed away at aged 84 in Perthshire, just miles away from where he had developed his ground source heat pump.

How to explain Haldane’s genius? What made this radical engineer tick? We will never know. But luckily Haldane left some breadcrumbs. In his 1949 Presidential address he was given an unusual opportunity to address ‘fundamental matters’ of philosophy.

As an engineer Haldane saw his profession as outwardly concerned with ‘matters affecting our material wellbeing…; increased production and the effects being made to raise the material standards of life’. Unsurprising words for a historical materialist and socialist. But Haldane was animated by more than material matters. As he told the room ‘none of us are engineers only and all are us are faced with the problem of working out our own general philosophy of life’. To explain philosophy, he took the audience back to his formative years at Cambridge and the Cavendish Laboratory in the late 1910s. Days of ‘revolutionary changes in physics brought about by the quantum theory and the theory of relativity’. In this cauldron he mixed ‘in the field of science and the field of metaphysics’ and arrived at his philosophy:

‘I felt then, and have never ceased to feel, the urge to seek the correlation of the various branches and categories of knowledge and experience. It seems so unsatisfying to partition human knowledge into a series of watertight compartments completely divorced from one another and to have no scale of values to apply to such widely differing subjects as physics, biology, religion and art’.

A desire to roam freely across the difference branches of knowledge. Perhaps this is what drove Haldane to bound across different engineering disciplines and into the field of political economy.

Immersion in the humanities was more than mere excursion; it changed the way Haldane thought about engineering. To be an engineer was to ‘occupy a position intermediate between that of pure science and that of the branches of knowledge concerned with human affairs’. For example, studying the history of scientific and philosophical thought gave him an understanding of the limits of knowledge; ‘the more we learn the more conscious we are becoming of our ignorance’. Haldane was wise enough to know where scientific and quantitative methods were naïve. For example, he argued it was impossible to quantify the value of the 275kV ‘SuperGrid’, but it would be foolish to delay a decision in the vain hope that a better ‘cost benefit analysis’ would come along.

From the late 19^th century numerous intellectuals had bemoaned the increasing specialization of knowledge. Haldane wasn’t the first to make this observation, but he did explain it particularly eloquently. He argued the ‘disappearance at an early state in education of any general study of religion or philosophy so that at the age when young people are becoming able to think on such subjects, the great majority proceed to concentrate on mastering the means of life and remain indifferent to, and almost oblivious of, its ends.’ Those words should be a clarion call to all working in the energy system today.

I hope Haldane would approve of this blog. I know it might seem indulgent to have written two blogs about a single British engineer. But it seemed fitting given Haldane’s his belief that a ‘study of the historical development of scientific thought and engineering achievement could…. throw light on how further advances should be possible… [and] avoid the twin errors either of regarding science with excessive veneration or of belittling it on the grounds that its picture of the world has no permanence’.

One final thought: Wouldn’t it be great if people in the energy industry still wrote like that?

Sources:

Leslie Hannah, Engineers, Managers and Politicians, The First Fifteen Years of Nationalised Electricity Supply in Britain, (1982)

Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, (1982)

Thomas Graeme Nelson Haldane bio (here)

David Banks, ‘Dr TGN Haldane – Scottish Heat Pump Pioneer’, The International Journal for the History of Engineering and Technology, Vol 85, issue 2, 2015.

T.G.N Haldane, ‘Inaugural Address, 7 October 1948 – means and ends’ Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, vol 96, part 1, 1949.

N. Haldane, B. Wood and H. C. H. Armstead, ‘Development of Geothermal Power Generation’, Transactions of the. 1958 World Power Conference, 4, Section C, Paper 21C/1 (1958), 1963–74.

‘Generation of Electricity from Wind Power’ Nature, 161, (1948).

T.G.N. Haldane and E.W Golding, ‘Recent Developments in Large Scale Wind Power Generation in Great Britain’, Transactions of the 4^th World Power Conference, Lund, Sweden (1952).

T.G.N Haldane, ‘Geothermal Energy – the Earth as a Power Station Boiler’, New Scientist, 3.76 (1958).

J.G. Brown, TGN Haldane and PL Blackstone, Hydroelectric Engineering Practice, (London, 1970)

TGN Haldane and HCH Armstrong The Geothermal Power Development at Wairakei, New Zealand (London, 1962).

T.G.N. Haldane and PL Blackstone, ‘Problems of hydro electric design in mixed thermal hydro electric systems’, Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, vol 102, part 3, 1954.