This time on Cleaning Up, Michael hosts Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, one of the UK's greatest living physicists, for a fascinating and detailed dive into the UK's energy storage requirements as it moves towards a fully carbon-free grid. 

Sir Chris is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and a former Director-General of CERN. At CERN he steered the funding and commissioning of its Large Hadron Collider, and as a theoretical particle physicist, Sir Chris predicted the existence of the very particle - the Higgs Boson - that the Large Hadron Collider went on to help discover. Sir Chris is likely the only person ever to have been knighted for "services to particle physics." 

In the last few years Sir Chris has been busy leading a forthcoming Royal Society study on large-scale energy storage as part of the net-zero transition. He and Michael discuss the significance of storage to a newly configured, renewable grid, the likely cost of stored electricity, and the role of salt caverns in hosting hydrogen stores. 

Relevant Guest & Topic Links 

Sir Chris discussed the energy storage requirements of a net-zero UK at a virtual conference in March 2020. His slides are available here: https://www.era.ac.uk/write/MediaUploads/Other%20documents/Need_for_Storage_in_a_Net_0_World_Chris_Ll_S_23_3_20.pdf 

Discover more about Chris’ storied career here: https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/llewellyn-smith 

Watch Episode 104 with Yanis Varoufakis here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLbm8fg08hc

Watch Episode 115 with Jorgo Chatzimarkakis here: https://youtu.be/_NCiEhprSOc

Watched Episode 116 with Tom Samson here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjThq8c3tT4

Guest Bio 

Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith FRS is a quantum field theorist and Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. Chris was Director of Energy Research at Oxford from 2011 to 2017, Director of the UK's fusion programme (2003-2009), Provost and President of University College London (1998-2001), Director General of CERN (1994-1998) when the Large Hadron Collider was approved and construction started, and was the first Chairman of Oxford Physics (1987-1992).  

Chris holds a BA in Physics with First Class Honours from the University of Oxford, as well as a D.Phil in Theoretical Physics. He holds honorary doctorates from universities in the UK, Spain, Canada and China. He was knighted in 2001 for “services to particle physics.” He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and was awarded their Royal Medal in 2015. Chris captained Oxford’s cross-country running team as an undergraduate in 1963. After completing his doctorate in 1967, Chris worked briefly in the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.