Durham University Chancellor hails links with Miners’ Association at clean energy conference 

DURHAM University Chancellor Fiona Hill has spoken of her pride at seeing historic links between the university and the Durham Miners’ Association being revived with the two-day conference, Energy Days, held at Redhills this week.

Dr Hill, who gave a keynote speech on the second day of the event, said: “It is great to see a partnership re-emerging between two of the great institutions here in Durham City – the university and the Durham Miners’ Association.

The conference, organised by the university-based Durham Energy Institute (DEI), explored how clean energy offers a bright and exciting future for the people of the former Durham coalfield, with leading scientists and academics sharing cutting-edge research on how disused coal mines could supply geothermal energy from minewater.

The recently re-opened Redhills, formerly the Durham Miners Hall, is itself a symbol of the clean energy transition – now being powered almost entirely by ground-source heat pumps that tap into natural heat underground.

Dr Hill said the building and the institution is a symbol of how communities came together across County Durham to share knowledge which helped them make better decisions.

“Redhills was set up as a parliament for the pitmen, who didn’t have a voice in the larger politics of the time,” she noted.

“They created this institution, and it was supposed to be the place not just for debate and the resolution of critical decisions for the miners and their communities and the broader region, but also as a place of learning.

“The miners would often invite along lecturers from the university to speak to the people because their whole goal was ‘to better themselves’, to us their language, to be able to gain knowledge that would help them make better decisions and to play a part through their work, and through their communities, in the future of the region.

“Both the university and the Miners’ Hall had this aim of sharing knowledge and generating new ideas for the future, so, what a great way for us to put that on a new footing for the future.

“It’s fantastic that the Miners’ Hall, having just been reopened, is already embarking on this kind of relationship with the university through the Energy Days event, but also that it is there for the whole community again.”

Famously, Bishop Auckland-born Hill was herself the daughter of a coalminer hit by the region’s deindustrialisation, who titled her autobiography There Is Nothing For You Here – her father’s bleak advice when he encouraged her to leave her home town to build a career.

That career saw Hill become a specialist in Russian studies – an expertise which would lead her to become a United States national security adviser who achieved global fame when she appeared as a principal witness in Donald Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.

Since then, she has gone on not only to become Durham University Chancellor and an international voice on the Russia/Ukraine conflict but also a defence adviser to the Government who was one of the key architects of last year’s Strategic Defence Review of the UK’s defence policies.

But this week she revealed that none of that might have happened had it not been for the Durham Miners’ Association.

She said: “When I was first looking at ways I might be able to afford to study, I received a £100 bursary from the Miners’ Association in support of my education, and that helped make it all possible.

“I’ve never forgotten the importance of that support, and I’m delighted to see the newly re-opened Redhills continuing that long tradition of giving back to the local community.”

Hill said she was particularly pleased to be able to support the Energy Days conference, which brought together everyone from leading scientists and academics, to artists, writers, community leaders and school children to explore ways of grasping the opportunities of clean energy.

She said it was important that people at the grassroots were helped in realising that the energy transition was for them and could benefit struggling communities across the North East.

“I don’t think you can get people on board without them participating, because in the message to people is the shift toward clean energy isn’t just for somebody else to decide. It’s for us to decide, it’s for you to decide how this works and we need to get people involved.

“Everyone needs to get behind it, and we need to pool our resources in our communities in the way the miners once did.

“That’s the only way that will get people on board because people worry about the cost – it’s not just whether they actually accept what’s happening and the difficulties that we have – it’s the money side of things too, and they have to see how this whole process can ultimately benefit them.

“It’s also a place where we’ve got to be able to explain people what is going on, what the implications of everything that we see are in terms of climate changing and the environment, and how this is an opportunity to improve on our prospects for that but also improve people’s job prospects too, especially in the North East which has such energy potential in the growing clean energy industries.

“But you have to empower people, enable them to make choices and give them an opportunity to make that choice with you, not have choices made for them.

“Then people will be able to understand whether it makes sense to have solar panels for their community, or geothermal energy, or whether it’s wind power, because a lot of this stuff it takes time to get your head around.”

As someone who has advised on national security on both sides of the Atlantic, Hill also said it shouldn’t be underestimated how increasingly important energy independence is in the modern world and how renewables are a route to gaining that in the UK.

“We saw that with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine when oil and gas prices shot up and we all paid the price,” she said.

“In the past, we could produce all the energy from coal that we needed and we could be largely energy independent.

“There’s a new route to that now for us with things like wind, solar, geothermal and all these new areas of energy development that we need to take advantage of.

“Reaching for energy independence as much as possible for the UK is extremely important because having dependencies on outside fuel resources can be extraordinarily risky.

“Right now, for example, most of our gas, 70%, comes from Norway, and it comes through one pipeline from Norway – so there’s incredible vulnerability there for sabotage.

“What we need, as much as possible, is security of energy supply and clean energy development offers us the best way to achieve that.”