Tradition with a new face

A wind-powered Aga… whatever next?

Coalbrookdale in Telford, Shropshire, has a record when it comes to innovation. It’s where the 18th-century ironmaster Abraham Darby first tried using coke instead of charcoal to make cast iron.

Close to 300 years later Darby’s foundry, now part of a World Heritage site, is still in business – making Aga cookers. And it’s still innovating.

In one corner of the site the company’s R&D team has spent the last year experimenting with running the country kitchen workhorse on renewables, by hooking a cooker up to a wind turbine.

Aga Foodservice’s chief executive William McGrath is encouraged by the test. “Telford is not the windiest place on the planet, but we’ve found that a lot of the time you can run your Aga from a wind turbine.” For the trial the company has set up a 5kW turbine to supply one of the company’s existing range of electric Agas for day-to-day use. McGrath admits that for much of the time the cooker has been switched over to mains supply, but says that over the full year it has been wind-powered on one day in two.

Wouldn’t wood look like the more obvious choice as a carbon-neutral fuel? The company’s Rayburn stoves have been using the stuff for years, to heat water and cook. But burning wood cannot supply the slow trickle of energy that keeps an Aga up to working heat. It’s this need that makes the cooker very well suited to micro-generation, McGrath argues. “The classic Aga uses a very small amount of energy over a long period of time,” he says. “It doesn’t need a lot of energy, but it does need frequent topping up.” Effectively that makes the cast iron cooker into a heat battery.

The trial is just one part of a re-think of Aga Foodservice products – reflected in its choice of Blur’s former bassist Alex James for its latest poster boy. Now that Aga is more than 80 years old, it has to measure up against 21st-century concerns about carbon emissions and fossil fuel futures.

On the face of it that’s a tall order. But McGrath makes a persuasive case for his product. They are, he says, made to last. About 70% of the material that goes into a new Aga is scrap metal, and at the end of their life most can be recycled. He also argues that today’s Agas “multi-task”; owners don’t need electric kettles and microwaves, and their cookers kick out about the same heat as two radiators.

There’s still plenty of scope for improvement. Top of the R&D must-do list has been to give Aga what McGrath calls programmability. Firing up your cooker and leaving it on all day to warm the home, may have suited 1930s customers. Today, those out at work want more flexibility. So the company now sells electric models that can be set to come on only when required, and a programmable gas model will follow soon.

Renewable energy remains the biggest challenge of them all, especially when wind power is so expensive to harness. Setting up the trial turbine at Coalbrookdale cost a cool £18,000, so it’s some way off yet for the market.

Nevertheless, if turbines fall in price, the idea could just be the perfect solution to the problem of intermittency: “What happens if the wind is blowing at night? What do you do with the power?” asks McGrath. His answer? “It could be getting your Aga up to heat.” – Julian Rollins

Aga Foodservice Group is a Forum for the Future partner.

20 March 2008

Julian Rollins