Jo Coleman shares her view on how the UK needs to prepare for a transition to a low carbon energy system

27th May 2015

Jo Coleman - Director, Strategy Development

The concept of the energy trilemma where the UK’s future energy system needs to be affordable, secure and sustainable is a familiar one. There has been a lot of talk in recent years about what needs to be done to transform the existing system into one fit for the future. Because of its ageing energy infrastructure the UK will need new energy capacity regardless of whether we choose to tackle climate change and decisions on the most cost effective way of implementing those changes need to be made soon to ensure proper planning, testing and investment to take place.

At the ETI we have developed a national energy system design and planning capability – ESME (Energy System Modelling Environment) which suggests that the UK can afford a transition to a low carbon energy system by 2050, but it is crucial that the country spends the next 10 years (the effective lifetime of the next two parliaments) developing and proving the capability of a basket of key supply and demand technology options.  In many cases this will involve demonstration at a scale consistent with the early stages of full scale deployment.

This decade of preparedness will allow known, but currently underdeveloped, solutions to be developed, commercialised and integrated and choices about the energy infrastructure design made by the mid-2020s. The UK has to replace – and therefore pay for – its energy infrastructure so a low carbon solution becomes an incremental cost with additional benefits. The country needs to adopt a systems approach to its energy planning – making decisions based on robust evidence to ensure any transition is a practical rather than an ideological opportunity. Preparing properly now means the UK can build capacity to provide a launch pad for implementation and invest resources where they will have the best economic leverage in the long-term, creating long term benefits for the UK and its economy.

Although renewable energy sources will have a significant role to play, we can’t rely on them alone so there will be a need to also develop carbon capture and storage (CCS) and nuclear power to ensure there is a balanced, secure and economic mix of low carbon technologies. We have identified bioenergy and CCS as technologies that can play a central role in reducing carbon emissions, but both require further development of markets and business models before they will attract the investment required for large scale deployment. The appeal of these technologies lies in their flexibility but also because of their potential to deliver negative carbon emissions, effectively removing carbon from the atmosphere. This would allow other industrial sectors to be decarbonised over a longer time period. But they are also among the most cost effective. If either CCS or bioenergy are not part of the UK’s energy mix going forward, it will double the cost of meeting the legally binding 2050 climate change targets and the value of each to the energy system is £200bn.

Away from power generation one of the biggest challenges will be how we heat our homes in the future. The majority of housing around now will still be there in 2050, much is poorly insulated and inefficient which wastes heat and money. Providing low carbon heat on demand for an inefficient housing stock will be increasingly challenging, efficiency improvements will have some impact where it makes economic sense, but the solutions need to be as diverse as the properties.

So clearly there are a lot of challenges ahead. Planning, examining and demonstrating at scale options for delivering these infrastructure and policy changes will be a key activity for the next 10 years. We need to prove capability across a range of the most attractive supply and demand technologies and ensure we have the information needed to make the right decisions not just in the power sector, but across heat transport and industry as well. By 2025, choices must be made regarding infrastructure design for the long-term. Closing down our options too soon could prove unnecessarily costly for the UK, but the bigger threat is failing to build up those options at all.