Energy for the Future: A New Agenda

Ensuring energy supply or more precisely ensuring adequate, affordable and reliable energy supply is considered to be one of the main challenges facing the humanity in the present century. As the scary stories of “peak‐oil” propagate and concerns rise about the prospects of finding an inhospitable climate, or fears of energy supply disruptions due to political or other reasons mount, people become concerned about the future of energy. Further, the process of developing an affordable, reliable, environmentally benign energy future is necessarily a long‐term one given that capital intensiveness, longevity and fuel specificity of energy‐related investments create a path‐dependence and produce lock‐in effects. The delivery of a sustainable, low‐carbon energy future necessarily involves a transition that focuses on influencing decentralised decision‐makers to adopt sustainable energy paths considering the economy‐wide supply and demand issues, advance planning, adequate incentives, capacity building, project management and transition management plans. The governance mechanism should be such that at any given time it promotes decision‐making in the right direction with possible demand‐ and supply‐pushes as appropriate. While the political governance system should provide the overall framework and set the aspired targets, ultimately most of the decisions have to be taken by the decentralised decision‐makers. In the case of energy efficiency and energy use, the consumers, the appliance suppliers and retailers have to be bought‐in. The builders and construction companies have to deliver energy efficient and zero carbon homes while the home buyers have to change their preference for a traditional home to an efficient home. The existing housing stock has to be upgraded. Similarly, the transport infrastructure development and management systems have to adapt to a sustainable path through rapid diffusion of alternative choices. Collectively, all such decisions will be required to reach the desired goal. In short, this is the subject of the book under review.

This study by the Sussex Energy Group takes a look at the challenge, explains the present locked‐in situation and explores alternative socio‐technical paradigms for a possible transition to a better energy future. It is about the policies to ensure a transition to a new energy paradigm that provides secure and sustainable energy with less damage to the environment and to the climate. The future of the British energy system is the main focus of the book, although, as the editors indicate, the content is relevant for other industrialised countries as well. This is a stimulating book that covers a wide range of topics and presents a different perspective grounded in the evolutionary economics tradition. While the book deals with different blocks of the jigsaw puzzle, it carefully and perhaps consciously avoids prescribing any transition management plan or a recommended path. It provides a thoroughly enjoyable reading and learning experience.

The book contains 14 chapters divided into three parts. The first part sets the background for the study by considering the energy challenges, governance issues, path dependence and lock‐in effects and policy lessons from the past. The main idea of this part is that energy policies of the past are not enough to ensure a better energy future. The British policy of relying on the markets as the principal driver of change in the energy scenario faces challenges in the changed socio‐technico‐economic climate. The new environment requires going beyond the market mantra and initiate actions that can catalyse the transition to the future. Although all six chapters of this part convey this message one way or the other, I found two chapters particularly interesting: chapter 4 on energy governance and chapter 6 on lock‐in effects. The Sussex Group has been working on these issues for a long time and their expertise is manifested in these chapters.

The second part presents the new agenda in six chapters that cover a large ground – policy formulation process, technology assessment, distributed generation, the green citizen, carbon trading and even solutions for global energy problems. This part reinforces the criticisms developed in the first part and suggests that:

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  The policy formulation has to move away from the present technocratic bias. Chapter 7 is particularly effective in presenting the alternative process of deliberative policy‐making. The example of the Dutch transition management exercise clearly shows how other European countries are committing themselves to a better energy future.

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  Creating a supportive environment for different technologies would be helpful for ensuring technology transitions where a diversified mix of technologies is expected to meet the future needs. Given the stages of development of different technologies, their supporting systems would necessarily be different and a single or uniform approach is unlikely to deliver the best results.

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  The citizen has a role to play and the future energy policy has to encourage the involvement of a critical mass of green citizens to promote the transition to a greener future. This would also imply more decentralised decision‐making and investment decisions and a greater reliance on the distributed systems of energy. However, such transitions are not automatic and require strategic decisions and interventions.

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  Although carbon trading mechanism is a powerful policy innovation of recent times, it may not overcome the barriers to a low carbon future or provide insufficient incentives to emerging new technologies to become cost effective. Making carbon trading systems more effective remains a challenge.