LAUSR

The evolution of modern industrialised society has been interwoven with discoveries of sources and uses of energy, especially the exploitation of fossil fuel resource stocks, the assembly of energy infrastructures, and the development of end-use technologies and practices. With its coal reserves, ports and engineering skills, Britain lay at the heart of the first industrial revolution. Nowadays, while energy supplies underpin continued economic development, this fossil fuel dependence exposes the UK to major risks: supply and resource insecurities; increasing costs of energy supply; and damage to the quality and longer term viability of the biosphere. The 2008 Climate Change Act aimed to establish an economically credible ‘greenhouse gas’ (GHG) emissions reduction pathway towards an 80% emissions reduction by 2050 against a 1990 baseline. It set legally binding mediumand long-term targets, as well as requiring intermediate carbon budgets. These GHG reductions will necessitate a radical transition towards an energy system that delivers high-quality energy services through low-carbon technologies and processes, whilst ensuring the provision of secure energy supplies at affordable prices: the so-called energy policy ‘trilemma’. There is clearly a need for urgent decisions and substantial investments in supply and demand-side options, against the risks of lock-in to technologies and institutions highlighted in the recent International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2016. In this context, the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded the nine-university multi-disciplinary Realising Transition Pathways (RTP) Consortium, under the auspices of the RCUK Energy Programme, over the period 2012–2016. It followed an initial Transition Pathways project (2008–2012), with essentially the same university collaborators, that was funded under a strategic partnership between E.ON UK and the EPSRC to undertake a whole systems analysis of the UK electricity sector. Thus, the RTP project built on the first project’s three socio-technical transition pathways, tools and approaches to analyse the challenges involved in realising a transition to a UK low-carbon electricity system in the context of wider European energy developments and policies. In constructing the three pathways, the project focused on aspects of governance. This approach sees a transition pathway arising through the interactions of three broad, highly aggregated types of governance ‘logics’ (state, market, civil society) and the shifting balances of agency between them and the actors who espouse them. These logics influence the framing of energy challenges and responses, including policy responses. The pathways were named Market Rules, Central Co-ordination and Thousand Flowers (TF) reflecting three alternative governance ‘logics’ (blue, red and green pathways, respectively). They were developed and analysed via an innovative collaboration between engineers, social scientists and policy analysts. Their research focused on the realisation of technologies, practices and choices that might ‘get there from here’ on the journey to 2050, and their behavioural, economic and environmental implications. It involved new studies of historical transition experience, strategic issues (including horizon scanning of medium-term technological developments on the supply-side, the network infrastructure and the demand-side), as well as network, market simulation and behavioural modelling, with ‘whole systems appraisal’ of key energy technologies and the full pathways, within a ‘sustainability framework’. This analysis sought to contribute to understand the future interplay of the energy policy ‘trilemma’: again, achieving deep GHG emission cuts, whilst maintaining a secure and affordable energy system and addressing how resulting tensions might be resolved.