First Seminar: Energy Transitions Past and Prospective
The first seminar in our series took place on 9 June 2010, featuring presentations from Frank Geels (click to view/download) and Peter Pearson (click to view/download). The main theme of the session was: how useful can past experiences of energy transitions be as guides to the coming transition from unsustainable to sustainable energy production and consumption?
The discussion following the talks focused on several topics, including:
- how far can energy transitions be managed, particularly when neoliberal economic and political assumptions are still dominant?
- what influence do changing structures of political governance have on transitions?
- will transition be predominantly driven by scarcity or crisis, and what effect might this have on the course it takes?
- how is behavioural change caused, and how much influence do energy prices really have?
- does the current debate focus too much on how to motivate responses from individual consumers? and
- how might a technological transition towards sustainable energy production overcome the inertia embedded in old, unsustainable technologies?
Click here to view/download a PDF version of the summary. What are your responses to these questions? We invite discussion below via comments.
The excuse for the poor performance of the UK state: **contemporary context of dominant neoliberal political rationalities** no longer stands up. Nor did it before the banking crash. It is the UK Civil Service who have stifled politiciansâ desire to support energy initiatives. The UK could have been early with CCS when proposed on Teesside, with an offshore gas-field handy, but the Civil Service insisted on a scheme for market competition, the Company could not wait, then they decided the UK could support only one of pre-combustion or post-combustion capture, and chose the latter, probably influenced by the existing mega power companies. The UK got the daft Kingsnorth proposal to build a new coal-fired plant with post-combustion capture potential (40% cost penalty if storage included). Then the EU chose the importantly more efficient pre-combustion technology and Kingsnorth was withdrawn.
We have another mess-up over Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) the elaborate system devised by the civil service for subsidising renewable energy. The prospect of double ROCs (~ 8p/kWh subsidy) for biomass has attracted proposals for mega-plants (300MW) that would waste the heat (the main energy output) and need to import huge tonnages of the north Atlantic resource, while squeezing out rationally sized biomass CHP projects designed to use the heat and attain high efficiency as prescribed by politicians.
National Grid connection has been another fiasco, many years delay being faced by innovative companies. The Civil Service ignored it for years until the clamour got politicians to act at the end of the last government. That the UK-born Pelamis wavepower project set up in Portugal was one consequence.
I have no easy characterisation of this UK-malaise â the civil service neoliberalism is combined with close working with major business interests and ability to brush-off criticism from parliamentary select Cttees (sheltered from effective scrutiny via stranglehold on government).
Posted by Max Wallis on July 12, 2010 at 02:39 PM BST #