Sustainable Consumption Institute

Abstract

The overarching challenge for UK energy policy is to ensure the delivery of secure, affordable energy in a way that meets the emission reductions targets laid out in the Climate Change Act (2008). The EPSRC-funded Transition Pathways and more recently Realising Transition Pathways (RTP) projects have both argued that multiple logics of governance, ownership, and control of the electricity system can be followed to address the energy trilemma. This work has developed three transition pathways for the UK energy system, each driven by different governance patterns. Each pathway has a specific technological mix, institutional architecture, and societal drivers. These pathways are: central coordination (central to this pathways is the role of the nation state in actively delivering the transition); market rules (after the creation of a broad policy framework, the state allows competition and private companies to deliver sustainable, affordable energy); and thousand flowers (this pathway is characterised by a greatly expanded role for civil society in delivering distributed low-carbon generation.). The following report focusses on the thousand flowers pathway. We explore the potential of a distributed energy future and investigate the technological trajectory it could follow, along with an institutional architecture compatible with its development. We acknowledge throughout that this is a challenging but realistic system transition.