FUTURES ANALYSTS’ NETWORK (FAN CLUB) - Seminar 24 April 2009

SEMBE - Powering Our Lives

Foresight undertakes major projects which seek to provide a robust evidence-base to inform strategic policy making over the longer term in critical areas where multidisciplinary science holds the promise of solutions. By helping to construct the evidence-base in Foresight projects, academics and other stakeholders have a voice in helping to answer some of the most challenging policy questions faced by the UK.

On Friday, 24 April, the FAN Club enjoyed a lunchtime seminar in Knightsbridge on the recent Foresight SEMBE Project, exploring the possible future development of energy systems and the built environment – especially in light of the UK’s challenging 2050 target for achieving an 80% reduction in carbon emissions.

The guest speaker was Dr Jim Watson, Director of the Sussex Energy Group, and one of the lead experts on the SEMBE Project, which was published on 26 November 2008, the same day that the Climate Change Act passed into law. The project was sponsored by the Department for Communities and Local Government (and Department for Energy and Climate Change?). With around half of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions coming from the built environment, achieving a sustainable society requires us to examine and modify how we generate and use energy and the environment in which we use it while maintaining energy security, the requirements of the economy and the expectations of the individual. View presentation slides here.

Dr Watson introduced the project’s combination of scientific evidence with a long-term view as a means of helping officials today devise policies that will be robust and resilient enough to serve society 50 years from now. The scientific evidence consists of around 60 peer-reviewed, state-of-science papers, ranging from fusion to household energy conservation. *(see bottom of page)

The evidence base was then interrogated by the project team through intensive futures workshops that resulted in four possible futures, which used two key uncertainties as its axes, first in the geo-political system (from open/global to closed/bilateral) and second, whether investment would be applied to existing systems or to different ones.

The resulting narrative scenarios are designed to illustrate – rather than predict or forecast – credible, possible futures and help citizens and policy makers alike visualise what the future might look like and then think about the specific challenges and opportunities that need to be addressed in order to achieve a sustainable future society.

Although the project does not promote particular policies, it does identify a number of important themes and trends that can inform policies that perform well in different possible futures.

One of the key energy themes that emerged from SEMBE is the problem of “lock-in”, which Dr Watson indicated was well-known to economists, but poses a significant challenge to the future of British energy. Over the past sixty years, the UK has evolved a centralised, national energy infrastructure (electricity, gas, etc) and although decarbonisation targets could be met with this system, lock-in gives policy makers less flexibility, making it difficult for newer technologies and radical energy systems that may suit us better now and in the future to establish themselves. For instance, electric cars will need to have an infrastructure comparable to that of petrol stations in order to become a viable alternative to existing vehicles.

Lock-in is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, combining technologies, institutions, regulations and behaviours and is not easily overcome. However, a combination of regulation, experimentation, diversification and decentralisation can give officials a better range of tools to meet and overcome to the evolving challenges it will face. Dr Watson observed that the project doesn’t suggest that energy systems should be completely decentralised, but that a mixture of systems, appropriate to the region and the setting is preferable (cities, for instance, may wish to develop their own Combined Heat and Power or heat grids).

There has been a great deal of discussion in recent years about the need to make “new build” construction zero carbon, and deadlines have been set to achieve this objective in the residential and commercial sectors, although there is concern over whether standards are being implemented, enforced and monitored.

However, the SEMBE project found that 70% of the buildings that were constructed by 2000 will still be with us in 2050. Consequently, there is a retrofit imperative for our existing built environment and this work must happen at a significantly faster pace than is currently the case. Moreover, there needs to be more investment in R&D for new technologies to make retrofitting easier, but also less expensive and it will be necessary to involve firms, communities and individuals to ensure retrofitting technologies are adopted by all.

Another central theme is the need for a dramatic change in energy behaviour. Dr Watson emphasised that people, not buildings, use energy and that how people use energy in buildings is as important as energy efficiency of the buildings themselves.

Dr Watson observed that the problem of climate change is extremely complex and will require multiple pathways to remedy the many challenges – technology cannot be relied upon to provide the solution, although it plays an important part.

He concluded by outlining some of the project’s proposals for opportunities (for Government leadership in procurement, for regulatory/auditory reform, and for the short term improving and increasing of low carbon skills, for example) and for innovative models, such as household MOTs, “green leases”, and tying developers to the medium- to longer-term performance of their developments.

The floor was then opened to questions, moderated by Karl Cunion, Assistant Chief Scientific Adviser, Communities and Local Government. A number of interesting questions were raised which stimulated a wide ranging and insightful discussion. The main issues included:

• The potential need for and scope for experimentation in exploring policy options and integrated solutions to the future challenges.
• How learning from ‘grand schemes’ of the past (SEMBE chapter 2) might be particularly useful in exploring issues such as centralisation vs decentralisation, and the development and deployment of smart technologies.
• The choices and tensions between strategies which call for investment to develop novel or, alternatively, existing technologies and the issues of risk management and risk aversion which these expose.
• How innovation in developing new business models will be crucial to future sustainability and how we might learn from the experiences and perspectives of other countries.
• The great importance of fully considering the societal context and the behavioural and motivational/incentivising aspects in policy development and the deployment of technology solutions in achieving change.
• It would be useful to explore how best to disseminate the key messages from the project, in particular those aimed at delivering behavioural change, into home, the classroom and elsewhere in the community.
• Pace vs policy; “vision” vs surveillance. How change in delivering a low carbon environment can be most effectively realised and driven by markets and/or central government and/or from the bottom up, so as to maximise the degrees of freedom for action.
• The function of the report scenarios in defining one possible future space as the context for policy and their scope to set out (or not) a pathway or roadmap for the delivery of the 2050 targets.
• Energy security
• Where will future investment come from – Government, communities and the potential role of carbon pricing?

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* These have been published in a special issue of the journal Energy Policy (2008, Volume 36, Number 12).