Chapter 1 - Diversity and Sustainable Energy Transitions: Multicriteria Diversity Analysis of Electricity Portfolios

Abstract

This chapter outlines a novel general framework for the analysis of energy diversity in relation to broader sustainability goals. For most current systems based on fossil fuels, diversification into distributed and renewable energy and demand-side energy services offers important ways to address environmental imperatives like the mitigation of climate change. The benefits of diversity also assist in addressing further fundamental challenges of sustainability. Here, as in other areas of mainstream industrial strategy, appropriate tradeoffs between diversity and wider portfolio performance offer means to help promote innovation, hedge ignorance, mitigate lock-in and accommodate pluralism. Above all, they offer a uniquely important opportunity for achieving qualities of precaution, resilience and robustness that are valued in common across sustainability, supply security and other high-profile areas of energy and industrial policy. Based on the recognition of three necessary but individually insufficient properties of diversity (variety, balance and disparity), the present general framework is applicable in a wide range of different energy policy contexts. It can be focused equally at the level of primary energy mixes, electricity supply portfolios or energy service systems. Perhaps most importantly, the present framework for multicriteria energy diversity analysis can be applied flexibly to an unconstrained array of different specialist, institutional or stakeholder perspectives. This amenability to more open and plural processes of engagement is also central to sustainability agendas. The present framework for multicriteria diversity analysis offers a means to be more systematic and transparent in articulating a range of different salient perspectives.