UK Energy System Research Articles

The future role of natural gas in the UK: A bridge to nowhere?

The UK has ambitious, statutory long-term climate targets that will require deep decarbonisation of its energy system. One key question facing policymakers is the role of natural gas both during the transition towards, and in the achievement of, a future low-carbon energy system. Here we assess a range of possible futures for the UK, and find that gas is unlikely to act as a cost-effective ‘bridge’ to a decarbonised UK energy system. There is also limited scope for gas in power generation after 2030 if the UK is to meet its emission reduction targets, in the absence of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Without CCS, a ‘second dash for gas’ while providing short-term gains in reducing emissions, is unlikely to be the most cost-effective way to reduce emissions, and could result in stranded assets and compromise the UK's decarbonisation ambitions. In such a case, gas use in 2050 is estimated at only 10% of its 2010 level. However, with significant CCS deployment by 2050, natural gas could remain at 50–60% of the 2010 level, primarily in the industrial (including hydrogen production) and power generation sectors.

Towards pragmatic narratives of societal engagement in the UK energy system

Issues of societal engagement in the energy system pervade both the study and the doing of energy policy. In both realms, narratives as persuasive ‘vehicles of meaning’ help us both to make sense of society’s role in past and current energy systems, and shape these roles in future energy systems. However, our eagerness to simplify complex histories and unwritten futures means that the narratives we create are often reliant on assumptions. This has implications for the degree to which narratives can find pragmatism, and thus be valuable, to a wide range of stakeholders.Drawing both on historic accounts of societal engagement in energy systems alongside emerging discourses around future energy systems, this paper offers several points of caution for the use of narratives of engagement. In terms of historic narratives, these relate to hindsight bias, predictability, and normative positioning, the combination of which depict histories of engagement as retrospectively obvious, and falsely suggest a controllability of past events. In terms of forward-looking narratives, while optimism and ambiguity play key roles in garnering interest in visions among stakeholders, they also mean that narratives vary in their relevance, and thus value to, different stakeholders. Fundamentally, narratives must find legitimacy in the actors they purport to recruit, and must thus simultaneously attend to regulative, normative and cognitive aspects of energy system engagement.

The potential of marine energy technologies in the UK – Evaluation from a systems perspective

Accelerated technological change plays a crucial role in enabling the low-carbon energy transition. Quantitative energy modelling exploring alternative long-term decarbonisation pathways can support policy-makers in choosing the most important areas for technology promotion. This study analyses the potential contribution of marine energy in the UK from an energy systems perspective considering the trade-offs between local lead markets and global learning, the uncertainty in the learning potential, competition with alternative technologies and impacts on system balancing. The results indicate that only under very favourable conditions, i.e. with learning rates above 15% and high global deployment, marine energy will have a significant contribution to the UK decarbonisation pathway. Alternatively, marine energy could constitute a hedging strategy against multiple failure in other low-carbon options. The early strategic investments into marine energy lead, in most cases, to a slight rise in societal welfare costs compared to the respective cases without attempts to induce marine learning and brings benefits to the electricity system. Thus, on the whole, we conclude that marine energy has the potential to contribute to the UK energy system, but there is a substantial risk that strategic investments in a national lead market will not directly pay off in the long term.

Valuing energy futures; a comparative analysis of value pools across UK energy system scenarios

Electricity markets in liberalised nations are composed primarily of private firms that make strategic decisions about how to secure competitive advantage. Energy transitions, driven by decarbonisation targets and technological innovation, will create new markets and destroy old ones in a re-configuration of the power sector. This research suggests that by 2050 up to 21bnGBP per year of new financial value is available in the UK electricity system, and that depending on scenario, these new values represent up to 31% of the entire electricity sector. To service these markets business model innovation and new firm strategies are needed in electric power provision. Energy scenarios can inform strategic decisions over business model adaptation, but to date scenario modelling has not directly addressed firm strategy and behaviour. This is due in part to neo-classical assumptions of firm rationality and perfect foresight. This research adopts a resource based view of the firm rooted in evolutionary economics to argue that quantifying the relative size of the markets created and destroyed by energy transitions can provide useful insight into firm behaviour and innovation policy.

Review of Tidal Lagoon Technology and Opportunities for Integration within the UK Energy System

The number of distributed resources for renewable energy installed worldwide has been increasing rapidly in the last decade, and the great majority of these installations consist of solar panels and wind turbines. Other renewable sources of energy are not exploited to the same level: for instance, tidal energy is still a minute portion of the global energy capacity, in spite of the large amount of potential energy stored in tidal waves, and of the successful experience of the few existing plants. The world’s second largest tidal range occurs in the UK but at the moment tidal installations in this country are limited to a few prototypes. More recently, there has been a renewed interest in harnessing tidal energy in the UK, and a few tidal lagoon projects have been evaluated by the UK government. This paper provides an overview of the historical and current developments of tidal plants, a description of operation of tidal lagoons, challenges and opportunities for their integration within the UK energy systems and solutions to improve the dispatchability of tidal energy. The concepts described in the paper are applied to a tidal project proposed for South Wales.

Multienergy vector modelling of a Scottish Energy System: Transitions and technology implications

The Scottish Government’s commitment for 100% of electricity consumed in Scotland to be from renewable, zero-carbon sources by 2020 continues to drive change in the energy system alongside European and UK targets. The growth of renewables in Scotland is being seen at many scales including industrial, domestic and community generation. In these latter two cases, a transition from the current ‘top down’ energy distribution system to a newer approach is emerging. The work of this paper will look at a ‘bottom up’ view that sees community led distributed energy at its centre. This paper uses the modelling tool HESA to investigate high penetrations of distributed generation in the Angus Region of Scotland. Installations of distributed generation will follow Thousand Flowers transition pathway trajectory, which sees more than 50% of electricity demand being supplied by distributed generation by 2050. From this, insights around the technological and socio-political feasibility, consequences and implications of high penetrations of distributed generation in the UK energy system are presented. Results demonstrate the influence that system change will have on regional and local emission levels under four separate scenarios. It is shown that the penetration of distributed generation requires supplementary installations of reliable and long-term storage alongside utilisation of transmission and transportation infrastructures to maximise the potential of distributed generation and maximise whole system benefits. Importantly, there must be a level of co-ordination and support to realise a shift to a highly distributed energy future to ensure there is a strong economic case with a reliable policy backing.

Long-term scenarios: Energy pathways in the UK

The bottom-up approach promoted through the Paris Agreement and signed in 2016 requires the definition of accurate and realistic national pathways to cut emissions. A recent study applied to the UK energy system shows that current UK policy on climate change is incompatible with the most stringent climate objectives.

The thermodynamic implications of electricity end-use for heat and power

Thermodynamic ( energy and exergy) analysis can give rise to differing insights into the relative merits of the various end-uses of electricity for heat and power. The thermodynamic property known as ‘exergy’ reflects the ability to undertake ‘useful work’, but does not represent well heating processes within an energy sector. The end-use of electricity in the home, in the service sector, in industry, and the UK economy more generally has therefore been examined in order to estimate how much is used for heat and power, respectively. The share of electricity employed for heat and power applications has been studied, and alternative scenarios for the future development of the UK energy system were then used to evaluate the variation in heat/power share out to 2050. It was found that the proportion of electricity used to meet these end-use heat demands in the three sectors examined were likely to be quite high (∼50–60%), and that these shares are insensitive to the precise nature of the forward projections (forecasts, transition pathways or scenarios). The results represent a first indicative analysis of possible long-term trends in this heat/power share across the UK economy. Whilst the study is the first to consider this topic within such a timeframe, some of the necessary simplifying assumptions mean there are substantial uncertainties associated with the results. Where end-use heat demands are met by electricity, energy and exergy analysis should be performed in parallel in order to reflect the interrelated constraints imposed by the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. An understanding of the actual end-uses for electricity will also enable policy makers to take account of the implications of a greater end-use of electricity in the future.

Impact of technology uncertainty on future low-carbon pathways in the UK

Energy and climate policy-making requires strong quantitative scientific evidence to devise robust and consistent long-term decarbonisation strategies. Energy system modelling can provide crucial insights into the inherent uncertainty in such strategies, which needs to be understood when designing appropriate policy measures.This study contributes to the growing research area of uncertainty analysis in energy system models. We combine consistent and realistic narratives on several technology dimensions with a global sensitivity analysis in a national, bottom-up, optimizing energy system model. This produces structured insights into the impact of low-carbon technology and resource availability on the long-term development of the UK energy system under ambitious decarbonisation pathways. We explore a variety of result metrics to present policy-relevant results in a useful and concise manner. The results provide valuable information on the variability of fuel and technology use across the uncertainty space (e.g. a strong variation in natural gas demand). We demonstrate the complementarities and substitutability of technologies (e.g. the dependency of hydrogen technologies on the availability of CCS). We highlight critical low-carbon options and hedging strategies (e.g. the early decarbonisation of the electricity sector or the stronger use of renewable sources as a hedging against failure in other technologies) and demonstrate timing and path dependencies (e.g. the importance of early decarbonisation action in the presence of multiple technology uncertainty). The results also show how the availability of a given technology can have wider impacts elsewhere in the energy system, thus complicating the management of a long-term energy transition.

Modelling energy transitions for climate targets under landscape and actor inertia

The speed at which established socioeconomic and technological systems can be adapted to alternatives that are compatible with a climate stabilised, 2°C world remains unknown. Quantitative models used for assessing this challenge typically make a number of arguably optimistic assumptions regarding human behaviour and decision making. This often restricts the insights produced to futures approximating a so-called first-best policy landscape. However, empirical studies of socio-technical change have shown that technological diffusion is often influenced by actors and institutions interacting under less ideal, second-best conditions. This paper quantifies these factors in a formal energy model as landscape and actor inertia and employs them for the first time in BLUE, a dynamic stochastic socio-technical simulation of technology diffusion, energy and emissions inspired by the multi-level perspective. Using the UK energy system as an example, the results illustrate how socio-technical inertia may significantly blunt future efforts to achieve climate targets.

Regional winners and losers in future UK energy system transitions

This paper demonstrates the integration of institutional perspectives on energy system transitions into formal energy economic modelling. The perspectives of key UK energy system stakeholders have been used to develop three socio-technical narratives of energy system change that are quantified in a 24-region techno-economic model of the country. Implementing these three narratives in the model environment allows their feasibility for meeting climate targets to be assessed as well as articulating their implied sub-national regional outlooks for technologies and investment. The latter elements are discussed in light of the regional socioeconomic and demographic landscape. The study highlights some of the regional political dimensions associated with future investment targeting in the UK energy system. In particular, energy policy decisions may create tensions between the four different UK government administrations as well as raising important questions about regional economic development and how an equitable energy transition can be achieved for all.

An income-based analysis of the value premise for property energy performance

There is a body of literature that has given some empirical support to the notion that energy efficient buildings may be associated with significant financial premiums. However, such evidence is not entirely conclusive and may be confounded by an associated workplace quality factor. In light of the perceived lack of clarity within this body of literature to provide empirical support to the existence of financial premiums for building energy performance, this research aims to explore the potential financial value of property energy performance through the application of futures studies to income-based valuations. This is addressed through applying exploratory scenario descriptions of the UK energy system to the valuation of 24 commercial offices. In doing so, every opportunity is given to identify the significance of property energy performance to financial value. The results of this research demonstrate how, even when exploring an extreme set of diverse energy-system futures and accounting for the social costs of climate change, the potential of financial premiums for energy efficient property are not of the same order of magnitude as those observed in the literature. These differences may be explained by confounding associations between such labels and overall facility quality, or by short-term market sentiment.

Implementing land-use and ecosystem service effects into an integrated bioenergy value chain optimisation framework

This study presents a multi-objective optimisation model that is configured to account for a range of interrelated or conflicting questions with regard to the introduction of bioenergy systems. A spatial-temporal mixed integer linear programming model ETI-BVCM (Energy Technologies Institute – Bioenergy Value Chain Model) (ETI, 2015b, Newton-Cross, 2015 and Samsatli et al., 2015) was adopted and extended to incorporate resource-competing systems and effects on ecosystem services brought about by the land-use transitions in response to increasing bioenergy penetration over five decades. The extended model functionality allows exploration of the effects of constraining ecosystem services impacts on other system-wide performance measures such as cost or greenhouse gas emissions. The users can therefore constrain the overall model by metric indicators which quantify the changes of ecosystem services due to land use transitions. The model provides a decision-making tool for optimal design of bioenergy value chains supporting an economically and land-use efficient and environmentally sustainable UK energy system while still delivering multiple ecosystem services.

The role of flexible CCS in the UK's future energy system

That CCS will be required to operate in a flexible and load following fashion in the diverse energy landscape of the 21st century is well recognised. However, what is less well understood is how these plants will be dispatched at the unit generator scale, and what effect this will have on the performance and behaviour of the plant at the individual unit operation level. To address this gap, we couple an investment and unit commitment energy system model with a detailed plant-level model of a super-critical coal-fired power station integrated with an amine-based post-combustion CO2 capture process. We provide insight into the likely role of coal and gas CCS plants in the UK's energy system in the 2030s, 2040s and 2050s. We then evaluate the impact that this has on the performance of an individual coal CCS plant operating in this system, and chart its evolution throughout this period. Owing to the increased frequency and duration of part-load operation, asset utilisation and average efficiency suffer, leading to a substantially increased LCOE, implying that CCS costs will need to decrease more rapidly than is currently expected. Further, as a direct consequence of the dynamic operation, the interaction of the CCS plants with the downstream CO2 transport network is characterised by highly transient behaviour, including periods during which no CO2 is injected to the transport network, implying that the transport system must therefore be designed to incorporate this variability of supply.

The implications of heat electrification on national electrical supply-demand balance under published 2050 energy scenarios

Published UK 2050 energy scenarios specify a range of decarbonised supply side technologies combined with electrification of transportation and heating. These scenarios are designed to meet CO2 reduction targets whilst maintaining reliability of supply. Current models of the UK energy system either make significant assumptions about the role of demand side management or do not carry out the analysis at sufficient resolution and hence determining the impact of heat electrification on the reliability of supply of the scenarios is not possible. This paper presents a new model that estimates national supply and demand, hour-by-hour. Calculations are based on 11 years of weather data which allows a probabilistic assessment of deficit frequency throughout the day. It is found that achieving demand reduction targets are far more important than meeting electrification targets and that significant adoption of CHP is most likely to deliver a viable energy future for the UK.

Uncertainties in decarbonising heat in the UK

Heating is arguably one of the most difficult sectors to decarbonise in the UK's energy system. Meeting the 80% greenhouse gas emission reduction target by 2050 is likely to require that heat related emissions of CO2 from buildings are near zero by 2050, and there is a 70% reduction in emissions from industry (from 1990 levels). Though it is clear that the use of the natural gas network will reduce over time, recent modelling suggests a limited residual role for gas by 2050 to help meet peaks in heat demand. High levels of uncertainty about the way in which heat will be decarbonised present a number of challenges to policy makers. This paper will explore the risks and uncertainties associated with the transition to a low carbon heat system in the UK as outlined by the 4th carbon budget review. The potential impact of key uncertainties on the levelised costs of heat technologies and the development of energy networks are explored using a sensitivity analysis approach. Policy changes required to decarbonise the heat sector are also examined.

UK nuclear and fossil fuel energy infrastructure climate risks

The energy sector’s importance as critical national infrastructure means that the sector has been long prepared for disruptions, of which weather-related disruptions are generally well understood. Climate change means changing mean operating conditions, new and more frequent extremes and changing risk profiles. These changes have the potential to disrupt operations, while others may have long-term effects on the performance of infrastructure. This paper reviews the current knowledge base surrounding climate impacts on the infrastructure and operations of the nuclear, coal, oil and gas subsectors. We also present assessment of ‘confidence in the science’. The risks identified within the Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) were comprehensive; however, we note areas in need of further investigation. Risks to upstream oil and gas are not covered in detail, and risks to new energy systems, in particular carbon capture and storage and unconventional fossil fuels, are not covered at all. Their detailed consideration in the next CCRA is recommended, alongside more systems approaches to risk assessment of the UK energy system.

Land use implications of future energy system trajectories—The case of the UK 2050 Carbon Plan

The UK's 2008 Climate Change Act sets a legally binding target for reducing territorial greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050, relative to 1990 levels. Four pathways to achieve this target have been developed by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, with all pathways requiring increased us of bioenergy. A significant amount of this could be indigenously sourced from crops, but will increased domestic production of energy crops conflict with other agricultural priorities?To address this question, a coupled analysis of the UK energy system and land use has been developed. The two systems are connected by the production of bioenergy, and are projected forwards in time under the energy pathways, accounting for various constraints on land use for agriculture and ecosystem services.The results show different combinations of crop yield and compositions for the pathways lead to the appropriation of between 7% and 61% of UK's agricultural land for bioenergy production. This could result in competition for land for food production and other land uses, as well as indirect land use change in other countries due to an increase in bioenergy imports. Consequently, the potential role of bioenergy in achieving UK emissions reduction targets may face significant deployment challenges.

Long-term scenarios for reaching climate targets and energy security in UK

The construction and subsequent analysis of scenarios using energy systems models is an essential tool in energy policy making. This paper presents two descriptive scenarios for the development of the UK energy system to 2050, using four subsequent decadal time-slices. The two scenarios, K_Scenario and Z_Scenario, were modelled with the use of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) 2050 Pathways Calculator. K_Scenario is a scenario in which the use fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage (CCS) are prominent in the power sector, while Z_Scenario focuses on the development of renewables with energy storage and nuclear power. Both scenarios seek to achieve the UK's legally binding target of an 80% reduction in GHG emissions from 1990 levels by 2050. Abatement is achieved through numerous developments in each of the scenarios, including the development and use of shale gas, hydrogen, additional wind and solar deployment, the expansion of bioenergy and use of carbon capture and storage (CCS). These developments must be driven by policies designed to pursue dramatic decarbonisation.

An integrated systematic analysis of uncertainties in UK energy transition pathways

Policy goals to transition national energy systems to meet decarbonisation and security goals must contend with multiple overlapping uncertainties. These uncertainties are pervasive through the complex nature of the system, the long term consequences of decisions, and in the models and analytical approaches used. These greatly increase the challenges of informing robust decision making. Energy system studies have tended not to address uncertainty in a systematic manner, relying on simple scenario or sensitivity analysis. This paper utilises an innovative UK energy system model, ESME, which characterises multiple uncertainties via probability distributions and propagates these uncertainties to explore trade-offs in cost effective energy transition scenarios. A linked global sensitivity analysis is used to explore the uncertainties that have most impact on the transition. The analysis highlights the strong impact of uncertainty on delivering the required emission reductions, and the need for an appropriate carbon price. Biomass availability, gas prices and nuclear capital costs emerge as critical uncertainties in delivering emission reductions. Further developing this approach for policy requires an iterative process to ensure a complete understanding and representation of different uncertainties in meeting mitigation policy objectives.