London’s Energy Future

The London’s Energy Future Symposium took place on 19 March at UCL. The event was the first in a series organised by London 2062. This is a project under the UCL Grand Challenge Grants Scheme which looks at the long term future of London across a number of issues by bringing together a range of leading academics and practitioners. Speakers included Paul Ekins and Bob Lowe of the UCL Energy Institute, Peter North of GLA and Bob Fiddik from the London Borough of Croydon. Among the many issues discussed that day few are listed below:
· Current policy challenges including the price of energy (i.e. low-carbon energy is currently more expensive than high-carbon energy); energy efficiency in buildings (measuring building performance, building industry skills, building valuation and motivating/ regulating
household reduction/ consumption); and incentivising investment (via the electricity market reform, Green Deal loans and Green Investment Bank).
· GLA’s policy is that London is moving towards district heating! GLA has already produced a series of ‘heat maps (see http://www.londonheatmap.co.uk/) and is drawing up at the moment an ‘Energy Master Plan’.
· ‘Lessons’ from other countries show us that the UK needs to move towards more ‘collective thinking’ which is, however, deeply counter cultural in this country; and de-risking legislation for the energy market
· Who should design energy systems and energy policy? Economists and engineers, alongside policy makers, not only policy makers as done over the last 10 years!
· For the scale of envisaged change to happen we need to built a ‘community of practice’, continuous and coherent policy support, and include economics and engineer ‘literates’ in policy processes.
This was an interesting discussion, loaded with economic and technical stuff! However, the role that institutions and people might play in this transition has been little touched upon!

Catalina Turcu, UCL
21 March 2012