Energy for the UK in 2050

Background

What will be the UK's energy needs in 2050 and how will they be met? At first glance this seems an impossibly daunting question to answer. Future political, technological and social possibilities seem unbounded, and as history shows far-reaching changes can occur in an instant. The energy industry faces such rapid change and discontinuities that shorter-term plans quickly become obsolete.

The pace of change itself seems to be accelerating so forecasts on any timeframe beyond perhaps three years would become increasingly unreliable. Clearly the question needs to be asked and is of interest to government, utilities and many other bodies involved in long-term energy planning.

Gill Ringland of SAMI and Azfar Shaukat of Capital Energy Limited led a workshop of about 50 people at the Strategic Planning Society in April 2003 to consider the UK's future energy. The participants were drawn from a range of industry sectors.

The Process

• Based on the Energy White paper and work leading up to that, we defined the area of concern as energy generation in the UK in 2050

• The participants identified about 200 forces shaping this environment: and we realised that our area of concern needed to be redefined - one of the possible disruptive changes was technological breakthroughs in energy transmission and storage so that energy for the UK need not be generated in the UK

• Sorting the broad range of forces into forecastable and uncertain, important and unimportant, and identifying three groups of uncertain and important events which would shape energy provision in 2050

• Generating scenarios from these three groups, naming them through discussion to bring out the nature of the scenario; and choosing a few for further analysis

• Working in small groups on the chosen scenarios to develop early indicators, timelines and heroes - to make the scenarios more vivid.

Conclusions

The scenarios were prepared in limited time and were not meant to be comprehensive. Additional preparation, research and specialist input would have helped in the detail but we found that credible and meaningful ideas could be produced even in a short but focused scenario creation session.

In such a short workshop, accuracy is not the aim, but the broad outcomes from each scenario are not materially affected by the level of detail and can provide a framework for future desk research. In this workshop, as in most futures work, we found that cross-disciplinary input can generate a broader spectrum of ideas and "angles" than from sector-specific specialists only.

A more detailed write up is available in Utility Week, August 2003.