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Against a backdrop of growing interest in the development of low carbon alternatives to petroleum derived liquid fuels, this paper provides an analysis of earlier experiences of the emergence and evolution of alternative liquid fuels. We argue such analyses can provide useful insights for future energy transitions and in particular the governance of such transitions. This paper focusses on two alternatives to petrol manufactured in the UK during the inter-war period (1918-1938). The two fuels were power alcohol, made by the Distillers Company Ltd. (DCL) and sold as Discol between 1921 and 1973, and a petrol-from-coal made by Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd. (ICI), which was blended with petroleum derived petrol and sold between 1935 and 1958. Here we examine the background to the emergence of these fuels, the actors involved and their combined roles. We find both fuels received government support during a time of rapid growth in the motor industry, fluctuating economic conditions, fears of absolute oil shortages, and the desire to develop the UK’s chemical industry. Both fuels were considerably affected by changing political thinking around energy security and oil major hegemony; governance of fuel distribution in particular had significant effects on both fuels. We discuss how changing modes of governance, between market and state logics, created hybrid governance conditions. These conditions reflected state intervention to support new fuels and a failure to regulate the market for fuel distribution. Therefore, whilst hybrid governance provided government with the flexibility to respond quickly to changing circumstances, unresolved tensions between policies made it more difficult for alternative fuels to thrive.

Under the 2008 Climate Change Act, the UK has committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. This implies a radical transformation of systems for meeting energy service demands - in particular, a transition to a low carbon system of electricity generation and supply. Despite efforts by the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to examine pathways to 2050, most of the focus in UK energy policy has been on the shorter term reforms needed to incentivise high levels of investment in low carbon generation technologies, embedded in the Energy Bill currently going through the UK Parliament. This chapter draws on work by the authors and colleagues on UK low carbon transition pathways for the electricity sector to 2050 (Hammond and Pearson, 2013; Foxon, 2013) to examine the drivers and consequences of alternative low carbon pathways, and reflect on the implications for current UK energy policy measures. This suggests that governance models with different roles for government, business and civil society could lead to quite different low carbon futures, so that which model dominates could have a significant influence on the direction of change and the risks and challenges to be addressed. Whilst a hybrid government-market form of governance appears to be emerging, there still seems to be a relatively small role for civil society in influencing the pathway to a low carbon future.

Demand management in Britain is not new. We suggest that there is value in exploring earlier experiences, for the insights they offer into the culture and practices of the electricity supply industry and into the challenges demand management faces today. The paper focuses on the two decades after the Second World War, in which the UK electricity supply industry tried to mould and shift the time profile of electricity demand, especially for domestic heating. Between 1945 and 1964 the Electrical Development Association (EDA) was an industry actor that worked to impact domestic electricity demand. As the industry’s central public relations arm, its main role was to promote electricity and its use, although in this period it also attempted to reduce domestic demand at peaks, especially for space heating. In the late 1940s, when electricity supply was very tight, it did this by advertising to discourage the use of electric fires. Later, the EDA encouraged the take-up of off-peak appliances, such as night-storage heaters, and considered these promotional activities successful attempts at load-shifting. The EDA is thus an interesting case of demand management by an organisation whose main interest was to increase, not decrease, the use of electricity, a position not unlike that of most large electricity utilities today.\ud The paper explores EDA’s stated reasons for engaging with demand management and the context of their work in this area, including shifting government policies and social changes and competition from other fuels and technologies, in an attempt to understand the viewpoint and actions of one of the industry’s influential but traditional actors. The EDA was constantly negotiating between critical views of its work, from both within and without the electricity industry, and their own organisation’s desires both to promote electricity and shift demand off-peak. These negotiations are shown to have influenced their demand management work. The paper also investigates, partly as a reality-check against EDA’s self-promotion, what types of heating appliances were actually used and preferred by domestic consumers.

Innovation in renewable energy sources (RES), such as solar photovoltaics (PV), can play an\ud important part in CO2 reductions for climate change mitigation, as well as contributing to economic\ud development. With a production capacity growing by more than 70% per year over the last 7 years,\ud China is rapidly emerging as an important player in the global PV market, with significant levels of\ud exports to Western European countries. The country's low labour cost combined with the potentially\ud huge internal market should enable it to contribute to technology learning processes, driving down\ud costs and increasing market diffusion. By comparison, though the UK aims to show global leadership\ud in climate change policy, e.g. by setting a legally binding target to reduce CO2 emissions by 60% by\ud 2050, it has been slow in developing either production capacity or markets for PV technology.\ud By adopting a national innovation systems framework of analysis, the paper identifies the different\ud technological and institutional actors and relations of the innovation systems for PV in the UK and in\ud China, and assesses the extent to which these are likely to encourage or constrain the technological\ud development and the market diffusion of this technology in the two countries.\ud This novel effort to compare and contrast the innovation systems in the two countries combines\ud information collected in both the UK and China and interviews with a sample of key actors in the PV\ud sector. The comparison of the two countries’ innovation systems both unveils striking differences from\ud which valuable policy lessons can be derived for the management of innovation in the energy sector\ud and helps understanding of how such innovation could contribute to economic development.

This paper describes work being undertaken as part of an interdisciplinary project on transition pathways to a low carbon economy, bringing together insights from engineers, social scientists and policy analysts. The project is examining the plausibility of different transition pathways for a low carbon energy system in the UK, under different governance patterns, in relation to both centralised and decentralised systems for meeting energy service demands. It uses a conceptual and analytical framework combining the multi-level transitions perspective of landscape, regime and niche levels, with more detailed analysis of the technological feasibility and social acceptability of the pathways. The research uses an interpretative frame based on an „action space‟ of governance patterns relating to the mix and balance of actions led by three sets of actors in central government, in liberalized markets and in civil society. In order to evaluate these pathways, the project team is employing a „toolkit‟ of techniques to explore and evaluate specific implications of the selected transition pathways to a highly electric, low carbon economy. These aim: to provide a transparent sustainability appraisal framework (economic, social, environmental and technical benefits) for the transition pathways; to explore and evaluate the „whole system‟ implications of the selected transition pathways. This paper highlights how these assessment tools will be used to explore the implications of different governance patterns in relation to the transition pathways.

This paper describes the key findings and policy messages from an inter-disciplinary project developing and analysing transition pathways for a UK low carbon electricity system in the UK to 2050. The project is a collaboration between leading UK engineers, social scientists and policy analysts, supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the energy company E.ON.\ud Three core transition pathways explore alternative future pathways for the evolution of the UK electricity system under different governance arrangements, dominated by market, government and civil society logics respectively. The paper outlines these three core transition pathways, and briefly summarises insights from demand side, supply side, and whole systems appraisal analyses of the pathways.\ud The pathways demonstrate that governance and regulatory frameworks will have a significant influence on the mix of low carbon generation options, the level of future energy service demands (including additional demand from electrification of heating and transport services) and mix of centralized and distributed generation. The paper also highlights the significant challenges facing market actors, energy users, social movements and policy-makers in realizing any of these pathways. The adoption of low-carbon generation and energy efficiency technologies will depend on changes to market and regulatory frameworks, to strategies of large and small firms, to practices of how households and businesses use energy. How these changes interact or ‘co-evolve’ will determine the nature of the pathway and the risks in realising it. Finally, the paper summarises how analysis of and reflection on these pathways could help to inform decision-making by government, firms and wider society on steps needed to realise a transition to a low carbon electricity future.

Over the last five centuries, industrialised societies have experienced major technological innovation, mass production of equipment, expansion of energy infrastructures and networks and falling costs of fuels. This has meant cheaper\ud heating, power, transport and lighting. This paper presents evidence on the decline in the cost of these energy services and the associated rise in energy service use, from\ud the fourteenth century to the present day, in what was to become the United Kingdom.\ud For most of the services (i.e. heat, power, transport and lighting), there was an upward trend in average energy prices during the second-half of the nineteenth century and\ud much of the twentieth century. During the period, energy systems were dramatically altered with large scale substitution towards more expensive but higher ‘quality’ fuels.\ud From the beginning of the nineteenth century on, though, the average efficiency for energy services always improves. This means that, since 1750, apart from a brief period of stagnation in the first half of the nineteenth for power and transport, Britain experienced consistently declining prices of energy services. We also found that, since the Industrial Revolution, demand for power, transport and to a less extent lighting appear to be inelastic. However, in the last fifty years, power and transport demand have become far more sensitive to declining prices and rising income levels.

This paper reports on a mail survey that investigated public preferences in South-East England for the use of low-carbon energy technologies in electricity production,\ud namely on-shore wind, biomass and nuclear power. Using a labelled choice experiment the perceived importance and value to the public of distance and the impacts of these energy options on biodiversity, carbon emissions, land occupation and household cost was explored. Results suggest that the attributes, the name of technology, respondents’ demographic characteristics, general attitudes towards the environment and energy, previous knowledge and experience with the technologies were significant choice determinants. Considering the current debate about the further development of low-carbon technologies and in particular of nuclear power and biomass in the UK and worldwide, this survey aims to provide an insight into the factors that could potentially influence their public acceptability.

This paper describes the formulation of transition pathways for a low carbon (electrical) energy system in the UK. It uses an approach based on earlier work on understanding transitions, using a multi-level perspective with landscape, regime and niche levels, and its application to the development of ‘socio-technical scenarios’. The paper describes four outline transition pathways for UK energy systems, based on the co-evolution of governance systems and technologies.

Environmental policy and innovation policy regimes at national and EC levels require a more strategic principle and process based approach to policy coherence, in order to achieve greater integration. This paper investigates potential public-private institutional structures, forms of stakeholder participation, and development of mixes of policy instruments that could play a role in integrating environmental policy and innovation policy regimes into a sustainable innovation policy regime. These factors form part of guidance for improving policy processes for promoting sustainable innovation, currently being formulated in a research project under the UK ESRC Sustainable Technologies Programme, aiming to reflect the complexity of both innovation and environmental processes and systems. This paper analyses three aspects of this guidance – the role of public-private institutional structures in policy development; forms of stakeholder participation and related consensual policy decision-making designed to include representatives of the innovation constituency; and approaches to the development of a more coherent and integrated mix of policy instruments. It draws on a project case study of EC Directives and other policy measures relating to alternative energy sources in vehicles; assessment of Integrated Product Policy as an attempt to achieve greater policy coherence; analysis of the Transition Management approach (developed by Kemp and Rotmans, and now being applied to innovation in energy policy by the Netherlands’ Ministry of Economic Affairs); and direct experience of involvement in EC policy processes. Finally, potential institutional developments to move to a more adaptive policy making approach are considered. This would facilitate ‘policy learning’, by institutionalising policy review, learning and correction mechanisms, and so facilitate more rapid reaction to the dynamics of innovation. It is argued that such an approach could be beneficial to sustainable innovation policy, the development of more sustainable innovation systems, and also to the integration of environmental policy with other policy areas.