Beware the lessons of past transitions

Hangovers from mine closures 40 years ago risk slowing down the UK’s current energy transition. That is according to World Energy Council secretary general and chief executive Angela Wilkinson, who insists that community buy-in across the country is essential to ensuring the UK achieves its energy transition plans.

If the energy transition is to be successful, she says, we must learn the lessons of the past. In particular, she says that lessons must be learnt from the coal mine closures of the 1980s in that different communities will have very different expectations of what the transition will entail.

For Wilkinson the question is how to convene different groups with opposing views and to tackle head on the increasing polarisation she sees as hindering the net zero transition.

She points to how different communities view change, with some areas that were once heavily industrialised potentially having a less favourable view of what the forthcoming changes in how we use energy will mean for them.

“I’m pretty sure if you go up to somewhere like Sheffield and talk to them about energy transition, they’ll have a very different story of what the last one looked like than if you go to Chelsea in London and talk to electric vehicle owners about what this one is going to look like,” she says.

It’s easy to see why Wilkinson highlights Sheffield. Many of its surrounding areas formed part of the South Yorkshire coalfield with one coking works at Orgreave the site of perhaps the most pivotal moment of the 1984-85 miners’ strike.

While almost four decades have passed since the infamous battle between striking workers and the police ended, it is events like the miners’ strike, Wilkinson believes, which continue to polarise politics and communities up and down the UK.

She explains: “All the transitions we’ve had in history have never been top down. We didn’t go from wood to coal because somebody gave us a plan nationally. We didn’t go from coal to gas with a national plan alone.”

In particular she says the UK should have more humility about whether it has really taken on board all of the learnings from the transition away from coal.

“Look at the devastation on coal mining communities, look at the voting tendencies, you can understand problems today politically, trust problems, from some of the ways we’ve mismanaged energy transitions in the past…I think we’ve had very poor conversations in the UK.”

Wilkinson spoke to Utility Week following recently published research ahead of next year’s World Energy Congress in Rotterdam in The Netherlands.

The World Energy Council’s latest Pulse survey reflects the views of more than 700 leaders of the global energy community and shows that two thirds continue to be concerned by the pace of energy transitions, nearly double the number who expressed similar concerns in the Council’s April 2022 study.

Furthermore, the respondents are particularly concerned that insufficient action is being driven from the bottom up, with 35% stating that individuals and communities should be empowered to lead transformations.

“More people need to understand their roles and choices. And there needs to be more trust in the system of providing services to help householders and communities.”

As the head of the World Energy Council, Wilkinson’s role is to convene groups from across the world to discuss and identify solutions to fix what it says is “an energy system that is fundamentally broken and which no longer meets the needs of societies that it was originally designed to serve”.

Yet she believes the polarised nature of the UK makes it particularly hard to do this in this country. While some groups have good intentions, she says, some partake in “stealth advocacy”.

“Our job has always been to convene the ecosystem in the public interest. The gap this time isn’t the technology gap and it’s not the finance gap. It’s about putting people and places at the centre of an energy transition, which is not happening fast enough, or well enough.

“I’d be very happy to run a series of conversations in the UK that had different cities and communities talking about what energy transition means to them. And whether they have the right information, whether they trust the right actors, or whether they understand what their choices are.”

Wilkinson points to issues such as the 2008 financial crash, the energy crisis, the war in Ukraine and now cost of living crisis as exacerbating the situation.

“What we’ve been seeing is, even as we’re trying to address global challenges, the inequalities in the UK have become deeper and more widespread. And that’s where I think you get polarisation. Polarisation is ultimately not an ideology agenda, but a fairness agenda. But you’ve got polarisation ideologically, on top of that, because you’ve got ‘it’s my way or the highway’, ‘it’s green only, or it’s no oil’…these are absolutes.

“That’s an ideological ideal agenda. If you talk pragmatically now you’re seen as being the enemy of speed and that makes it very difficult.”