Looking back to the future

This week the Energy Networks Association (ENA) celebrates its 20th birthday. Writing for Utility Week to mark this milestone, its chief executive Lawrence Slade looks back over the past two decades and outlines what he believes are the big challenges facing the sector as we move towards net zero.

ENA celebrates our 20th anniversary this week. As the sector enters perhaps its most significant period of growth and change in a generation, it’s instructive to look back at where we stood.

In 2003, a record-breaking heatwave caused Europe to talk more seriously about climate change while Prime Minister Tony Blair launched the UK’s first formal energy policy in 20 years – the white paper, Our Energy Future. Central to this policy was a renewed commitment to cutting our emissions by 60% by 2050, in line with the Kyoto protocols.  

Looking back, there was a lot that was prescient in the white paper – the central place for innovation in our energy system, the need to take advantage of every energy technology to get us to our decarbonisation targets and the need for continued international cooperation are as strong now as they were then. For ENA, there’s also the occasional glimpses of projects that would grow to be of crucial importance, like the focus on encouraging the emergence of small-scale distributed electricity generation blossoming into our internationally recognised local flexibility markets, supported by ENA’s Open Networks programme.

Some policy discussions at the time are strikingly familiar. On renewables Yvette Cooper MP, then planning minister, said she “wanted to see a more considered approach, so the planning system is used positively rather than negatively”. In many ways the industry has simply continued to push for this positive approach over the last two decades, which is needed now more than ever.

What few policy makers in 2003 anticipated was how quickly renewable energy generation could be ramped up; data from government shows renewable electricity generation reached a record share of 47.8% of total generation in Q1 2023, at 37.5TWh, up from 10.6TWh in 2003 – that’s a massive increase of over 250%.

Unfortunately, few policy makers in 2003 seemingly anticipated the speed at which climate change would accelerate, the global failure to reduce emissions and correspondingly how the race to net zero would become a central theme of our strategic energy planning.

In the years ahead, network operators are spending and investing around £40 billion to create a net zero grid. The scale of the investment is needed as we will require massive amounts of electrification, using all the tools available to us including existing capacity, flexibility and upgrading of infrastructure to handle a projected threefold increase in power demand.

With electricity, a big focus in the immediate future is working with Ofgem, government and industry to improve and accelerate customer connections. In the gas network, urgent decisions are needed to help deliver the investment that will support the transition to a hydrogen economy; the combination of greater electrification and the introduction of hydrogen will be critical to the achievement of net zero.

Twenty years is a moment in geographic terms but a lifetime in climate science. I hope that by 2043 we can reflect on how the hard work to decarbonise our economy and energy grid has resulted in one of the great success stories of our lifetimes.