Energy Demand Research Centre (EDRC)

📢Our October Newsletter is out!! This months we feature 7 new #publications, our first #policy brief, a focus on our fourth challenge, a new #vacancy and #funding opportunities! 👉 Read it here: https://lnkd.in/eEp_SPCQ 📭 Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://edrc.eo.page/gf34q

📉What will the Autumn Budget do for energy demand? Karen Turner dives into what the Budget's policies mean for energy use, public well-being, and the balance of progress in the energy transition. From fuel duty freezes to critical changes in the Winter Fuel Payment, how will these policies shape our energy future and what are the implications on energy demand and equity?⚡ Read the full blog: https://lnkd.in/gVWWWM7a Centre for Energy Policy at the University of Strathclyde #EnergyPolicy #NetZero #Budget2024 #EnergyDemand #UKPolicy

At the C-DICE event today on influencing policy as researchers. Prof Paul Monks, Chief Scietific Advisor for DESNZ kicks off by highlighting also importance of energy demand in reaching net zero. I’ll be presenting how we approach impact in the Energy Demand Research Centre (EDRC), reflecting on learning from previous projects on fuel and transport poverty.

📢 Our first policy brief is out! How can public funds address #fuelpoverty while reducing energy demand, boosting #sustainable economic #growth, supporting jobs, and minimizing cost pressures?🤔📊 💡 Karen Turner, Antonios Katris, Hannah Corbett, Sarah Higginson and Long Zhou address this key #policy question by comparing two strategies: direct #energy bill support vs. energy #efficiency investments. 👉  Discover the trade-offs these approaches bring to households who are classed as living in fuel poverty — and their impact on the broader economy: https://lnkd.in/dDw_jpzC Centre for Energy Policy at the University of Strathclyde

Is it too early to re-run the key points made in the Greener Transport Council report about freezing fuel duty. Apparently not... Freezing fuel duty (celebrating its 15th anniversary) is not a case of 'doing nothing'. It is a deliberate choice to exert a downwards pressure on the cost of motoring. This weakens mode shift ambitions and it reduces the effectiveness of every £spent on trying to make those changes. There are winners - particularly high mileage drivers (both in need and not), but the long-run effects continue to reinforce upsizing of vehicles, increased traffic and diminished alternatives. Hard to celebrate the gains on things like BSIP whilst deliberately dialling up the headwinds which make that less impactful. Or to make sense of increasing the cap in bus fares. Was this really a higher priority than continuing winter fuel payments? I'm yet to fully absorb the full package of budget decisions - but as a headline this one is not filling me with positive vibes about change. https://lnkd.in/dPG-kYxA Glenn Lyons Anna Rothnie Stephen Joseph Stephen Frost Richard Sallnow Hannah Bartram Jillian Anable Claire Haigh Andy Eastlake Energy Demand Research Centre (EDRC)

Is it too early to re-run the key points made in the Greener Transport Council report about freezing fuel duty. Apparently not... Freezing fuel duty (celebrating its 15th anniversary) is not a case of 'doing nothing'. It is a deliberate choice to exert a downwards pressure on the cost of motoring. This weakens mode shift ambitions and it reduces the effectiveness of every £spent on trying to make those changes. There are winners - particularly high mileage drivers (both in need and not), but the long-run effects continue to reinforce upsizing of vehicles, increased traffic and diminished alternatives. Hard to celebrate the gains on things like BSIP whilst deliberately dialling up the headwinds which make that less impactful. Or to make sense of increasing the cap in bus fares. Was this really a higher priority than continuing winter fuel payments? I'm yet to fully absorb the full package of budget decisions - but as a headline this one is not filling me with positive vibes about change. https://lnkd.in/dPG-kYxA Glenn Lyons Anna Rothnie Stephen Joseph Stephen Frost Richard Sallnow Hannah Bartram Jillian Anable Claire Haigh Andy Eastlake Energy Demand Research Centre (EDRC)

So, if doing nothing on how we pay for driving is a bad option (see yesterday's post) what should we do? Slides and text for my recent talk to the Manchester Lit&Phil Society are now available here: https://lnkd.in/esw9R6tx A few highlights (see slides and narrative for detail): 1) A shift to a pay per mile tax for EVs is necessary, sensible and doable if Government acts early 2) A national congestion based road user charge is a dead duck. The pandemic has shown that this will be a tax on inflexibility of employment. Undeliverable except on very small spatial scales in the middle of cities. 3) The problem of how we pay for travel is currently about petrol/diesel vs. electric. But the really big discrepancy will be between off-street with solar/V2G, off-street no solar, versus on-street for your EV charging. The cost per mile differential between the cheapest home based charging and on-street is at least an order of magnitude. A regressive pricing system based on the inverse housing space with almost no tax income. Great! 4) In all of the above, we also aren't really talking about how we pay for driving. That is the £79bn a year we spend on simply owning, maintaining and insuring cars. That's nearly 3 times what we spend on moving cars and that is growing as a proportion. The INFUZE project is trying to imagine and develop potential futures which take us into post-individual car ownership (yes - some of that is here already). It will mean rethinking how we organise, price and tax mobility. None of that is part of the short-run discussion on 2p per litre on fuel duty. We've had the same system for paying for driving for around 100 years. I'd argue that we don't need a small economic adjustment to make the system fit for the future, but real clarity about the kind of system we are planning to encourage. Right now it looks like a very unjust mess.

New Energy Demand Research Centre (EDRC) blog by Greg Marsden on the £3 bus cap - getting people to use more buses requires long-term planning

💡 The multi-billion-pound expansion of #renewable energy is funded through a subsidy auction, with costs covered via energy bills rather than impacting the central government budget 👇 💷 Prior to #Budget2024, the government has tasked the National Energy System Operator (NESO) with providing the first blueprint for Great Britain’s infrastructure up to 2050. NESO is currently carrying out analysis of clean power, including which levels of demand reduction are needed. 🌍It is critical to emphasise that demand reduction and increased flexibility are critical to meet wider decarbonisation objectives. No generation-only approach can deliver a path to net zero, while maintaining system security. 👉 EDRC research points to how a comprehensive governance strategy for achieving net zero must encompass both energy generation and demand-related facets. Read Jacopo Torriti's Governance perspectives on achieving demand side flexibility for net zero: https://lnkd.in/g47nzBSd #UKbudget #energypolicy #energyflexibility

Given the trailing of the rise in the £2 bus fare cap I've put some thoughts together on what this really means - and what else we need to look for in the budget to understand the impacts on buses. https://lnkd.in/eTQNeXhq