A Four Decade look back at Low Energy Futures
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Abstract
In the late 1970s the UK government commissioned an independent evaluation of low energy futures (LEF) which had been proposed by NGOs as alternative strategies to the conventional one which focused on the supply side, and especially nuclear energy. The study was led by Aberdeen university, whose professors insisted the analysis should also include the Government’s own strategy.
My PhD piggy-backed on this study focusing on the economics of such LEFs and the Government’s reference energy scenario (RES).
The thesis developed an appraisal methodology and provided a comparative assessment of the energy scenarios, which included a set of control cases which matched the government’s economic growth assumptions as well as two designed low growth cases proposed by two NGOs.
Both the Aberdeen study and my work concluded that the main challenges related to deployment of supply facilities, arising from consenting and that the most viable scenario was a LEF, which built in considerable decoupling of energy and GDP as opposed to the Government’s RES. The studies also concluded at a higher level of renewables was viable than previously considered and that the LEFs would cost less to deliver than the RES. This was not the result the Govt was expecting. The findings were never released.
Biography
Dr Guy Doyle is Chief Economist for Energy at Mott MacDonald, with about 44 years’ experience in techno-economics, forecasting and analysing world energy markets. Half of Guy’s work experience has been at Motts, where he has worked on hundreds of projects across the energy sector in multiple jurisdictions, from the Bahamas to Afghanistan from running country energy masterplans, modelling green ammonia production chains to searching for an I-phone for energy. He prosaically he sat for a decade on the UK Government’s Panel of Technical Experts advising on capacity markets and energy security issues.
Prior to joining Mott MacDonald, he ran Power Ink, an electricity consultancy (~16 staff), was a partner at McCloskey Coal, chief economist at IEA Coal Research and forecasting consultant at Economic Models (now part of HIS-Markit) were he did whole system modelling. He also spent 2 years writing for the Financial Times on energy matters and was the founding editor of FT Power UK (in 1991). Guy holds a Doctorate in Energy Economics from the University of Aberdeen (in which he analysed high renewable and conservation deployment strategies). The external markers were the late Professors Surrey and Cheshire both at Sussex’s Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU)