The Future into the 2020s and Beyond

Abstract

The UK experience with renewable energy offers some policy lessons for the future. Competitive mechanisms have their place, but the UK experience has been mixed, with some at least of the mistakes arguably being due to an overzealous political belief in the efficacy of markets as a way to identify winners and get prices down rapidly. Nevertheless, some progress has been made, even if it has been slow compared with some other countries and also may not have been exactly in the direction originally envisaged by the early AT pioneers. Whether that matters or not may depend on what happens next. Will renewables just become a technical fix for a basically unchanged society, or are there other pathways ahead?