Yet, half of the UK’s total annual emissions from 1990 remain to be eliminated if the country wants to achieve its goal of net zero by 2050. Having largely decarbonised electricity generation, the UK faces a new set of challenges. “We see the political narrative around net zero starting to splinter a bit; different parties are saying different things about net zero”, says Mark Winskel, implying that future emissions reductions will likely be less politically straightforward than before. Transport is the most emissions-heavy sector in the UK, being responsible for the equivalent of over 110 million tons of CO2 yearly.

When asked about ways to reduce emissions from transport, Mark mentions several possibilities. “You can think about very technical ways to do that, like substituting existing cars and other vehicles for low-carbon alternatives, particularly electric vehicles these days. But you can also consider behavioural changes: how individuals move around cities and countries, what modes of transport are available to them, and how much demand for transport there is out there, and how to factor in the possibility of changing that demand”.

He adds that to tackle these questions, we may have to look beyond engineering solutions on the supply side. “The Scottish Government is very interested in local neighbourhoods and how people may not need to travel as much during their weekly patterns. We can also incentivise greater use of public transport, making it easier for people to make the right choice”.

Heating – once neglected, now essential

Britain must reduce its emissions in other areas, including those that, until recently, had not been mainstream in the academic community: “It wasn't that long ago when heating was very much a neglected topic within the overall energy research and energy policy portfolio. We now have many different parts of the University looking at the heat problem, from social and behavioural sciences to engineering and economics. Bringing those different aspects of the problem together is where we can make good progress”.

Heating presents an example of a scientific area that requires a multidisciplinary approach, which has been necessary for tackling many different problems within energy research. “I was heavily involved in one project looking at scenarios for the UK's energy system transition. We deliberately designed that as a project to incorporate different disciplinary contributions”. Mark explains that to succeed, similar large multidisciplinary projects often require the “right environment”, in which working groups study different aspects of a problem, while learning to understand the contributions of other groups.

To work on reducing the emissions from heating, researchers from the University of Edinburgh are also cooperating with the private sector and local authorities. “Each local authority in Scotland is currently developing its own local heat and energy efficiency strategy. This isn't traditionally an area that local councils have been expected to work on, so they often lack the necessary skills and capacities to do that internally. The question is, where can they go for that expertise? I think academia can play an important role in helping fill that gap”. Much of this expertise remains technological, including research into underground heat storage. For example, former mines can heat water, which can then be used to heat homes.

The need for a smarter grid

The possibility of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in heat and transport does not imply that further improvements cannot be made by making electricity generation even cleaner. “We’ve got ambitious targets for offshore wind deployment, and I think we can go further in onshore wind as well, which has been left out of the picture recently because of policy choices, particularly outside Scotland”. The co-chair of Energy@Edinburgh thinks the key to lowering emissions from the electricity sector lies in mobilising supply chains, setting ambitious targets and fostering market competition. He argues that this approach helped the UK make the sector cleaner in the first place: “One of the important things about that story is that without market growth, we don't get the cost of these technologies down”.

However, the country with the largest offshore wind energy market must cope with the changing electricity supply that comes with the fluctuations in wind energy and other intermittent renewables. When the wind stops blowing, additional energy sources are needed to compensate for the shortfall. “We still have gas in the system to provide that flexible response. That isn't something we can continue with indefinitely, if we're going to meet our net zero targets”.

Mark elaborates that while innovative ways of compensating for the fluctuating supply are being explored, it is not yet clear which one is the most promising. “Some of it will involve alternative storage technologies. Electric battery technology is, again, coming down rapidly in cost now. We're also exploring hydrogen as a conversion carrier to provide that stored backup capacity. But we're also thinking about how demand can be shifted and made more responsive so that we don’t have periods of intense peak demand, reducing the strain on the system”. The researcher sees shifting towards a smarter energy grid as one of the most important tasks for energy policy.

The importance of interdisciplinarity

Energy, as a political and scientific problem, has evolved through several phases. After the Second World War, the government focused primarily on increasing energy supply, as electricity demand in cities and towns exceeded the capacity of existing coal power plants. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the UK privatised its energy sector to reduce energy costs, becoming the first European country to do so. During the 1990s and 2000s, sustainability and climate change mitigation dominated energy discussions.

As Mark explains, the so-called “energy trilemma” encapsulates the three factors that have been dominant at different times in the UK’s recent history: energy security, cost and sustainability. “Today is much more of a competition between those three factors—there's no getting away from concerns about energy security. We've seen that with the Ukraine war and the threat over gas supply to Western Europe. There are also concerns about energy affordability, given the war’s impact on energy costs. We’ve seen a huge impact, a tripling of energy costs for most energy consumers in the UK in the wake of the Ukraine invasion. And at the same time, we're still trying to progress the energy transition to decarbonise the system.”

Navigating the energy trilemma, as Mark believes, requires a holistic approach – one that he and his colleagues hope to enable through the Energy@Edinburgh network. “No single discipline is likely to have the entire answer to the complex problem of energy transition –that invites thinking about how the different bodies of expertise are scattered around the institution, and how they can be brought together to create a whole which is providing added value. Energy@Edinburgh allows that to happen. We provide spaces and opportunities for people to interact together, and we try to bring in outsiders from policy and business as well. And we see where that takes us.”

Interview audio recording

You can also listen to the full, unedited interview on MediaHopper.

Author and interviewer: Jan Žižka