Professor Rob Gross, Director, UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), put UK energy policy in a historic perspective: ‘There's a lot happening in the UK policy world at the moment, as there has been over the last 20 years. In some respects, it’s back to the future. The Climate Change Act (2008) is internationally-renowned and world leading. Policies of the electricity market reform of 2013 brought forward the contracts for difference (CfD). And more recently, there was the incredibly wide-ranging and far-reaching piece of legislation – the 2023 Energy Act. I think it’s fair to emphasise quite a strong supply-side bias and a particular preference for some technologies, notably offshore wind and nuclear.’

He continued: ‘What we’ve failed to do over the last 10 years is to engage in a public dialogue around this change. As a result of that, you see opposition to new pipelines, the failure of the Hydrogen Village trial and uninformed media commentary around electric vehicles generating so much brake dust that they are worse than diesels, for example!’

Daisy Powell-Chandler, Head of Energy & Environment, Public First, discussed some of the implications of recent energy policy moves in practice for consumers. ‘A short while ago, we asked people all over the country to imagine that a developer was about to build a wind farm near their home in some unused green space. We took the total opposition to that proposal and asked what would happen if we gave them £75 a year off their bills. Suddenly a bunch of them started to think maybe they quite like that. And when we doubled the amount, another cohort changed their view. Gradually we’re breaking down the opposition. We’re not talking about citizen engagement here. This is hard consumer money; this is a transaction.’

She added: ‘Another example is heat pumps: only 48% of people say that they know what heat pumps are. Even the ones who’d heard of one didn’t know how they’d go about getting one, why it would be a good thing, or what it would do to their home. In a survey, adding even one sentence explaining what a heat pump is massively increases your likelihood of people installing a heat pump. This is not citizen engagement, this is consumer information; this is marketing.’

Paul Spence, Director of Strategy and Corporate Affairs, EDF Energy, emphasised the need to move from ‘theory’ to ‘practice’ when it comes to citizen engagement. ‘We need to stop talking about policy, and we need to start worrying about doing. We need to be able to host and offer the right things for people to build, to bring manufacturing to the UK and not to offshore any carbon emissions that we might have. We will have to double the amount of clean electricity that the country needs. We also need a smarter system and we need to work on the demand for electricity.’

Rachel Fletcher FEI, Director Regulation and Economics, Octopus Energy, gave vivid examples of how companies can whet the appetite of consumers for new initiatives with closer engagement and an innovative approach. ‘The sectors in the industries where over the last decade we have seen some of the most seismic change have actually come about, not from introducing new products into those sectors, but by encouraging customers consumers to engage differently with the same product.’

‘Famously, Netflix started by buying Blockbuster Video. Those of us who, of a certain age, might remember going down to the video store. You’d choose something, watch it and then you’d have to remember to take it back again or risk a fine. Netflix bought this clunky old model and very quickly, actually over a matter of years, it turned into online streaming. A whole transformation of TV and film viewing ensued. Who knew back then that actually we want to watch yesterday’s 6:00 o’clock news today? But apparently we do. There’s no end to what we don’t know about consumers.’

She concluded: ‘There’s a massive opportunity, and arguably an absolute need, for us to get consumers, or some consumers at least, to use energy flexibly, in order to get to net zero cheaply and quickly. If we’re really going to get to net zero, we have to convince pretty much every home in the country to decarbonise their domestic heat. And in the vast majority of cases, that will mean ripping up floorboards or putting in new equipment in people’s homes. That is not anything that we have really cracked, and it won’t be done unless we think about the customer. How do we make it easy? We cannot engage with customers and encourage them to change their behaviour and work with that in a dynamic way without lots and lots of data and digital systems.’

This led to a thought-provoking Q&A discussion with a very well-informed audience of Energy Institute members and other industry players and the panel.

Q: Why have I heard nothing about building insulation? 
Rob Gross replied: ‘The rest of Europe has managed to implement a demand reduction scheme. We have had a rather disappointing energy efficiency information campaign. Energy efficiency policy has basically been flatlining since about 2012. Efforts have continued to be lacking outside of the social housing sector, where great improvements have been made. Some academics who have previously favoured a fabric-first approach, which means insulate before you do anything else, are now starting to ask whether we should be pushing with the heat pump roll-out as quickly as we can, because of the overall system efficiency improvement.’

Rachel Fletcher took a practical approach: ‘If you’re going to do a mass rollout, the most sensible thing is to, where it is possible, put a heat pump into the home, which may require a bit of additional insulation, depending upon the age and the building standards to which the home was built. On top of that, the heat pump is a flexible controllable asset, which then means that in in addition to getting that efficiency factor, the customer can actually start to take advantage of cheap green power. We’re now working with home builders to put solar panels, heat pumps and storage in people’s homes; we can guarantee the customer no electricity bill for five years simply by optimising those free assets.’

While Daisy Powell-Chandler addressed a key challenge: ‘One of the reasons why I think we don’t need to have an argument about fabric-first versus heat pump first versus some combination is because, at the moment, we do not have supply chains that can fix every home in this country, even before 2030. That would be incredibly ambitious.’

Q: If you have a massive amount of investment, you have to have a massive return. Where’s the revenue going to come from? If I talk to people up in the Welsh valleys in fuel poverty, they need the social tariffs. 
Paul Spence stepped into the breach and addressed the issue of energy poverty: ‘We need to find the cheapest way to deploy as much capital as we possibly can over the next period, and things like regulated asset bases are part of that. But one of the things that I’m delighted to see is the NISO [National Information Standards Organisation] costing some of the future scenarios. And then we have the discussion about who pays: is it the taxpayers? Is it bill payers? And over what period?’

Rachel Fletcher took up the baton: ‘My proposition is if we engage customers in this transition, the cost will be a lot cheaper and we will get there faster. We desperately need government-targeted support for people who can’t afford their energy bills, and I hope that the cost of wholesale electricity will come down and the need for that support over time will reduce.’

Rob Gross looked at the future implications and warned: ‘If you make a network asset investment, you amortise it over 40 years. If you can get a sensible rate of capital and you distribute that across everyone that’s using the system, you end up with a relatively small number. While not giving a misleading impression of the challenge, that doesn’t mean that there’s a great big whopping lie here.’

Q: I don't think the Demand Flexibility Service trial was a great success. The pictures we got in the press were all about people sitting there using their iPads with candles. That is not going to take us to net zero. What would you do to really drive that demand side? 
Daisy Powell-Chandler was pragmatic: ‘We need to engage people. I want to push back on the idea that it needs to be some grand civic engagement. So that we all feel we’re on a great journey to net zero together and we spend the next 30 years as a society mostly talking about that. It’s not going to happen! We should give up on that. What we absolutely do need to do is engage people as consumers.’

Rachel Fletcher pointed out the importance of addressing what really matters to consumers. And emphasised the mismatch between good intention and practice when it comes to smart meter roll-out. ‘Octopus is now the biggest domestic electricity retailer in the country, but is only eight years old. How have we done it? By giving people good value and good service, and then we start to talk to them because they trust us. We have a ridiculous national smart meter roll-out programme that is all about getting meters on people’s walls, whether they work or not. That is completely the wrong way to do it. We have customers begging us for a smart meter because we are offering them something [ie benefits] that they can only unlock with a smart meter.’

Q. What is the best way to educate the public about the energy transition? 
Paul Spence gave his insight: ‘Today we’ve just launched the next iteration of Hinkley Point. Not everyone wants those jobs. But there are a lot of other jobs that they can have that they do want; anyone who is interested can read our socioeconomic impact report about it. David McKay’s book Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air is absolutely brilliant. The other one that I refer to is How Bad are Bananas? by Mike Berners-Lee.’

• Further reading: ‘Addressing low heat pump heating system sales in the UK’. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be gas boilers versus electric heat pumps; maybe a temporary dual heat pump and boiler transition scheme could be a way to see heat pumps gain widespread acceptance in the UK. 
• Find out more on how the UK is ‘reviving’ its nuclear sector in a bid to move towards energy independence.