Continuous renewable energy deployment may be less certain than previously thought. If interest rates rise, the cost of renewable energy is disproportionately affected compared to fossil fuel alternatives. Thermostatic policies can help ensuring renewable energy deployment in such environments. Image above: Continuous deployment of wind farms may be less certain than previously thought. Aerial take […]
Previous work stresses that actors use strategic technology framing—i.e. purposeful language and rhetoric—to shape technology expectations, persuade stakeholders, and influence the evolution of technologies along their life-cycle. Currently, however, the literature predominantly describes strategic technology framing as a sociopolitical process, and provides only limited insights into how the framing itself is shaped by the material […]
Lived experiences of cobalt miners in the DRC and e-waste workers in Ghana We are living in a society that relies heavily on digital technology, and these technologies have become so engrained in our everyday lives that we rarely question where they come from, whose labour contributes to their existence and what happens after we […]
This blog post is partly based on the policy paper “Job Losses and the Political Acceptability of Climate Policies: why the job killing argument is so persistent and how to overturn it.” Concerns for a “just transition” towards a low-carbon economy are now part of mainstream political debates as well as of international negotiations on […]
Summary This report describes patterns of diffusion of energy technologies in a set of future scenarios, and historical diffusion dynamics of a range of energy technologies. The report covers scenario projections, and historical diffusion dynamics, in five broad sectoral areas: power generation, heat in buildings, industrial energy demand, transport, and agriculture.
Summary The INNOPATHS project is developing a set of narratives that describe the possible evolution of the European energy system over the coming decades. This process is heavily informed by stakeholder views, through a series of co-design processes. This report describes the second stakeholder scenario workshop, which was held in London in July 2020. The […]
Summary This Deliverable focusses on two distinct issues, in Part 1 and Part 2 Part 1: The role of users and user-based innovation in the heat pump transitions of Finland and the United Kingdom A typology of user-based innovation hypothesizes five different user types in low carbon transitions: User-producers, user-legitimators, user-intermediaries, user-citizens, and user-consumers. This […]
Increasing the use of renewable energy (RE) is a key enabler of sustainable energy transitions. While the costs of RE have substantially declined in the past, here we show that rising interest rates (IRs) can reverse the trend of decreasing RE costs, particularly in Europe with its historically low IRs. In Germany, IRs recovering to […]
The political acceptability of climate policies is undermined by job-killing arguments, especially for the least-skilled workers. However, evidence of the distributional impacts for different workers remains scant. We examine the associations between climate policies, proxied by energy prices, and workforce skills for 14 European countries and 15 industrial sectors over the period 1995–2011. Using a […]
How might Europe achieve deep decarbonisation? The INNOPATHS project is using a process of stakeholder engagement and co-design to develop decarbonisation pathways for Europe to 2050 – each of which explores a different route to deep decarbonisation. On Tuesday 9th July the project brought together policymakers from across Europe to think through how decarbonisation Will […]
