Governing local energy and industrial decarbonisation in Britain: planning innovations and implications for net zero GHG emission goals.

Clean energy policy in Britain focuses on large scale electricity generation and transmission, in line with the legacy of largely centralised oil and gas infrastructures, markets and regulation. There is however increasing debate about the contribution of distributed energy, and local/regional integration across heat, power and storage, to net zero GHG emission goals. This debate is partly a pragmatic response to the increasing proportion of electricity generation connected to the distribution networks. In addition, there is cross-sector recognition that making best use of such distributed resources, alongside integration of heat, power and storage, should provide significant whole system efficiencies, reducing investment costs as well as delivering local economic, environmental and welfare co-benefits (Innovate UK-PWC, 2022). The need to end the use of unabated fossil fuels for heat, industrial processes and transport, and development of decentralised electricity and heat networks, is laying foundations for new forms of demand flexibility, including potential for balancing supply and demand at local or regional scales. Energy systems planning and decision making is hence likely to need more representation of local and regional level actors, including local, regional and devolved governments, local industry and business and civil society. In Britain, however, local and regional energy governance has been progressively hollowed out. In contrast with many Northern European countries local and regional authorities have no formal powers over energy and very limited capacity or resources for engagement in clean energy planning and development. The key actors at regional level are currently gas and electricity distribution network companies who have, until recently, focused on network planning and investment in line with regulated economic incentives. Direct engagement between distribution network businesses and local/regional authorities and other stakeholders has been uneven, and formal requirements for such cross-sector and cross-network planning have been marginal. There are now, however, steps towards reconstituting some forms of local-regional energy governance, with a particular focus on local authority roles. This paper examines the emerging practices of governance for local and regional energy systems and local industrial decarbonisation in Britain, and considers the early impacts and future implications. The analysis is developed through empirical case studies of local energy, and industrial, decarbonisation planning, and regional scale regulatory innovations. It contributes first to empirical knowledge about governance for decentralised energy systems’ innovation in Britain; and second, to conceptual framing of the relationship between governance experiments and transformative energy system change. Lastly, it reflects on lessons for policy and practice to accelerate clean, sustainable energy. To understand current, and potential future, practices of energy governance at local and regional scales in Britain, we structure the paper around three overarching questions: 1. How has local and regional energy planning evolved since 2019? 2. What are the most significant outcomes of these practices? 3. What new alignments of national, regional and local energy planning and governance may emerge and are there structural tensions with the current planning regimes?