Fouquet 2016 - Historical Energy Transitions
Fouquet 2016 - Historical Energy Transitions
Fouquet 2016 - Historical Energy Transitions
Short communication
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history: The relatively rare and protracted nature of energy transitions implies that it is vital to look at historical
Received 30 June 2016 experiences for lessons about how they might unfold in the future. The fastest historical sector-specific
Received in revised form 13 July 2016 energy transitions observed here was thirty years. However, full energy transitions, involving all sectors
Accepted 22 August 2016
and services, have taken much longer. Ultimately, the price of energy services played a crucial role in cre-
Available online 6 September 2016
ating the incentives to stimulate energy transitions, but energy price shocks may have acted as a catalyst
for stimulating processes that led to certain energy transitions. An additional key factor is whether the
Keyword:
new technology offers new characteristics of value to the consumer, which can help create a market even
Energy transitions
when the initial price is higher. A crucial factor that can delay a transition is the reaction of the incumbent
and declining industries. Nevertheless, governments have, in a few instances, created the institutional
setting to stimulate energy transitions to low-polluting energy sources, and this could be done again, if
the political will and alternative energy sources were available. Finally, past energy transitions have had
major impacts on the incumbent industries which have declined, on economic transformations and on
inequality.
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction tions to inform the present and future policies has accelerated
[48,52,8,2,45].
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the global With this in mind, the purpose of this piece is to draw partic-
economy has extracted and used 0.5 trillion tonnes of oil equiv- ularly on my own historical and long run research to offer some
alent of fossil fuels (see Fig. 1) and has led to 1.2 trillion tonnes lessons about energy transitions. To contribute to a more refined
of carbon dioxide emissions. The rising global emissions, along or at least reflexive take on energy transitions, this short commu-
with other greenhouse gas emissions, are threatening to inten- nication starts by reviewing the speed of past energy transitions.
sify climate change. This threat means that fossil fuels, without Afterwards, the role of prices in driving transitions is discussed. This
worldwide carbon capture and sequestration mechanism or suc- is followed by a comment on incumbent industries that declined,
cessful geo-engineering projects, will impose a rising burden on with a focus on the experience of the coal industry. Then, the paper
the atmosphere. This burden highlights the potential benefits from examines the impact of energy transitions on consumption pat-
a transition out of fossil fuels to low carbon energy sources. terns, economic development and inequality. Then, it explores past
Because energy transitions are seen by many scholars and experiences in which environmental policy may have influenced
analysts to be relatively rare and protracted processes, it is energy transitions.
important to look at historical experiences for lessons about
how they might unfold in the future. The literature on his-
torical energy transitions has blossomed in the last ten years 2. The speed of historical energy transitions
[22,25,5,39,36,1,3,59,50,43,33,28,32]. Perhaps triggered by unfold-
ing events, and partly stimulated by the special issue in this journal, Since the Industrial Revolution, it has taken, on average, nearly
research output on using experiences from past energy transi- fifty years for sector-specific energy transitions (i.e. the diffusion of
energy sources and technologies) to unfold in the United Kingdom
[15]. Here, the definition used for a transition was from 5% to 80%
夽 I would like to thank Benjamin Sovacool for comments related to this paper. (or the peak, if it did not reach 80%) of the energy consumption for
Support for this research from the ESRC is gratefully acknowledged. a particular service (e.g., heating, power, transportation or lighting)
E-mail address: [email protected] in a specific sector – as Sovacool [52] points-out in his conclusion,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2016.08.014
2214-6296/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
8 R. Fouquet / Energy Research & Social Science 22 (2016) 7–12
Table 1
The Average Duration of Energy Transitions in the United Kingdom.
social costs of energy production and consumption on a massive death toll in London was particularly shocking and scientists could
scale. In the 1880s, nearly £(2000) 20 billion (around 20% of GDP) attribute these deaths to poor air quality, and a growing range of
of estimated damage was being caused by air pollution resulting substitute fuels and heating technologies was available [17].
from coal combustion. The study also indicates that the relationship However, even with a major demand for improvements and
between air pollution concentration and damage was non-linear, legislation introduced, it is far from certain that the legislation
and increasing at higher levels. As a comparison, air pollution in will be effective. Legislation was often weak or included loop-
China in 1995 was estimated to have caused damage equivalent to holes, such as the addressing black smoke and industrialists argued
9% of GDP, although the level of concentrations in London and other their smoke was “brown”. . . Alternatively, legislation is often not
British cities was roughly 50% higher. enforced or requires lengthy court proceedings. The smoke abate-
As a result, citizens have demanded reductions in pollution and, ment movement in the Victorian era faced a case of government
at times, transitions to low polluting energy sources [17]. These failure because of politicians’ belief that legislation would harm
experiences offer interesting parallels with a potential low car- business and industry [17]. Thus, overcoming the perceived eco-
bon transition. In particular, they indicate that greater demand for nomic damage from legislations is still the most likely way to sway
environmental legislation tended to coincide with periods of eco- politicians. Yet, just like in Victorian Britain, while politicians are
nomic growth, because, first, the damage increased due to greater cautious of harming industries, they are even more reluctant to
consumption and pollution and, second, rising incomes enabled address household behaviour, and their emissions associated with
citizens to be concerned with more than their basic economic residential and transport energy consumption, because of the fear
needs. Also important in influencing the demand for environmen- of losing votes – so, presumably, less democratic systems can over-
tal change was the public’s awareness of the impacts. The outrage come this problem more easily.
and political action following the 1952 Big Smog in London indi- So, even with effective legislation introduced, for it to be sus-
cates that the demand for climate stability will probably increase tained (i.e., enforced and not revoked by future governments), it
as a result of extreme and shocking events that (most, particularly must be of limited cost to polluters, and pro-legislation pressure
mainstream media, will agree) can be attributed (with a high degree groups must continue to maintain their pressures on politicians
of confidence) to climate change – such as when Bloomberg Busi- over long periods of time (e.g. a decade or more). For demand to
nessweek used the title “It’s Global Warming, Stupid” after Super be sustained, it seems likely to either require a series of shocking
Storm Sandy devastated New York City. events, or a wide scale change in value systems that can support
Independently of governments, markets have sought energy (and in lifestyles that can accommodate) long term political pres-
transitions [15]. In the case of low-polluting energy transitions, sure.
there have been few examples, but the switches to gas and elec- Nevertheless, the Alkali Act of 1863 (and the Montreal Proto-
tric cookers in the early twentieth century hint at the possibility col in 1979) show that environmental legislation can be effective
that markets might take the lead in certain sectors and services in if the victims are sufficiently influential, the polluters are a clearly
the transition to low carbon energy sources. This is particularly of defined and observable group, relatively cheap solutions are avail-
interest when the niche demand leads to declining prices through able and equipment exists for monitoring pollution levels. This
a process of economies of scale and learning by doing, as solar pan- suggests that legislation targeted at specific groups may be more
els have been doing. A niche non-free-riding demand can exist for effective and sustainable than when covering a heterogeneous
low carbon energy sources and technologies. This demand will be array of polluters [17].
greater if the sources and technologies have desirable character- Finally, crucial to the outcome of past experiences was the evo-
istics that fossil fuels and their related equipment do not have. lution of ideology, of government attitudes towards intervention
The demand for gas and electric cookers was driven in part by and of the relationship between the market and the state. It would
the desire for cleaner and easier to use fuels. In turn, a powerful be difficult to identify trends in the forces over the next cen-
driver of demands for the gas and electric cookers was social status. tury. Nevertheless, they will evolve, such as perhaps new beliefs
Thus, if low carbon sources and technologies can be seen as status- about our relationship with nature or the potential globalisation
enhancing, they may achieve an important niche demand. If this of markets and governments, and will play an important role in
niche demand develops, and producers can achieve economies of determining any transition to a low carbon economy.
scale, then the prices might become competitive with fossil fuels. In
this case, markets could drive part of the transition to a low carbon
economy [17].
More probably, though, government will need to help create 8. Conclusions
the demand for these energy sources, especially when the price
of the low-carbon option is more expensive. Transitions have The purpose of this short communication was to outline some
often required the discovery of new solutions for many differ- of the key issues identified from research on historical energy
ent sectors and services, the transformation of energy systems transitions. Critical issues to consider are the speed of transitions
[19], and the decline of energy industries and technologies that (sector-specific and full economy transitions), the price of energy
were represented by powerful pressure groups [15]. Thus, given services, as well as shocks that can trigger unfolding events, the
the scale of the change and the time they took to unfold, govern- benefits that the consumer may gain from the transformation, the
ments have tended to be reluctant to push for energy transitions role of government ply in internalising the external costs of pollu-
in the first instance. Furthermore, transitions have and may cre- tants, the industries that will decline, other transformations that
ate new environmental problems (as did coke and town gas, will ensue and the changes in inequality that may occur.
petroleum products, nuclear power and even certain renewable Undoubtedly, one should be aware of the uncertainties about
energy sources). the relevance and transferability of historical insights to potential
Nevertheless, the experience of the Clean Air Act of 1956 shows future energy transitions. Theory acts as the bridge between pre-
that, with sufficient pressure and resolve, governments can initi- vious experiences and lessons for understanding future behaviour
ate transitions to low polluting energy sources. Despite it having and formulating policies. However, at present, no formal economic
been a general period of low air pollution by historical (though theory of how energy transitions unfold exists – although others
not today’s) standards, the episode with the strongest demand for have presented potential frameworks for thinking about energy
improvements in Britain was after the Big Smog of 1952 when the transitions [25,2]. Thus, one should take care about understanding
12 R. Fouquet / Energy Research & Social Science 22 (2016) 7–12
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