The future of energy

Despite the uncertainty about what the future will look like, some key changes look likely, including:

• Development of a smarter and more flexible system with greater responsiveness of demand to price changes

• Increased decentralisation of the energy sector (with more distributed generation and more suppliers operating locally rather than nationally)

• Increasing interdependence of services

• A more diverse commercial environment, at least in the medium term

• A better service for consumers enabled by new and smarter technology

The Electric Power Research Institute expects that “we will see as much innovation in the next eight years as we’ve seen in the last 25”. There could also be varying levels of disruption e.g. decarbonisation of heat could involve significant change to how people heat their homes – moving away from natural gas or oil heating to electrification, district heating or hydrogen. If there is a decentralised system and an increase in interdependency different areas will need to work well together.