How as a society in the UK can we deal with climate change?

Changing behaviour will have a far greater influence going forward. Almost 80% of our decarbonisation to date has come from technology that we don’t notice—mostly changes to the power system—and much of what remains to be done involves individual choices—how we decide to heat our homes, and how we travel.

Everything we build from now on needs to be designed for our future climate. Government is committed to a net zero electricity system by 2035, and National Grid has to build as much transmission infrastructure in the next seven years as they have built in the last 30 years. That infrastructure will have to last for up to a century, and it needs to have minimal carbon impact and be resilient to everything our changing climate can throw at it. Delivery at that scale and speed will require a lot of calculated risk by everyone involved, including the regulators.

Is enough in place for change like that to happen?

I think that our approach to land-use planning needs to become far more intentional, whether that is for renewable energy generation, or giving more land to forestry to increase timber construction, or to stop new development in floodplains.

At the same time, every initiative needs the best planning and design, and be accountable through high-quality public consultation. People have strong ideas and emotions about the function of the countryside and what it should look like.

All infrastructure design must focus much harder on minimising its carbon footprint. Having looked at how HS2 compares with high-speed rail in France, we seem to create quite a lot more infrastructure to achieve the same end. This brings higher carbon intensity, destroys more woodland to create access and makes the process slower and more expensive.

Do we have a good understanding of what the future baseline looks like?

We have got some pretty good baseline information on average temperature rise. For example, probably another 0.6 degrees by 2050 in the UK. The maximum temperatures in the South East have been rising at almost 1 degree per decade, so by mid-century, we could be experiencing summer peak temperatures of at least 43 degrees.

Climate impacts are already with us, with the last decade being the hottest one on record. Despite this, we still haven’t thought through the extreme scenarios we should be planning for in different sectors. For example, the 40 degree temperatures of 2022 caused problems in the electricity system, ranging from transformers overheating to a shortage of cooling water, to excessive expansion of overhead wires. In terms of impacts on the natural environment and what we can do to increase resilience, we need consistent data to understand the impacts from our actions—indeed in many areas we need much better data to monitor the effects of climate change and of actions we need to take to adapt to it.

We have to plan and design for resilience and adaptation. With at least 30 more years of escalating hazards ahead, adaptation is still getting pushed down the line. The last decade has been a lost decade in terms of preparing for the risks we already have and those that we know are coming. Every month that passes locks in more damaging impacts. Action is needed, and we need it now.

What leadership is needed for a more resilient system?

With renewables poised to become the backbone of our energy supply, the challenge is less about the design of individual assets than about the design of the system. We need to understand all the interdependencies and establish resilience standards.

For example, a couple of years ago there was a significant period of ‘wind drought’. This should drive us to establish the redundancy we need in the energy supply system—the level of storage and/or alternative renewable fuel.

When it comes to systems thinking, we are still in a position where it’s pretty well every energy project for itself, in part because much of the supply is essentially a private development delivery model and interdependencies are not fully understood or factored in. It is Government which has to take responsibility for the system architecture. By way of example, we need companies sharing data, on resilience standards that other players in the system can rely on. Government needs to provide leadership on safe and acceptable ways to allow sensitive information to be shared to support the establishment of a systems approach and accelerate delivery of cost-effective resilient systems for our critical infrastructure.

In relation to resilience, failures within the electricity system can have a cascade effect and it is this type of issue that needs strategic management. I recently heard a company that manages smart vehicle charging for electric vehicles at night through a cellular network say that when it experienced a substation outage, all the cars switched to charge at peak time instead. About 300 cars were involved but imagine the impact on the grid of that kind of failure magnified across a city in the future, say, with 300,000 cars.