We don’t need more big shiny toys, we need a grown-up conversation about sustainable local energy.

This week, the ADE's Chief Strategic Advisor, Joanne Wade, published a blog with Business Green

The recent to-and-fro bickering between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition at Prime Minister’s Questions is just the latest salvo in the political war of words on energy and climate. It’s time we fight back against the new political narrative that seems to be taking hold.

The narrative goes something like this. Big, private sector spending on big energy kit (e.g. North Sea Oil and Gas or Hinkley Point C) means big economic growth and big money for government… and public sector spending on more localised infrastructure is money that we can’t afford down the drain.

This narrative is flawed - public investment in a green economy (and yes, it is investment, not ‘spending’) will of course require the government to find the necessary money somewhere. But let’s not overplay the difficulty of this: after all, the current Labour Party plans to invest £28 billion per year amount to spending less than 3% of government’s annual income on something that should be a pretty high priority.

The point that never seems to be made in these high-profile Parliamentary sparring matches is that this investment will lead to less spending for government in the long-term, and also more income. More income from the increased earnings of the people employed in the green economy and less spending on physical and mental health services for people whose quality of life has improved thanks to high-performance homes.

The narrative taking hold at the moment is taking us back to the past, to a vision of our energy system that is way out of date: a system where big supply assets trickle energy down to small consumers. This is not how the transition to net zero should be envisioned. Our future energy system must hold consumer benefits at its core whilst meeting net zero commitments in an efficient and affordable way.

There are many MPs, on both sides of the House, that undoubtedly understand the costs that our outdated way of doing things imposes on the public and how these materialise in their communities through fuel and travel poverty. They also understand the opportunity of changing the way we do things, of changing the focus and investing more in a greener energy system, centred on energy demand management and local energy infrastructure. The new, skilled careers that people want; the lower energy bills that free up money for households and businesses to spend elsewhere in the economy; a healthier and more productive population.

Our current energy system has delivered huge benefits for many years, but we have to accept that it is no longer fit for a future where energy service demands are very different, where environmental system constraints will be much tighter, and where inequity in access to basic energy services is not acceptable. Doing the same things that we have done before (investing in more of the same large-scale technologies) and expecting to achieve something very different is – as they say – madness.

We need to work with our elected representatives to ensure that those who already understand the value of change can resist the rise of this outdated narrative... and of course, we need to work with those who don’t yet have the facts, to ensure that they can really see what a new type of energy system could do for their constituents.