Rethinking the Continuum between Public and Private Actors in Electricity Policy in the Context of the UK Energy Transition

Abstract

At the turn of the 1990s, a very large part of UK energy utilities was transferred from the public sector into private ownership. When analysing the era of privatisation, recent research on public policy has concluded that public authorities' ability to influence or shape national energy choices has been substantially weakened. Since the mid-2000s, however, tight cooperation between private investors and UK public regulators and policy-makers has emerged as a critical factor to meet the challenges posed by the energy transition. How have the British public authorities tried to get private actors on board and to involve them not only in the delivery and funding of energy services, as has been the case with public-private partnerships, but also in the decision-making process? This article identifies various schemes spearheaded by the UK government to breed or revive innovation in the privately-owned renewable and nuclear energy industries. This analysis explores the various strategies used to facilitate 'decompartmentalising' initiatives and ensure a smooth transition towards a neo-corporatist revival of the Triple Helix involving industry, academia, and government. It shows how these hybrid processes offer valuable insight for analysing and reconceptualising the boundary between the public and the private sectors. Based on this case study, this analysis ultimately demonstrates how the public/private dichotomy should be reassessed using the concepts of hybrid roles and responsibilities.

Open and collaborative innovation for the energy transition: An exploratory study

“…However, this is not necessarily true, as argued by Hippel [45]. During the energy privatization in the UK in the 1980s, for example, R&D responsibilities were transferred from the public to the private context, which caused many issues because of "incompatibilities between short-term and profitability-led investment objectives of the private sector and the more long-term, efficiency-based and sustainable demands of energy services" [46], p. 883. Mismatched profit and time scales are a common concern for profit-oriented businesses, especially when incorporating sustainability and efficiency requirements.…”

“…Refs. [69,91], PPPP for solar development [94], PCP [97], 5P facilitating energy access [105], REEEP [110] Joint R&D, codevelopment, and alliances Actors from all sectors agree to develop or improve in tandem a technology and/or service FCH JU [100], Triple helix [46,70,75,78,86,88], Joint R&D [8,73,76,81], the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance [103] physical domains, and collaborative innovation mainly through cocreation and co-design of energy pathways and crowdsourcing for private companies.…”

Organizational change in response to environmental complexity: Insights from the business model innovation literature

“…Arguably, the existence of relational flaws in closed innovation system paradigms, and the inherent lack of recognition by (energy‐intensive) organizations of the transformational influence of a broader set of actors (e.g. suppliers at various levels, recycling and returning facilitators, NGOs, local authorities and energy experts) (Sarasini & Linder, 2018), partly explains that incoherencies in the way energy is supplied and consumed have sustained, and even increased, over the years—especially in liberalized economies where public authorities' ability to influence or shape energy choices is weakened (de Carvalho, 2018). A shift towards more social inclusivity and permeability between normally closed institutional settings (Lichtenthaler, 2011) ought therefore to be encouraged.Proposition (P1): The existence of ‘relational flaws’ in activity systems constrains the practice of organizational change in response to complexity.…”

Unveiling the shades of partnerships for the energy transition and sustainable development: Connecting public–private partnerships and emerging hybrid schemes

“…From 2015 onward, the volume of scientific production in PPPs in energy has intensified in energy efficiency and agro‐energy applications in Europe and waste‐to‐energy and electric vehicle charging infrastructure in China (Manos et al, 2014; Xu et al, 2015; Yang et al, 2016). A key aspect in the literature is the persistence of sustainability (Arbulú et al, 2017; Bougrain, 2012; Sheng et al, 2020), clean energy (Atmo & Duffield, 2014; Feng et al, 2021; Raza et al, 2021), and the energy transition (De Carvalho, 2018; Koengkan, 2020) as the motivation for research.…”

“…The energy transition and evolution of related energy systems have significantly broadened the role and scope of PPPs to support the transition toward cleaner technologies and sustainable development (Chen et al, 2019; De Carvalho, 2018). Per Thomas et al (2018), the energy transition requires “scalar lenses” to comprehend and connect the different contexts in which it occurs (Broto & Baker, 2018; Harrison & Popke, 2018; Smith & High, 2017; Thomas et al, 2018, p. 184).…”