by Andrew Robertson

Decarbonising the electricity sector has been identified as a short-term priority for cutting UK greenhouse gas emissions in response to the risks of climate change. The scale and rate of change in the electricity sector means that there is a strong need for energy research and a big potential for new research to influence policy. This article outlines examples of the areas where research is, or could be, particularly influential in policy making and uses them to demonstrate some of challenges policy makers face in using research to develop policy.

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by Simon Damkjaer

The water resources community remains stuck in a futile debate of whether water constitutes a human right or a commodity, which is resolved through the content of General Comment 15: water constitutes a human right, which puts conditions on economic approaches to water and its commodification. Instead, it is time to
address the issue of globally adopted misrepresentative water scarcity metrics that misleadingly show increasing conditions of scarcity, which risks biasing the argument towards the commodification of water. Redefining these metrics to portray hydrologic realities, will more precisely inform the formulation of water policies and help advance solutions to global water problems.

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by Christina Chang and Rebecca Farnum

Our world is running out of fossil fuels to burn for energy. Therefore, even if we were not concerned with climate change, we need to be able to produce and store energy sustainably from renewable sources. Sunlight is an abundant energy supply, and the blueprint for sustainable energy creation and storage has long been right under our noses – and on our salad forks. This article draws attention to an emerging solar energy storage technology being developed in labs around the world, called artificial photosynthesis. Artificial photosynthesis can be used to make ‘artificial leaves’ that act like ‘solar batteries’, creating and storing fuel. We describe how artificial photosynthesis works and discuss how it may provide a way forward for renewable energy storage, reduce our negative impacts on the planet, and make electricity accessible to our most vulnerable population.

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by Victoria Plutshack

As the UK aims to produce 15% of its energy consumption from renewables by 2020, planning policy becomes increasingly important to facilitate the large-scale implementation of renewable technologies. As it stands, there is great opposition to wind farms across Wales, the North East of England and Scotland. How can we improve the planning process and companies’ engagement with the local community to increase the success rate for planning applications? This piece looks at what we can learn from psychological and sociological frameworks, such as the Theory of Planned Behaviour and concepts of place attachment, to craft a suitable government response.

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by Raphael J. Heffron

New economic thinking is needed in the UK energy sector. The mainstream economic approach to the electricity sector needs to be radically altered, and two new approaches are discussed in this article. The first focuses on restructuring the electricity market, and the second on achieving parity for low carbon energy sources in terms of subsidies received in comparison to the oil and gas sector.

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