This message first appeared in our March 2025 newsletter. To stay up to date with the latest news and research on energy issues that impact consumers, sign up to receive our monthly newsletter below.
I’m often asked what it is I expect from the energy transition. (I suspect many of you are regularly asked the same thing). Less commonly, I’m asked what I want from the transition.
We could fill a book with the things that ECA wants, but if I had to boil it all down to a single proposition, it would be simple: shared benefit. We hear a great deal about the enormous challenges of the transition, but less regularly about the equally large opportunities.
The key will be ensuring that these opportunities are available for everyone.
Since the Industrial Revolution, there have been several examples where the benefits of system change were concentrated, rather than dispersed (including in the energy and fuel markets). But there are some clarion examples of true shared benefit - and my favourite, (as some of you will know) is the sewering of London in the 1860s.
Until that time, outflows went straight into the Thames. Tens of thousands of Londoners died in the preceding decade from outbreaks of typhoid, dysentery and cholera. Business was regularly halted; in 1858 (a year known to English history as ‘The Great Stink’), parliament was closed. Something had to be done.
Into the fray stepped Joseph Bazalgette, Chief Engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works. In 10 years, he and his team designed and built a system that enabled London to prosper - and which is still used today.
There was enormous innovation (‘Portland cement’, used just about everywhere now, was invented for the job), incredible surface infrastructure deployed (e.g. new bridges such as Battersby and Hammersmith), urban redesign (displaced soil from the sewers became Victoria Embankment), and mammoth structural engineering (a third of a billion bricks to line the thousands of miles of tunnels). Nothing like it had ever been done before - and all while Londoners went on with their lives metres above.
Overnight, the health status of Londoners changed, with several major diseases all but eradicated. London’s economy took off like a rocket. Every citizen shared in the benefit at a personal level, regardless of need or circumstance, while the City of London took every opportunity to capitalise the investment for the whole community.
My sense from this project is that Bazalgette and his backers recognised a fundamental truth: that each person’s benefit was utterly contingent on every person’s participation.
Put into our context, the proposition is disarmingly simple: there really can’t be any winners in the energy transition if there are also losers.
