Renewable energy sources are now supplying around 30% of UK electricity and their use seems set to continue to expand to supply maybe 50% by 2035, and possibly much more in the decades ahead (BEIS 2018). A study for the UK Governments National Infrastructure Commission looked at a scenario with 80% of electricity coming from renewables by 2050 (Aurora 2018). Indeed, in some ambitious scenarios, by 2050, renewables supply all global power and all other energy needs (Jacobson et al. 2017). That may be too optimistic, but there are more moderate scenarios in which renewables supply over 80% of global power by around 2050 (IRENA 2017). Fifty years ago, when the use of renewable energy sources was first being promoted by activists on the counter-cultural fringe, this sort of projection would have been almost inconceivable. At that point, hydro power and some academic work aside, all that existed, for example, in the UK, were a few amateur experiments, often with tiny home-made wind turbines and solar collectors, typically servicing rural retreats or ‘alternative’ community projects.

This book explores how that changed and how renewables became what now seem likely to be the dominant energy sources of the future. It focuses on the UK, although many of the developments it describes were related to, and went in parallel with, developments elsewhere, notably in the USA and Denmark, and more recently Germany, with the latter, along with China, now well ahead in the race to deploy renewables on a wide scale. The UK story is certainly not unique nor exemplary: as we shall see, many of the early initiatives were blocked or marginalised, and resistance to change has been a constant experience. But that has been overcome. This book shows how this came to be.

Inevitably, given that it is focused on major changes in policy and strategic approach, the emphasis is on the often-turgid details of institutional wranglings and contested funding programmes, rather than on the technology. The technical and strategic case for renewables is well explored in a range of texts, including in my own overviews (Elliott 2007, 2013), and more recently in some excellent updated editions of some well thought of standard text books (Peake 2017; Sorensen 2017). Instead, this book tracks through, in some detail, the policy and ideas battles from the early days to the present, and then offers a prognosis of what might happen next.

The story it tells is a familiar one in any area of technological innovation, of an uphill struggle against vested interests defending a well-established technological and institutional status quo. In 1981, one of the early renewable energy pioneers, Professor Stephen Salter at Edinburgh University, commented ‘We are attempting to change a status quo which is buttressed by prodigious investment of money and power and professional reputations. For 100 years it has been easy to burn and pollute. 100 years of tradition cannot be swept away without a struggle. The nearer renewable energy technology gets to success, the harder that struggle becomes’ (Salter 1981). He was right, but the battle seems to have been won, at least partly.

I have divided the story into two parts, before and after 2000, with an interim analysis in between. This ‘end of century’ division is somewhat pragmatic, but is not entirely arbitrary. The first period starts with the fringe pioneers and then looks at how the UK government (and other governments) took an increasing interest in renewables, stimulated by the 1973–1974 oil crisis. In the second period, from the year 2000 onwards, concerns about climate change, although already influential, became a major driver, along with increasing concerns about geopolitical security, especially following the terrorist attacks in the USA and elsewhere.

This approach highlights the point that the major drivers for change have been ‘external’ events, rather than the ‘autonomous’ emergence of new technologies (Winner 1977). The acceptance of the new energy technologies may have been aided by the work of the early pioneers and the lobbying activities of environmental groups, and the later successful take-up of the technologies was certainly aided by the efforts of innovators and engineers in helping the technologies to develop. However, that would probably not have happened if the wider context had not changed.

That said, this book does not explore the exact role that these and other external factors played. It is clear that the main ‘external’ events (the oil crisis and climate change) related back to energy use. So they could have been predicted (and indeed were by some). Even so, although they were not ‘Acts of God’, they came as a shock. The result was that there were changes, a reconfiguration of approach and an opportunity for new approaches to be adopted. This book focuses on these responses, and, in particular, on how renewable energy development was handled in the UK. It also inevitably touches on nuclear power, since that was, in effect, a rival non-fossil energy option. Initially it was the clear leader, with renewables as the challenger, but latterly its prospects have diminished somewhat, while renewables have gone from strength to strength. It should be noted that a key motivation for many of the early renewable energy supporters was to develop an alternative to nuclear, given its cost, safety, security and radioactive waste problems (Elliott 1978), and subsequently that motivation was reinforced by the major nuclear accidents in 1979 (Three Mile Island, USA) and 1986 (Chernobyl, USSR).

I should point out that I was an active participant, if only at times tangentially, in many of the debates over policy developments that are described and reviewed in this book, so it benefits from an ‘insider’ view. That also of course risks bias. While clearly supporting renewables, I have endeavoured to provide an impartial account of events and issues, although inevitably there will be those who see things somewhat differently. By focusing, in the chapters that follow, mainly on official reports, I have tried to avoid a partisan approach, while also hopefully giving fair treatment to divergent views.

I have found few academic treatments of the overall story this book tells, but an excellent PhD thesis on the UK government’s renewable energy programme by an academic historian covers the period 1974–1988 in a much more scholarly, detailed and archive-based fashion than I could achieve in my broader study (Wilson 2010). I was pleased to see that its conclusions were generally similar to my own, at least in terms of what happened up to 1988. It says ‘the programme can be seen in some senses as a tokenistic gesture by the government acting within the uncertain political, social, and economic landscape of the 1970s’. However, as shown in this book, while that may well have been true initially, subsequently, despite continuing contestation and opposition, the situation changed.

One broader conclusion of the PhD thesis was that ‘government decisions on renewable energy were continually driven by socio-political factors which overwhelmed the unreliable economic case for renewables at that time’. As we shall see, that tendency continued. Renewables were certainly treated as marginal for much of the initial period, but they did progress despite their problems, and, 30 years on, the economic uncertainty is now much less, with renewables becoming cost competitive and of much more central concern. Even so, I would recommend that any reader who needs a more detailed analysis of the early days takes a look at this work, which also includes helpful references to other early research studies in the field.

Before plunging into the details, to set the scene, it is helpful to briefly summarise the post-Second World War energy situation in the UK, and how it initially developed. This short overview (and the timeline/chronology of key events offered earlier) obviously compresses a long history and a complex story, but there is no shortage of more detailed histories (Chick 2007), commentary (Pearson and Watson 2012) and contemporary analysis (Hall et al. 2016), and subsequent sections of this book go into exhaustive detail in terms of the development of renewable energy. However, the simple historical message is that the post-war context was not a promising one for new energy ideas, with a firmly established technological status quo blocking the way. It took some major challenges to change that.

Certainly, in the decade or so after the Second World War, the UK energy system seemed remarkably stable, based mainly on coal. There had been severe power shortages in the late 1940s, but the answer was seen, by the then Labour Government, as getting more coal and building more coal plants, with state-owned coal mines feeding the state-owned power system, and also supplying coal to make so-called town gas, to be distributed by the state-owned gas company for heating.

The ‘forward ordering programme’ for new coal plant construction, underpinned by the continued rise in demand for power, settled into what seemed to have become a standard ‘1–2 Gigawatts more’ annual pattern, continuing like that well into the 1960s. The arrival of nuclear power on the scene at that point, using Magnox reactors, a technology spun off from the nuclear weapons’ programme, did not change things much: the total nuclear energy input, initially, was small. The growth of oil as a major energy import was much more significant, but, until the first ‘oil crisis’ in 1973–1974, its availability was mostly seen as unproblematic. So the period of stability lasted for some while.

That is not to say there were not divergent views, even within the establishment. The National Coal Board was unhappy about the emergence of nuclear (a new fleet of Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors was being built during the 1970s and 1980s), which it saw as a threat. Meanwhile, outside of the establishment, the emerging environmental and conservation movements were also unhappy about the expansion of nuclear and also, more generally, about the overall growth-orientated direction being taken and its environmental implications.

However, it was the economic and geopolitical shock created by the 1973–1974 oil crisis that changed things. This was the result of an embargo imposed by OPEC, the then Arab-dominated Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, targeted at nations perceived as supporting Israel during the Yom Kippur War, including the UK. It led to large, rapid global oil price rises (by up to four times) and significant shortages in many countries, including the UK, impacting on the public directly and visibly: vehicle fuels ran out and there were long queues at filling stations for what little was left. There were also major knock-on effects on the national (and global) economy, and consequent political instability, contributing, along with a major coal miners’ strike and resultant three-day working week (to save energy), to the collapse of the then Conservative Government (under Edward Heath) in 1974. There was much talk of an ‘energy crisis’. Some of that was linked to fears of impending resource exhaustion, with alarmist projections about oil reserves ‘running out’. That might be some way off (it evidently still is), the more immediate issue at that time being price rises, and that, coupled with the issues of pollution and ‘acid rain’ production, started to make fossil fuels less reliable and attractive.

As a result, new ideas were now sought out. Although as we shall see, renewable energy ideas were explored in the UK, as elsewhere, the main expected technological beneficia...