OIES Podcast – Key themes and messages from the OIES Electricity Energy Transition event

In this podcast, Malcolm Keay and David Robinson, Senior Research Fellows of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, discuss with David Ledesma two issues central to the energy transition: the need for fundamental structural reform of electricity markets and new approaches to energy networks. They explain how the penetration of intermittent renewables has changed the economic and technological underpinnings of the power sector; requiring a different market design and a new approach to networks. The current market design reflects 20th Century conditions: a power sector with a small number of large dispatchable plants, mainly fired by coal or natural gas, with significant variable costs and unidirectional electricity network flows. Increasingly, the reality is of an energy system that consists of millions of competing sources of decarbonised energy resources, including large scale as well as distributed resources, mostly intermittent renewables with zero short-run marginal costs and where multiple energy networks (e.g. electricity, hydrogen, district heating) need to act as a system. The podcast ends with David and Malcolm giving their views as to what signals to look out for in the ever changing European and UK electricity markets.

By: OIES