How would UK energy scenario practice look if lessons were learned from the past two decades? A new expert workshop report from the Tyndall Centre at The University of Manchester argues it would mean broader commissioning of expertise, methodological diversity, and energy demand as core components of any scenario set.
The new report, Decarbonising the UK Revisited: Lessons from Two Decades of Energy Scenario Development, draws on a workshop held in February 2026 with ten leading UK energy researchers. It builds on the Tyndall Centre’s 25th anniversary report, Decarbonising the UK Revisited, launched at the Centre’s Critical Decade for Climate Action Conference in September 2025, as a reflection on the original Decarbonising the UK, launched in 2005.
The research underpinning the workshop reviewed over 80 UK energy scenarios developed between 2000 and 2009 and compared them with what has happened since. It found that the UK now uses far less energy than almost any of those scenarios anticipated, yet the opportunity to act on this potential was largely missed. The workshop brought together ten energy researchers, from those who have shaped the field to early career researchers now building on it, to explore why those gaps emerged and what can be learnt for the future.
Five themes for scenario development
Using reflexive thematic analysis, the report identifies five themes, encompassing 20 sub-themes, that capture the key learning from the workshop discussions.
The first theme, the institutional production of scenario boundaries, captures how the institutional conditions surrounding scenario development, including commissioning arrangements, advisory structures, and academic research cultures, have functioned as boundary-setting mechanisms, determining what falls within and outside the scope of analysis before any modelling begins.
The second theme, the selective optimism of scenario imagination, addresses what happened within those boundaries: a systematic pattern in which certain technologies were treated with persistent optimism whilst others were underestimated, and in which demand-side change was consistently downplayed.
The third theme, the missing people in energy futures, captures the various ways in which people, as publics, as differentiated socioeconomic groups, as practitioners navigating implementation, and as communities living with climate impacts, have been absent from or inadequately represented in energy scenario development.
The fourth theme, the question of the right tool for the right time, addresses the methodological dimension: what kinds of analytical tools and approaches have been used, what their limitations are, and what alternatives might be more appropriate.
The fifth theme, the politics that scenarios cannot escape, addresses the political dimensions that pervade all aspects of scenario development, from the macro-politics of economic growth to the micro-politics of researcher positionality.
Lessons from looking back
The report concludes that future scenarios can be strengthened to provide policy options that embrace innovative ideas and the bold, transformative, socially just change consistent with the scale of the climate challenge. For those who commission, produce, and rely on energy scenarios, the findings raise practical questions: how are the boundaries of an exercise set, whose assumptions are built in, which technologies receive optimism and which do not, and whether the people whose lives are reshaped by energy transitions have any meaningful presence in the process.
Dr Gaurav Gharde, lead researcher and author, commented:
“What stayed with me from the workshop is that those of us who develop scenarios, and the institutions that support our work, are not outside the systems we analyse. We need to be willing to ask ourselves how our own positions shape what we choose to explore, and the evidence of the past two decades makes a strong case for broader commissioning, greater methodological diversity, and a genuine openness to exploring a wider range of futures.”
The workshop report was authored by Gaurav Gharde, Sarah Mander, Carly McLachlan, Chris Jones and Alice Larkin from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at The University of Manchester.
Related links
- Learn about the Decarbonising the UK Revisited report
- Find out more about the public seminar on Decarbonising the UK, 20 Years Later
- Look at the 2005 report on Decarbonising the UK: Energy in a Climate Conscious Future
