IGov is a four year research project run by the University of Exeter which aims to understand and explain the nature of sustainable change within the energy system, focusing on the complex inter-relationships between governance and innovation. The project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
Prof. Catherine Mitchell, who leads the project, has recently written a blog series ‘Lessons from America’. The point of the series is not to provide an overview of US regulatory policy but to highlight how many countries around the world are now grappling with how to implement an energy policy which really does lead to practice change and a sustainable, secure and efficient energy system. We in GB could save ourselves an awful lot of time and money if we spent a bit more time examining what other countries do, and learning from their successes (and failures).
Europe’s 500 million (m) population dwarfs the US’s 320 m but the US, with its 50 States, has a far bigger pool of differing energy regulatory situations to experiment and learn from than Europe’s 25 countries; and the States have a far longer history of working together than Europe does. American, or specifically the USA (as opposed to Canadian or South American) energy regulation is, at first sight, very different from that in place in Britain, or in most of Europe. However, this series of blogs (Lessons from America) illuminates practices in the US that British or European regulators and decision-makers could beneficially learn from.
Read the series
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