The Policy Fellowship has helped me feel more confident about my policy thinking processes and has given me new tools to use in future.
Policy Challenge
Identify the benefits of flexible residential heating systems and approaches to ensuring its delivery through energy market players, consumers and heating system installers.
Learning Journey
The policy fellowship has provided a fantastic opportunity to explore what many of my interviewees agreed is probably the biggest challenge in the transition to net-zero; the decarbonisation of heat. From the start of the fellowship the importance of system thinking has been stressed and I was able to conceptualise the system relevant to my problem and set appropriate boundaries. One of the key take-aways was the idea of using personas to provide a model for thinking about different types of consumers and installers and their relationships with their homes and energy suppliers. This is an excellent way to make any policy problem more tractable and can also help in presenting ideas to a wider audience, and is a concept I will definitely apply in future.
Rachel Lee has worked in the energy industry for over 30 years, across both the public and private sector. She has been leading a programme within the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero looking at the cost and deliverability of transforming energy infrastructure to enable the decarbonisation of heat.
Impact
The Policy Fellowship has helped me feel more confident about my policy thinking processes and has given me new tools to use in future. I will be continuing the work through a public thought piece on heat decarbonisation policy against which I hope to gather a diverse range of views.