Create your pathway

2050 Web Tool

The 2050 Web tool is a user-friendly model that lets you create your own UK emissions reduction pathway, and see the impact using real UK data.

The tool presents you with three charts, describing the demand for energy, the supply of energy and the greenhouse gas emissions for the UK. Below the charts are a list of sectors. For each sector of the economy, four trajectories have been developed, ranging from little or no effort to reduce emissions (level 1) to extremely ambitious changes that push towards the physical or technical limits of what can be achieved (level 4). These are indicated by four numbered boxes.

If you click on a number, then that trajectory is selected and the charts recalculate - this calculation may take up to 30 seconds. If you move your mouse over the levels, a box will appear describing what that choice represents. You can find out more about each sector and what the changes would mean in practice by clicking on the name of each sector - these will display a short summary introducing the sector and explaining the levels and choices available.

Where there are letters (A, B, C, D) instead of numbers this means the trajectories within this sector represent different scenarios, rather than levels of effort. For example, we could derive energy from biomass (a lump of wood) in different ways – we could leave it as a solid fuel, or turn it into a liquid or a gas.
 

Create your Pathway

• Demand
  On the demand side, you can make choices about the amount of energy the UK uses. For example, you can choose how far to insulate our houses, how much more efficient to make our lighting and appliances, or choose how we travel and in what kind of vehicles.
   
• Supply
  On the supply side you can choose how the UK produces its energy. For example, you can choose to build up to 40,000 offshore wind turbines or up to 50 3GW nuclear power stations, you can allocate up to 20% of the UK’s land to growing bio crops and you can reduce our use of landfill sites.

Outputs from your Pathway

• Emissions
  The emissions chart on the right-hand side of the screen shows the emissions from your pathway to 2050 and allows you to check whether it meets the 2050 target by cutting UK emissions by at least 80% from 1990 levels.
   
• Energy Security
  Part of choosing a pathway is evaluating how well it could cope with real-life weather events and demand patterns. To test this, the 2050 Web tool simulates a cold, windless week. This means significant increases in the amount of energy demanded for heating, whilst reducing the energy supplied by some renewables, including wind turbines and solar panels. The 2050 Web tool will show how much back-up generation your pathway requires, and you can choose what level of effort put into storing energy, shifting demand and using interconnection to help meet the challenge.

Things to think about in constructing a pathway

You can explore some of the wider implications of your pathway by using the Web tool’s tabs. For example, you can see the implications of your pathway for the size of the electricity sector. You can visually track how energy flows through the system in your pathways. You can see the amount of UK land required by different energy supply technologies in your pathways. You can see how much your new energy system will cost to build. And you can read a short summary of your pathway on the story tab.

While this analysis helps us look ahead, there are some limitations to the approach:

• The model does not account for all possible feedbacks between trajectory levels in different sectors. 
• The cost figures are not comprehensive, and do not tell us anything about how energy bills might change out to 2050.
• It does not prevent implausible combinations of action, such as:
  
  - Very high levels of both solar PV and solar thermal at the same time - in practice these technologies may be competing for the same roof space;
  - A thriving manufacturing industry and high levels of additional construction at the same time as a reducing demand for freight transport;
  - Generating electricity through non-thermal processes, whilst at the same time rolling out use of district heating. 
   
• No assumptions are made about what the rest of the world does. It does not consider the role that international emissions credits might play.
• Like the UK's emission target, it does not take account of the emissions from:
  
  - growing biofuels abroad,
  - electricity generated in other countries.
  - the overseas manufacture of products which the UK imports. 
  
   
• Any new, unabated generation is provided by gas-fired power stations.

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