Last Thursday, I took most of the day off and cycled up the Derwent Walk and Waskerley Way into the North Penines. The former used to be a passenger railway line, carrying 500,000 people a year, the latter a passenger/mineral railway that served the local lead and fluorspar mines, elements of which you can still see scattered across the moors. Of Waskerley village itself, Wikipedia says:

There were two engine sheds, a station master’s house, two rows of housing, a school, and a Methodist chapel (now used as a barn). With the decline in railway haulage and passengers the line finally closed in 1969 and much of the village was abandoned.

You’re telling me. If there wasn’t a gate on the trail and some interpretation panels, you’d miss the couple of surviving buildings.

My bikepacking and hillwalking hobbies take me to all kinds of such remote places in the UK, but one of the things that always strikes me is those places weren’t that desolate in the past. Hiking from Glenfinnan Viaduct  into the Knoydart Peninsula, supposedly the UK’s last wilderness, at the top of the first mountain pass you find what looks like an old iron garden gate, stood alone with no fence, wall or any other hint to its purpose. Somebody put it there for a good reason, long forgotten. Abandoned tumbledown mines, lime kilns and drovers’ inns litter the uplands, remnants of a much more rural society before urbanisation became the dominant trend.

The evidence of employment migration is harder to see in the lowlands, but it is there. When I had Dr Simona Capisani on the pod to talk about climate justice, we discussed deprived former mining communities in County Durham, UK. These villages were built solely to house and support workers for each coal mine and their location was determined by the geology below. In the first half of the 19th century, the population of the county tripled to meet demand for miners, but as coalfields depleted, one by one those local economies collapsed, leaving poverty and dereliction. In fact, between 1951 and 1977, the county had a policy of rating villages A, B, C or D. Over 100 were rated D – condemned/abandoned to their fate. Local resistance meant some survived, but many are now just a few bumps in a field.

There have been many attempts over the decades to bring prosperity back to mining communities (I was briefly involved in one). Given their raison d’etre had gone, this has been a serious challenge – finding another form of employment which matches a population whose distribution was determined primarily by geology. If you’re not going to take the Darwinist approach of those postwar Durham County authorities, what can you do instead?

In his best selling book Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall argues that geographical influence on global politics is much under-appreciated. For example, in the first chapter Marshall argues that Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 was driven as much by Russia’s strategic lack of a warm water port accessible all year around as it was by nationalistic expansionism. Geography focussed Putin’s mind. Is the same true of energy on a national level?

Aberdeen boomed on the back of North Sea Oil & Gas on account of its prime position on the North East coast of Scotland, but what is its role in a low carbon economy? UK PM Keir Starmer is gambling on locating the state owned renewables company GB Energy there to mitigate the inevitable decline in oil and gas, but will it ever be more than a sticking plaster? There will be jobs in installing and maintaining offshore wind farms, but I doubt there will be the same concentration in jobs there as there was in oil and gas in its heyday.

Across the country, industrial petrochemical clusters are betting the farm on hydrogen and carbon capture and storage, two unproven and costly technologies, which they hope can be dropped in neatly to avoid collapse. If those gambles fail, as well they might, what happens to the local populations who migrated there decades ago? What industry will match the demands of fossil fuels that located them there?

One of the biggest differences between the high carbon energy sector and renewables is that latter is distributed rather than concentrated, so geography matters very much. A huge challenge in the UK is that the electricity grid is ill-prepared to transmit electricity from Scotland, where renewables are plentiful, to population concentrations in the SE of England where demand is highest. Local resistance to new overhead cables and the cost of burying them out of sight underground are the horns of a new political dilemma.

Many attempts to artificially engineer the geography of energy have failed, at considerable cost. North of me, regeneration experts were so desperate to fill the void left by the demolished North Blyth coal-fired power station with green jobs that they fell for the hype of the BritishVolt EV battery ‘gigafactory’. I don’t know for sure where the millions that went into BritishVolt came from or went, but I do know they barely left a trace. Meanwhile, actual gigafactories are being built where they are needed – right next to car manufacturing plants.

In another example, every so often we see a surge in interest for ‘eco-parks’, business parks developed for clusters of recycling and/or similar industries, as a form of green regeneration. The only problem is that the concept never seems to work in practice – green businesses go where they want to/need to go and the eco-parks either fail to get off the ground or, at best, evolve into a bog standard business park with a bit of green bling.

I don’t think you need to be a swivel-eyed free market fundamentalist to realise that ultimately the new geography of a low carbon economy will be determined by market forces. The big dilemma is how to avoid the kind of local economic collapse and social deprivation that we see in ex-mining communities. Can distributed energy bring distributed business that can be strategically located? What skills are easily transferred from high carbon to low carbon jobs? What policies would make a real difference to shaping supply and demand across the country?

I don’t pretend to have the answers to those questions, but the more I think about it, the more I am convinced we need to factor geography into our planning for a low carbon future. One concept that could open up the geography of the low carbon economy is regional/zonal electricity pricing, currently the topic of a big political debate. Its proponents suggest this would encourage heavy power users to locate where clean energy is plentiful, rather than trying to transmit it around the country. This could help populations in fossil-fuelled local economies as many of them are located in northern costal areas where offshore wind is easily harnessed. I will be watching that debate with interest.