ABSTRACT
The ‘energy trilemma’ is a term used to describe the policy challenge of simultaneously responding to the potentially competing goals of energy security, energy affordability and low carbon energy supply. The fact that the energy trilemma has become a powerful rhetorical device across policy and research is not surprising given that it is consistent with other prevalent policy discourses. Although it is said to provide a holistic view of energy systems, we contend that the trilemma is in fact lopsided and partial: in focusing on features of supply it overlooks fundamental questions about the scale and dynamics of demand. In effect, talk of the energy trilemma, and strategies and policies informed by it, take energy demand and the practices on which demand depends entirely for granted. This chapter introduces new ways of thinking about how demand changes and what this means for both the scale and the character of the challenges that the trilemma purports to represent.
