When we think of the energy transition, we think of pylons, power stations, offshore wind farms…massive infrastructure projects with huge price tags attached. There is, though, another side to low carbon energy which is smaller in scale but which in the aggregate has an important contribution to make: local and community energy. A lot of the technology is the same, the key difference is that the ownership and management of power generation is – in a variety of ways – conducted at a smaller scale.
The UK government’s Local Power Plan
The UK government recently launched its Local Power Plan (LPP), with the aim of supporting 8GW of power by 2030 – backed by £1billion in funding. The LPP is a welcome development, not only in expanding low carbon power generation but because local energy generation can engage the public directly in an energy transition, encourage community cohesion, bring direct financial benefits to participants and provide energy for more remote locations. Many such schemes already exist, but there is significant scope for expansion.
Our Putting Power in its Place paper argues that there is a major opportunity to use the LPP to address issues of energy poverty and contribute to making wider improvements to our energy system. Local energy schemes are, with some justification, associated with wealthier areas which have the capacity to engage with and develop such schemes.
PPERC’s Proposals
Our core argument is that the role of the state – through Great British Energy – is to pro-actively identify and support communities at the sharp end of the energy crisis through the development of local energy projects. The LPP states that ‘ownership matters’, what we argue for is genuinely community owned, democratic energy projects which provide both direct returns to those facing energy poverty and debt but also opportunities to develop skills and greater community cohesion. In practice this means more than simply allowing a local authority to take a slice of profits from a new generation site – it means actively providing advice, training and protected mechanisms for community owned energy.
We see the LPP, and the expanding role of Great British Energy at a local level, as a means of bringing a range of different people into the energy transition in both materially and socially beneficial ways. Expanding local energy projects, alongside the national level, creates opportunities for people across the country to develop both the technical engineering and ‘soft’ skills of planning and managing energy, new jobs, and space for small-to-medium enterprises to develop.
Implementing the Plan
Community energy creates the space for more and more people to take a stake in the future of energy. Most people are rightly worried about the impacts of climate change, local energy projects allow people to not only take action but to build bonds of solidarity and resilience in their local area which have a much wider value particularly at points of crisis. If the LPP is integrated with other programmes – the Warm Homes Agency, local and mayoral devolution, spatial planning – it can be part of developing stronger community bonds.
We want to see the LPP be a success, and the government has put the basic foundations in place for it to do so. What we set out in our paper are recommendations for how to implement the Plan in the most impactful and expansive way possible.
Read the Paper: Putting Power in its Place: A PPERC response to the Local Power Plan
By Gareth Fearn
Image Credit: Itay Noy, from project with Repowering London
