Community Energy event

UEA and Sussex Universities hosted a lively debate on community energy at UEA London yesterday. Speakers included Chris Church of the Low Carbon Communities Network, Rebecca Willis who has recently co-authored a guide to 'Cooperative Renewable Energy in the UK', Rufus Ford of Scottish and Southern Energy, Patrick Allcorn from DECC and Damian Tow, founder member and Director of Brighton Energy Co-operative. Among the many issues raised were:
- the importance of a sound business case for community energy
- the need to invest in skills and capacity building as well as technology
- the potential dangers in the grant system of a) over-reliance on subsidies and b) inherent bias as past winners of grants succeed time and again, and
- the need to recognise equity issues in making any grants.
The aim has to be to create a self-sustaining community energy sector, which is currently proving difficult. The complexity of the policy landscape does not help and some suggested that the community sector was treated rather patronisingly, rather than recognising the way that - collectively - it is a major player in the energy field. In the managed market for energy, a separate Community Feed in Tariff would be a good way forward, establishing the basis for community enterprises to scale up and function as businesses. Normalisation of community energy should be the ambition which many argued was within reach.

Energy and People Conference in Oxford

The Environmental Change Unit at Oxford and UKERC Meeting Place organised an excellent conference 20-21 September. It kicked of with an illuminating and very funny opening lecture by Elizabeth Shove on different ways of conceptualising energy and people: attitudes/behaviour/choice (ABC) or systems of provision and infrastructure or social practices - no prizes for guessing she favoured the latter although her main message was to be aware of your theoretisation and argue for it. Amongst the multiple workshops, I chose the communities and energy one for the first day. We heard about a new complexity based project from Leeds, the work of the HCA and (an impromptu but excellent mini-talk) the PACE scheme from USA which is the model for the UK Green Deal (but coming out of the private not the public sector). There was a reality check about energy crises in Ghana and environmental justice and energy in the UK, details of the UNLOC project from Surry and some interesting ideas on reflexive governance from Denmark. But the community theme did not seem to be where the core interests of this conference lay. Despite Elizabeth Shove's opening cautionary words about the ABC approach, the behavioural theme raised the most interest in the workshops I attended. The one on energy behaviour in non-domestic buildings and in urban development was very lively with talks on the role of investors, tenants, lawyers and letting agents in shaping this behaviour (ECI), identification of different pathways in zero-carbon housebuilding (Manchester) and the impact of Green Building Councils worldwide (Maastricht). The Green Gauge Trust provided warnings about the lack of capacity in the refurb market and ECI identified that this market was worth £28 b.p.a. of which about 45% could be oriented towards low carbon retrofit, an interesting figure to ponder.