For this episode, Poppy Maltby, Associate Director at Regen, is joined by:

Fraser Stewart, Great British Energy's Head of Local Energy Strategy

Charlotte Norton, Associate Director within the Cities and Regions team at the Carbon Trust

Alex Templeton - From the Net Zero Living project in Essex, and Director of Community Infrastructure Group CIC

Local and community energy projects are a critical part of securing a just energy transition, ensuring all places can capitalise on the clean energy transition.

This episode explores the Net Zero Living Programme's insights in community energy, including lessons from Essex's new community interest company, to understand how local authorities and other stakeholders can support and grow the sector.

Hello and welcome.

I'm Poppy Maltby, I'm the Associate Director at Regen, focusing on all things local authority and local energy.

This is the Net Zero Living podcast run by Regen for Innovate uk.

So Net Zero Living as a program has provided funding and support to nearly 300 businesses and local authorities over the last two years to adopt innovations that can help their places prosper from the shift to Net zero.

So we know broadly what needs to happen in the energy transition, but things aren't really happening at the scale and the pace that we need to hit our target.

So the program has been looking at these non technological barriers to change, the sort of softer stuff rather than the technology.

So it's not so much the wind turbine itself that's the problem, it's it's more the barriers around community support, the planning process, finances, decision making, etc.

So we at regen have been working with innovate UK and the 52 places running projects looking at how policy and regulation has been creating or removing those barriers.

And we're now helping to disseminate the findings from all that good work.

This podcast is the second in a series of three, along with publications, webinars and blogs looking to disseminate that good work and the insights in particular and learnings generated by those places.

And we have three big themes for this dissemination phase.

In December, we covered some great work in buildings and retrofits.

The first podcast explored the local authority roles in developing the skills we need for the future.

Do check it out if you haven't already.

And this month though is it's all about community empowerment.

This podcast is looking at community energy.

So through the program, a number of local authorities have been trying to affect change on the ground, roll out new technologies in their areas, which has meant engaging with people and they found that the pressures like cost of living are understandably sort of taking priority for citizens and that without the right engagement with local communities, they this transition is going to be much harder to deliver and for people it can feel sort of expensive, it can feel complex and disconnected from their local needs.

So during the programme there's been some really brilliant examples of good practice in this area and today we're going to be exploring some of those related to community energy in particular.

Hi, I'm Fraser Stewart and I am the head of Local Energy Strategy for Great British Energy.

Until recently, I was the Just Transition and communities lead at Regen, involved in the Net Zero Living program, running the Just Transition and Community Energy Policy Group.

Hello, I'm Charlotte Norton.

I'm an Associate Director for the Carbon Trust, responsible for our onshore renewables and heat networks work.

Carbon Trust been the technical assistance partners of Ovate UK's net zero living programme.

I'm Alex Templeton, I work for UK Community Works and I'm involved in Essex County Council's Net Zero Living projects.

So I'm going to kick off, really, why do we care about this?

What is the role of community energy and why is this important to us in the clean energy transition?

And I'm going to ask that to Fraser to kick us off.

I think there's a key.

You set out the context really well, is that we're ramping up, and now that is government ambition, but also internationally ramping up on the clean energy transition.

But we know that there are other things happening at this moment in time, whether that's cost of living, whether that's energy, energy bills, which are very closely connected, and a whole raft of other pressures that are much higher on people's priority list.

The reality, of course, is that we still have to get this transition done and there's no way through it without bringing communities on that journey, not just as consultees, because they will have some kind of veto in this process, but as active partners within this process.

The value of doing that is that when communities can own their own energy infrastructure, their own assets, their own services, it gives them a stake in that process.

Now, that has a range of, of benefits, right?

The first being that when they own assets, whether that's they own their own solar farm or wind turbine, or they deliver their own local heat network or retrofit program, the proceeds from that, the value from that stay local, they can be used for local priorities to deliver.

In some cases, when you get up to scale transformation that meets that local place's needs and ambitions, it also tends to be more inclusive and more just.

When you do things at the local and community level, not exclusively, it's not easy to do this stuff.

But at the local level, you have trusted organizations and representatives within communities championing these types of projects and the transition more widely, you can bring more people into the fold.

They tend to know who their local networks are, know who the people are on the ground, and they're better at reaching those who are typically marginalized or disadvantaged in society to bring them into the conversation, into that value offering as well.

The other spin out of this, and I guess it's why anyone listening to this podcast who presumably is some way linked to the energy sector or to local authorities, is that you can really build sustainable support for the wider clean power mission when you have communities on board as again an active delivery partner and owner within this process, because they have skin in the game, because they have a stake within it, and because it becomes much more tailored to the needs on the ground economically.

It can also, once you get up to bigger scale generation projects, you can bring in new revenues into local areas that can really transform those places.

Places that have maybe been left behind through de industrialization etc.

Can also meet those needs around cost of living, around fuel poverty support, which we know community energy groups have led the way on for the best part of the last decade, particularly the last three or four years in helping people on the ground.

Sally I think also achieving our net zero targets requires collective behaviour change by individuals and for individuals to hold governments and corporates to account to ensure that they do take the required actions to meet all the targets that have been set.

The activities by community energy organisations have a multiplier effect by influencing the activities in actions of individuals within the communities within which they're based.

So there's a real multiplier beyond that one project they've worked on, just through that dissemination of information that can really help continue to drive the decarbonisation agenda.

That's where there's a real incentive for local authorities to engage with community energy as well.

Because it delivers on so many more objectives than just decarbonization.

Why there is this agenda and the benefits that it can bring and why we're all very passionate about it, that you can really spread that word and encourage people to make changes.

And as I say, it will multiplies up and will help us hit those targets.

It's not always as easy as it sounds getting community energy involved in some of these projects and programs.

What are the real barriers standing in the way of us seeing this more consistently rolling out across the country?

I come from a few perspectives on this.

I'll start with I was a founding director at Glasgow community energy almost 10 years ago.

Now, just from the practical perspective of getting motivated people together who care about this stuff and want to do something about it, maintaining that interest and upskilling around the sort of the technical nature of doing a solar or a wind project, some of the legal agreements that you have to get in place, the finance you have to get in place, there are so many things you kind of have to learn on the job to do this and that can be quite challenging within the process.

So there's a lot of interesting twists and turns to doing these types of projects.

But I think in terms of the systemic barriers, we know that a lot of this still exists.

We know that speaking to the project experience the capacity of what are often volunteer organizations doing this, sort of from goodwill and personal motivation, it can be quite challenging to keep people there to dedicate the time you need to do what can be quite complex technical projects and also to understand the legal, the financial implications etc.

That's especially acute and especially sharp when you get into areas of higher deprivation or less affluent communities who maybe have organisations who would ostensibly benefit from, you know, having their own solar farm or wind turbines from the revenue that that can bring them, but maybe don't have the bandwidth, the space because they're focused on other maybe social justice style issues, poverty, inequality, etc.

And don't have the technical expertise.

So I think that's number one to unlocking this at scale or the main barrier is the capacity piece.

But we also know that there are other sort of systemic technical regulatory barriers as well.

It's quite challenging for smaller scale community energy projects like that, the sort of smaller wind solar projects communities typically do.

It's challenging economically.

And there hasn't been a consistent source of revenue for community projects since some kicked off almost in spite of that challenge.

But it is commercially a bit more difficult than it has been.

All these things are under consideration, but by removing those barriers you can go at scale and at pace and we're hoping to see more movement on this in the coming months.

And Charlotte, you worked specifically with some of the Net Zero Living projects on this.

What's your take on the big challenges.

Within the Net Zero Living programme?

We built on some of the one to one work we did around community energy to develop a Community Energy Insights piece for local authorities on how they can develop their own community energy support program.

That Insights piece has two different parts, so it's got a background information pack and then sort of process guidance for the local authorities.

So within that we sort of looked at what, what has made those community energy projects that are successful, successful and we came up with a list of sort of key ingredients that are required and they reflect a lot of actually what Fraser was just saying, which is always encouraging.

There were things like delivery, resource appetite and opportunity.

An obvious one is funding and we need funding for projects to get off the ground.

But you could have all of the funding in the world and a community energy project is not going to be successful if there isn't effective community engagement or there aren't sort of robust governance procedures in place.

But there are also a lot of successful projects out there which have managed to tick all those boxes and deliver.

Which means, you know, there is a way.

Thanks.

I'd love to bring Alex into this now as a case study from Net Zero Living at setting up the organization in Essex.

Do you want to just give us a bit of a background, Alex, on what the project was and the organization that you've set up through Net Zero Living?

The question from the Essex County Council senior team was solar is a no brainer.

Why isn't everyone doing it?

And so we knew quite a lot about those non technical barriers but then we started looking at, okay, what do we actually need?

So the average household has got about 12 and a half thousand pounds of liquid capital.

They're not going to invest a significant proportion of that into renewable energy or retrofit.

And also there was the problem with communities in that sort of.

Any individual community would find it quite hard to get the 50 to 150,000 pounds that you would need to get a larger project through the planning commission and therefore make it investable.

So we're looking at two financial innovations.

One was a pay as you go model for households and businesses.

The second one was how do we design a revolving feasibility fund that would allow any community to take that risk and get to work.

But if they failed, then that would be transmuted into a grant.

So that would remove two of those key barriers, the individual household and, and businesses lack of liquid capital and the high risk early stage feasibility for communities.

So if you went to, we went back to the various councils we were working in and said, okay, we need money for a fund for this.

And they said, we can't quite go that far.

But if you want to set up your own organization, arm's length, a social enterprise, we will give you support to do this.

So that's so that we set up Essex Community Energy and Suffolk Community Energy Suffolk is dormant for the time being, but Essex is now active and it's got a couple of million pounds funding from another project this Hofgen funded.

And so the organisation itself, that community energy organisation, the CIC I think is what you ended up setting up that was critical as part of the governance, I imagine as part of having an organization on which to focus on finance delivery etc.

Did you look at any other models?

Were there other organisations that could have played that part or did it need a new organisation?

There was no existing organisation in Essex or Suffolk that we thought was appropriate and the CIC model was chosen over the other sort of co optives and other potential community benefit society models because we needed the freedom to raise large amounts of money if we were going to be going to the market.

And if this works, you're wanting 100 million pound chunks.

That needs to be an organisation that doesn't have the constraints of a cooperative or community benefit society.

So there's more flexibility in that model.

Did you have any sort of challenges or issues in setting up that organization?

Was it relatively straightforward?

Oh, very straightforward.

The challenges will come further down the line as we get deeper into operations.

How are communities represented and given power in that organization as well as in their own local energy groups?

That's a question that has not been resolved, but we think it is solvable.

And so if you were giving some lessons or learnings to other areas, if they don't have already existing community energy groups, what would be your recommendations for people looking to set up something in their area?

There's one tool that we found very useful, or I found very useful, is an old IBM Motorola management tool when they were trying to work out how to deliver productive change because all of their change projects kept failing.

It's something they called the VISA tool and it's a vision, incentive skills, action plan and resources.

You go to a community group and you map, right, what have you got?

And you've normally got vision and incentive skills.

They can be got action plan that can be developed.

It's always the resources.

And I think if we really want to empower communities to act, we've got to get serious about resourcing that.

Yeah, I think that moves us to the sort of, I guess the crux of what Net Zero Living was exploring, which was to look at the role of local authorities, local government in supporting community energy and overcoming some of the barriers we've spoken about and also like Alex has mentioned, making sure that those benefits trickle down to the communities involved.

Charlotte, what would you highlight as the sort of most critical supporting actions that local authorities should be exploring?

I don't think there is a one size fits all because every local area is different and every local authority is different and it depends on what the capacity there is and appetite within that local authority, I think this is the thing that you have to have a joined up approach within the organisation and then within the wider community.

Part of that process guide I was talking about earlier about setting up sort of community energy support programs, a big focus on that is defining what is community energy within your local area, what does it mean in that local area and then mapping out the stakeholders.

And if it's about a local authority working out what their role is, they need to do some internal stakeholder engagement.

What resources do they have?

Are there champions within the organisation who are going to be given that resource to support the community energy agenda?

Is there funding available?

How can the local authority help support it?

We've set out a number of different roles that they could take, varying depending on what resource and capacity there is, but all looking to help support community energy organisations on the ground.

Mapping out the stakeholders, you know, like national public sector organisations and opportunities where there's support that might be provided, or private sector organisations locally who might complement the community energy sector.

And then from all of that sort of engagement and understanding, I think you can then start looking at what the sort of gaps and opportunities are within the local context.

To really understand what actions this local authority could do successfully, you need to get to know your local area and develop something that makes sense to meet those needs and opportunities that you've got locally.

Thanks, Charlotte.

Alex, we put out a report this week about communities driving change and it was talking about local authorities supporting an ecosystem in their area that can support community organizations and community energy.

What's your ecosystem in Essex like?

What sort of support did you have from the local authority there?

So the local authority has two dedicated members of staff working on community energy, which is really good.

They have nurtured a number of 30 odd community groups who are pretty coherent, ambitious, want to do things.

The gap coming back to the resources thing again is how many megawatts have they actually put in the ground?

That is the missing bit of Essex County Council support.

And that is part of what our project is trying to solve is that early stage feasibility revolving feasibility fund.

Thanks, Alex.

And you know, financing as we know is a, and particularly that feasibility stage is, is really critical.

I might come to you, Fraser, now from a GB Energy perspective, resource is.

One thing, but the capacity to deliver projects is another element of this as well.

So as we get through the coming months with the local power plan expected in the next little while, GB Energy is very much hard at work internally developing out what those capacity offers look like and what those finance and Those investment offers look like as well, with a key focus on some of the models that we understand work for community energy already and making sure that they're valuable, viable and that GB Energy can add value to those.

So thinking about the community generation style projects, but also shared ownership, which we know is likely to become sort of bigger ticket for communities and also potentially local authorities and collaborations between the two of them, right.

Local authorities and community energy groups can co own larger scale generation projects if they wanted to.

So those configurations of different models of ownership and different points at which investment and additional funding and finance is required across grants, loans and equity is very much underway at GB Energy just now, alongside the capacity piece as well.

And I thought I'd use the opportunity to ask you for, I guess, sort of examples, lessons, projects that you've been sort of impressed with.

Start with Charlotte, you know, what have you been impressed with in the community energy space?

What do you think is a model that people should be looking at so much?

And there are so many different examples, to be honest, and different examples in terms of scale project type.

I come from a renewable electricity generation background, so I'm always excited by community wind turbines or solar farms.

But there's some really inspiring energy efficiency projects out there as well.

Spreading the word at the local level on how you can save energy in your homes and save money and have real benefits for people on an everyday basis.

When we were putting together the insights piece on the community energy support programs, we just did some research to bring together a range of different case studies, specifically looking at how the community energy and public sector have collaborated and in a range of different ways.

So there's some where, you know, the local authority support is much more light touch, they're off takers, they're benefiting from the community energy projects.

So for example Agni Solar Co Op in South Wales, who have about 5 megawatts, I think of rooftop solar PV across South Wales on a variety of buildings, public and community.

That's a really nice example because they have won tenders against private sector organizations to install solar PV on public sector buildings.

And I think probably the key differentiator there is that they provide those social benefits and tick the wider objective boxes for the local authority because all of their profits go into their climate change education program.

There are several examples of similar, similar projects.

I think Surrey had one, their home energy advice team where they have trained up a number of energy champions within communities who do sort of go door to door and provide energy efficiency advice to local people and signpost them to where they can get support if they do identify opportunities for retrofit measures.

Yeah, as I say, I think that's a lovely one because it has that real multiplier effect again of training people up and then for them to pass on knowledge to others.

Yeah.

It reminds me of one of the earlier documents we did for Net Zero Living when we were trying to quantify the sort of wider social and economic benefits that you get from community energy and community organisations.

So, as you mentioned, it's benefiting the local authorities, but it's benefiting the area.

Alex, from your perspective, setting up and working in Essex, did you take inspiration from organizations elsewhere or projects elsewhere?

No, I think ours is a bit.

Different, but there's a lot of excellent models out there and excellent work going on.

The idea that I think we are planning to mutate later on is the ripple model.

I mean, unfortunately it went bankrupt, but the idea of a kind of local place where you could have an allotment of panels that would work really well.

Thanks, Alex and Fraser, you must have a long list of inspiring studies for us.

Yeah, I like them all, I like them all.

I don't want to leave any of them out, but I think there are some obvious ones that we always refer back to.

The likes of Repower in London, Plymouth Energy, Community Bath and West Bristol, very well established.

They've been around for ages and ages doing this stuff, doing the hard yards.

But the work that they do, I think is worth anyone digging more into to understand what is possible and the work that they would like to do going forward, sort of the art of the possible and the ambition in this space is really, really great.

If I can pull out a case study that I really like and refer to often, it's Staffordshire Community Energy where they'd set up community owned solar on NHS trust buildings, a load of NHS trust and university buildings.

The revenue generated from the community owned solar then funds the local fuel poverty charity.

Beat the cold with that partnership because it's not just they've got panels on the roof, they've got a partnership with the clinicians, with the consultants in the trust buildings themselves.

They've been able to track the benefit of having the community solar fund in the fuel poverty charity track the impact of that charity on the local nhs so they can identify how many repeat visits they're avoiding through having this funded charity locally.

They have a clear referral pathway and they're saving time and they're saving resource on the NHS as well as helping people most in need.

And I think from A local just transition perspective.

I think that's as neat and tidy a just transition style project as you're likely to see.

There are lots of others as well like Huntley Development Trust and Point and Sandwick, the two big community owned wind projects in Scotland as well.

Both of which are fairly long standing I think over a decade now.

Both have been in operation for but they use their revenues to fund local businesses, long local skills, local services and have done for a long time, are well established and are continuing to expand the stuff that they offer.

So lots of, lots of great examples to choose from Your community Energy Scotland, England and Wales.

Each website has their maps of different projects.

I suggest anyone interested scroll around, have a click through and you'll see the variety of stuff that's going on.

Great, thanks Fraser.

I love that example in safety.

That's so neat as you said.

Delivering net zero.

It's a mass rapid infrastructure transition and we need permission to build, we need consent and buy in and ownership and fairness is a big part of that.

And going back to our resources gap or the resources gap I mentioned earlier, we're going to be focused on how do we get those resources to the community group to make the empowerment real, rather than hesitate to use the word performative.

But I think so often it is performative.

Thanks Alex.

Charlotte, I'm very hopeful about what's to come, not least because of just the supportive words that have been coming out of government over the last couple of years and also around some of the actual changes we have seen come into place in the last year.

So we have seen more beneficial arrangements for smaller projects connecting to the electricity network being enacted.

We have had some market changes which are improving sort of electricity prices for smaller projects and the potential for more to come.

So I'm very excited to see what the local power plan includes and just to see where that can then take the sector in the next year.

So yeah, no, I think things are looking hopeful.

And Fraser, big challenges ahead at GBE.

Yeah, you can blame me when it all goes wrong.

On the other side of this, being inside doing this stuff just now is really exciting and the energy and enthusiasm and I think sincere commitment on local and community energy within GB Energy certainly just now is infectious.

It really, really is.

It's massive.

That's not the target, that's the floor.

That's the baseline that we want to hit.

We want to go well above and beyond that.

So we will be working over the next few months and of course the next few years with stakeholders in the sector and anyone who to wants, wants a piece of this to make that a reality.

So a very, very exciting time.

The commitment to the sector I think is a wave that we all need to get on board with and ride as best we can.

Fabulous.

Thank you so much for that wrap up.

It's really great to hear the positive energy coming out and it does feel like we're in a different position now than we were say, five years ago where it was a sort of sector limping along.

It feels like it's a sector like you said on a wave.

Thanks so much all of you for your contributions.

Fraser, Charlotte and Alex, it's really exciting to hear some of the lessons coming out of Net Zero living.

Like I said, this is the month dedicated to community empowerment and learning and spreading that knowledge across other local authorities and businesses and communities.

Our report this month has really tried to focus on the ecosystem that can support community energy and sort of wraps itself up by saying that community energy thrives where local authorities play a strategic enabling role.

They coordinate partners, identify opportunities and create the conditions in which community energy groups can succeed.

So I think that's really summarizing a lot of what we've discussed today.

Just to flag that our next, next and final podcast in February will be on the slightly thornier topic.

Well, not that this is not thorny, but the hard finance and investment required for this clean energy transition to communities, but also more broadly to the rest of local and clean energy tech.

And that will be coming out at the end of February.

So thanks very much and goodbye.