People power: community approaches to energy

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/apr/10/people-power-community-renewable-energy

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Kate Harrison from Ashton Hayes Community Energy says the group is not doing anything extraordinary. Except they are part of a significant new movement, a shift in the way our energy is generated and supplied, and a break away from the hegemony of the big six energy companies.

Energy minister Greg Barker has said he wants to see the country powered by the 'big sixty thousand', a network of decentralised energy companies supplying their own communities with clean energy. While it may sound like your typical eco-loony claptrap, government figures show that over the last five years some 5,000 community groups have engaged with energy initiatives. With hardware costs plummeting fast and ever more terrifying IPCC reports, the UK is going bonkers for small-scale, community renewables.

The village of Ashton Hayes in Cheshire, home to Ashton Hayes Community Energy CIC, already has solar PV panels on their school and on their low-carbon sports pavilion, installed in 2010 when the village was awarded a £400,000 grant from DECC's Low Carbon Communities Challenge. Now the people (there's only 1,000 of them) and their associated gadgets are hungry for more of the clean stuff.

In 2005, the parish council suggested that the village should go carbon neutral, and the following year the project launch attracted 400 people – that's 75% of the adult population. Fast forward to today, and through some seriously well sustained behavioural changes they can boast a 25% overall reduction in energy use.

Kate Harrison is the community support officer for the Carbon Neutral group and on the board of the energy company – all voluntary, unpaid work. She says everything they have done so far has been purely down to energy efficiency and careful usage. "None of it cost any money," she said. Taking further steps towards carbon neutrality will cost though, and that's where the CIC comes in to its own.

The company was originally set up to manage income from the existing solar panels, but an administrative mistake means that the school panels aren't eligible for the feed-in tariff. Kate says at present Ashton Hayes Community Energy is just a "free standing management tool", but it's a tool that can make other things happen. "We could help some of the elderly residents in the housing association to get solar panels," she says. "They get free electricity and some of the money from the feed-in tariff would come back to the energy company and be reinvested. It won't be a huge amount, but it feeds off itself."

They are currently undergoing a period of research, asking what is the most affordable and appropriate technologies for their village, and whether they might raise funds through local share offers or crowdfunding.

When a neighbouring village tried to engage them in an anti-wind campaign they politely declined, saying that actually they would quite like their own one. And this is where the community aspect really is key; the turbine subject to the no campaign was privately owned. "He didn't do anything to get people on side," Kate says. "If he'd said 'I'll put 10% of profits in the parish coffers' then people wouldn't think it's so bad after all. It has to be community or people won't get on board with it. Everyone has to be invested in it."

This isn't just opinion. In Germany, home to one of the most successful and publicly supported renewable energy industries in the world, around 40% of all clean tech installations have some kind of public ownership, according to the Energiewende website.

And to Kate, any arguments against renewable energy are simply facile. "You can show figures but some people are prepared to say black is white, thinking that it can't possibly work is so ingrained that you can't convince them it does. But it doesn't matter. Within 20 years every community will have some form of community energy supply. It makes no sense not to."

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