As the UK government ramps up its efforts to enable new community-owned energy projects, questions are being asked about how to ensure less affluent, marginalised and working-class communities can also own, lead and benefit from their own clean power projects. Here, Fraser Stewart explains why shared ownership can support a more just energy transition.
As the UK government ramps up its efforts to enable new community-owned energy projects via GB Energy and the Local Power Plans, questions are (rightly) being asked about how to ensure less affluent, marginalised and working-class communities can also own, lead and benefit from their own clean power projects.
Community-owned energy projects – including shared ownership – can undoubtedly support a fast and fair clean power transition, giving more people a more direct stake in its success.
However, local and community ownership is not necessarily “fair” by default. Financial barriers can make it challenging for less affluent groups to invest in local and community energy projects, and those with less time or expertise may struggle to engage with or navigate complex technical, regulatory, financial and legal processes.
A ‘middle class hobby’?
All of these have led to a perception in some circles that community ownership is a middle-class preoccupation – something for leafy villages with retired engineers to benefit from.
This may have been accurate once upon a time. Issues certainly remain with broadening the benefits of community ownership to different social and economic groups. Yet community energy organisations across the UK today have been leading in inclusive engagement and ownership models in less affluent areas, often as a driving priority and in spite of a challenging policy environment.
Many use the revenues from community-owned renewables to tackle fuel poverty in the local area, providing support around bills and decarbonisation (as well as community empowerment and improvement) to help redress social and economic injustices.
Plymouth Energy Community alone, for example, has supported over 11,000 households with energy and fuel poverty issues. Glasgow Community Energy deliberately established community solar projects in two areas of high deprivation in the city, and worked proactively to involve local fuel poverty, faith and diverse social justice-focused community organisations in the design and governance of the project. These are not unique cases.
Projects are increasingly lowering the financial barrier to participation—for instance, offering £1 share offers or letting people invest in pairs. Partnerships between local authorities and community energy organisations, such as Oldham and North Ayrshire, are democratising ownership of local energy assets and services to support more ambitious community wealth-building approaches.
While there may be challenges to making community ownership broadly accessible and meaningfully “just”, there are several good examples of this happening already – of communities leveraging renewables to meaningfully redress social and economic injustices, collaborating in their local areas with diverse groups to take power meaningfully into their own hands.
Serving justice in community energy projects
Of course, delivering more “just” projects (even with the best intentions) can be challenging. However, there are clear ways that we can leverage community energy for a just transition at a much wider scale and much more consistently.
Alongside the sector, Regen has already done some core thinking on this, supported by extensive evidence and analysis. Local, community and shared ownership projects can (and we argue should) embed justice in their activities across four key dimensions:
- Ownership and governance: Ensuring that ownership models are democratic, accessible and accountable, and actively include diverse stakeholders and organisations representing different social, economic and cultural groups
- Participation and engagement: Projects are developed and governed with meaningful, proactive engagement with diverse citizens and communities, with people supported to codesign and make decisions on projects from the outset
- Finance, funding and investment: Operating projects using transparent financial models that prioritise just transition outcomes and do not exclude people from governance based on ability to pay
- Benefits and beneficiaries: Aiming to maximise social, economic and environmental benefits tailored to the priorities of different social groups, with as much maintained within the local area as possible
We argue that these principles should be at the core of any local or community-owned energy project. How this looks on the ground will naturally vary from place to place.
It’s not just about energy, it’s about power
These principles can support more “just” projects and outcomes at the local level. Our papers in this space, including with the Scottish Government and on Shared Ownership, provide some examples and models for achieving this.
But this is not just a question of individual energy projects. It’s a question of power.
Leveraging community energy for a just transition means making space and providing resources for more communities to lead, engage, innovate and deliver projects that meet their needs and ambitions.
This raises a core question: How do we make it so that less affluent, marginalised and working-class communities can meaningfully shape and deliver their own projects, or meet shared ownership offers with commercial developers?
Community energy still broadly relies on very tenacious volunteers to get moving, which lends itself to communities that have the time and resources to do so (hence the current stereotypes).
This isn’t always a bad thing: where established community energy organisations exist, they can make for great partners to bring projects and benefits to nearby areas that lack their own capacity at present. The role of the existing sector in sharing knowledge and supporting less-expert groups should not be understated.
Yet enabling more communities to participate ultimately means building more capacity within communities with fewer resources today.
Enabling more communities to lead
Significant changes are underway in policy and support that could help here. Through the Local Power Plan, GB Energy is expected to provide direct financial support to communities and local authorities to deliver their clean power projects. In our recent Shared Ownership for a Just Transition paper, we argue that this should be targeted first at lower-income communities.
There is also some expectation that the UK government will provide more direct capacity-building support through grant funding, either via the Local Power Plan or through an expanded Community Energy Fund. This is in addition to support already in place in Scotland and Wales.
This would be a welcome development. It won’t be enough for GB Energy to throw low-cost finance at projects in high-capacity areas with existing pipelines, crucial as this will be. There is a pressing need for funded capacity building, administered at a very local level, to ensure the right social infrastructure, expertise, and resources are in place for communities to lead and participate in these things meaningfully.
Good engagement, successful outreach through existing local organisations working with marginalised groups, shaping models that promote community wealth, and developing the appropriate legal and technical expertise to support inclusive and accessible decision-making are all critical and require adequate resources to do well.
This also includes ensuring that strategic energy planning by local authorities, networks, suppliers, NESO and others takes a holistic view, identifying capacity gaps and opportunities for community ownership and delivery. The added value here is not just empowering communities but building support for wider net zero initiatives, which we know that community ownership can bolster.
This will become especially valuable as we move into more inherently local and social issues, such as heat and transport decarbonisation. It is imperative that the UK government, GB Energy and others recognise that local and community energy is not just about generation: it’s about efficiency, retrofit, heat, fuel poverty and engagement as known and trusted actors in the wider transition.
Closing thoughts
Community energy can, and does, support a more just energy transition in many ways – on a small scale for now. It builds strong local support for renewable projects and the wider clean power mission and it can help tackle fuel poverty, local decarbonisation and build social and economic capacity in communities, creating far wider value than energy schemes alone.
However, enabling this at scale means ensuring that the right capacity is in place for communities to take ownership and that projects embed just transition principles consistently at their core.
The good news is that lots of exciting examples of this already exist, with extensive research and practitioners providing the roadmap for leveraging community ownership for far wider value to far more people, with justice, equity and fairness at heart.
As GB Energy gears up to shape and deliver the Local Power Plan, the opportunity to enable local and community energy for a just transition is substantial. Ensuring these principles – and these opportunities – are realised will be a key challenge to address.