Background
Community energy can be broadly defined as energy projects in which local residents and businesses have a shared stake and are the main intended beneficiaries. Community energy has the potential to engage local communities in energy matters, with the aim of bringing two main benefits for the low-carbon transition: acceptance of change, and engagement with energy. Projects can also be methods of delivering other benefits for communities. Motivations include political objectives, local priorities, and some consumers’ desire for more control of their energy affairs.
The Energy Research Partnership (ERP) has produced a discussion paper on community energy in the UK. The paper presents examples of community energy in the UK and other countries, highlighting the motivations, benefits, costs and risks, and identifying challenges that community energy faces in the UK. Those challenges are grouped into: assessing outcomes, deploying projects, and delivering benefits. The paper considers how to improve the assessment of projects, and to improve the understanding of the role of community energy in the UK in order to determine whether its net impacts (and their distribution) justify addressing the challenges that it faces.
Show more