How do we connect to the grid?
Helen: A DNO is a ‘Distribution Network Operator’, which means we own the distribution assets for the electricity grid in the networks.
Kai: It is 100% the case that the individual network operators have control in terms of how they support communities. Electricity North West do work very proactively with community energy organisations to overcome the barriers to getting grid connections.
Helen: Any generation, so solar, wind, or hydro, would need a grid connection, so they would need to speak to us about connecting to the network and there is a process that people need to follow to apply for a grid connection.
Something we do to help communities is to understand that process.
Kai: The costs of connecting to the network is a key barrier. The problem is particularly acute when it comes to community energy because their projects are necessarily fixed in position.
A commercial developer can be a lot more agile, move more a lot more quickly to reserve the affordable grid capacity sites. It can then leave communities scrambling around, unable to find an affordable grid connection.
There’s things that the network operators definitely can do to facilitate and to support. Communities to identify suitable sites.
Helen: We make sure that they have got some confidence that their project is being developed near where they can get a connection at a price their project can afford.
Kai: Ofgem, in terms of generation, seem set on the generator always paying a portion of the costs of the additional network that need to be built. Basically, the network operators are trying to find ways – as are community groups – that they can enable this to be more affordable under the current rules.
Helen: We’ve funded I think it’s 33 projects over the last 5 years. We’ve funded things like: Middleton Community Power, Skelmersdale Community Energy, Solar Made Easy in Cumbria, Charge my Street.
We like to fund projects that help people either set up a group, grow their project or their group, or overcome sort of specific issues, or barriers that they’ve got that are stopping them develop their community energy project.
Kai: What is clear is that we need a lot more investment in the network to enable projects to connect, and we will be supportive of community owned projects being able to connect affordably and not having to pay excessive reinforcement costs when it’s very much clear that as a country, to get to net zero, we need to invest in this electricity network, so it shouldn’t just fall on community energy projects.
Who makes the policies?
Helen: Ofgem is the office for gas and electricity markets. They are a national organisation, and they give the license to operate for the gas and electricity companies in the UK.
Kai: Ofgem, who get it’s remit from the department in government, ultimately decides the policy around the network connections.
Helen: We’rs governed by Ofgem as a natural monopoly, and we have to follow rules and regulations.
Kai: They’ve just finalised the amount of investment that they’ll allow each of the network operators to invest in the network over the next five years.
Ultimately it is Ofgem that decides to what extend the distribution network operators can invest ahead of need so they can build out the network, and that will enable community groups to connect to it. Meaning they wouldn’t then have to also pay for all that reinforcement on the network.
Helen: It’s our duty to accept applications from anybody who wants to connect to the network, and if people want to connect to the network there’s a process, they apply to do that, and that’s what we have to do, that’s our job.
Kai: There’s mechanisms that Ofgem can put in place that would mean if a solar farm in a village where the electricity network was at full capacity, they could put in place mechanisms so that that community owned solar farm could connect to the network, but the cost of building the extra bit of wire, or whatever it is, is socialised across all customers that connect to the network. Both demand, and generation.
What does renewable production cost the climate?
Alejandro: There have been studies that demonstrate that 55% of the greenhouse gas emissions are associated to the way that we produce energy. I do not talk only about electricity. I’m talking about transport as well, and about heat.
But there is another 45% that is associated to materials, and how we use materials.
Obviously, we have to tackle the energy part through renewables, trying to consume less energy. But there is the part of materials, and the magnitude of the challenge that we have regarding reducing emissions for climate change is so big that we cannot ignore the 45% that is associated to materials.
In the case of solar panels, it’s more for the production of the solar panels itself - but obviously that’s crucial. They need to create new infrastructure. We are going to have to increase the infrastructure that we have for electrification you know, because there is going to be much more demand - and it has to be urgent - because we are consuming all the carbon budget we have left, in order to reach the goals that we have.
It's massive to afford, and it has to be done fast. Creating a solar panel has some emissions you know. But it’s curious because the moment that we decarbonise the electricity grid, also is going to make that solar panels have less emissions, because the emissions from solar panels comes from the electricity you need to produce them. So if you have more solar panels on the grid, more wind, more geothermal, the emissions associated to the production of solar panels are going to be reduced.
How can we derive energy from the sun?
Kai: A lot of communities have turned to solar
Sandy: I feel like solars been around for a while, like especially when you had the feeding tariff and such.
Helen: We’ve looked at a solar project run by the Salford Diocese helping all the faith groups in Greater Manchester look at how to put PV panels on religious buildings and all their estates.
Timothy: 50-70 kilowatts on a kind of a large building roof or something they might put was kind of about the average – although they get bigger.
Sandy: And I think that’s appealing to people across the political spectrum with different motivations, who might not even be as motivated by climate change, but might be more motivated by financial independence, energy independence, for other reasons.
The way your roof is facing, and is your roof in good condition? And then yeah, like the actual direction of the roof and like which way it faces is important.
Kai: If there’s rooftops in their community that are all suitable for having solar panels on.
Timothy: where you might have like a housing co-op developing its own housing, and they would put their own solar panels on the roof.
Kai: The amount of sunshine does affect that, but you know, so does land availability, or rooftop space. If a community has a good relationship with a landowner that will make solar more feasible because they can find a site.
How can measuring carbon help reduce emissions?
Alejandro: Everything you do in life has an impact.
Jaise: So, carbon footprint is how much emissions from a particular activity. So that indicates how much carbon from the energy activities so we are trying to come up with how they should reduce in the future.
Angela: One of the most concrete ways to think about it is we co-developed a tool, like an excel spreadsheet.
Sandy: We point them to a form on our website which basically asks them a lot of questions about their home. Everything from how old it is, how big it is, where it is, things like that. Because for some people it might be like ‘I want to get off gas, I care about not using fossil fuels.’
Angela: This one asks questions on impact areas such as equalities, health, environment.
Alejandro: Trying to see what things we can introduce in order to reduce the emissions.
Jaise: For example a community in Levenshulme. What can they do, and what level of climate action they should do to align with Greater Manchester’s climate change target.
Alejandro: All of these things are the things we are doing in order to help reduce the emissions, and therefore fit in the budget we have calculated for Greater Manchester.
How can we make power net zero?
Timothy: The idea of decentralised energy is to be a more efficient way of making the transition to a renewable energy system.
Helen: Community Energy England do an annual state of the sector survey and although growth has been slow over the last few years, it’s still increased in the number of communities looking at this area.
Timothy: That means more renewable generation, more windfarms, and solar, and hydro, and so on, and potentially massive upgrades in the national grid to move all that energy around the country, and you’d lose energy in long distance transmission.
It’s more efficient in resources, and cheaper if we can use more electricity closer to where it’s produced.
Helen: To decarbonise this country, and to move us away from fossil fuels, so to decarbonise heat and electricity we are going to need community involvement in that because it’s going to involve changes to people’s homes.
Jaise: There are core benefits for community energy schemes, so it’s not just ‘Oh let’s have a solar farm, or community hydro.’ It’s not just a supply system with some incentives and some income, but I think the core benefits are there’s a sense of community, they’re thinking about ‘How we can use that supply to meet our demand and how we can reduce the demand, and whether we should consider energy efficiency measures, energy conservation.
Helen: All of these can’t be done to people, they need to be done with people, and quite often - especially on the heat side – you need a collective response.
Timothy: You need a mixture of cleaner energy, more renewables, probably more energy storage as well to cope with renewables not always generating.
Jaise: There are core benefits in a number of ways and definitely community energy schemes are really beneficial in decarbonisation.
Helen: You need to involve people in those decisions, and what’s happening to them, because otherwise they’ll resist the change, and they won’t want to be part of it. But also local people can probably come up with the best solution for their area because they know it.
What does it take to run an energy project?
Sandy: It is multidisciplinary. Multiple different tradespeople. Even just when we’re talking about installing, it could be multiple different tradespeople.
Jaise: Lot’s of people who are enthusiastic and there is a willingness to do things, but they don’t have the right skillsets and knowledge, and access that knowledge.
Kai: There’s a need for more accessibility and more diversity.
Helen: Key to community energy is engagement with your local community. The skillset will depend on what energy project you wanted to do, but if you want to run a community energy project you need to be embedded in your community and understand how to, and who to talk to within your local area. So, you need communication and engagement skills.
Jaise: Group practice, that sort of thing is lacking, in addition to the finance. I think that’s sort of getting better. There is various networks and conducting and finding out best practice is getting better definitely, but in the early days that was a big barrier. There wasn’t enough places to look for, how to be a community energy scheme.
Kai: The caricature of a community energy group, it kind of sometimes just be retired engineers that have now got this time on their hands to take up these voluntary projects.
Sandy: We have a slide that we use in training sometimes that shows like all the different people that are involved in retrofit, and it is extremely complicated, it is this really mixed-up web.
Helen: A lot of community energy groups have become very expert in the projects that they do, but to a certain extent there’s also other organisations out there that can help you with those expertise.
Sandy: The way that construction is set up, teamwork can be a bit difficult between like architects and tradespeople. It can be seen as quite combative. I think it’s really nice getting people in who might not share a space that often, to be able to all get onto the same page and listen to each other.
How do we fund community energy?
Kai: The UK needs this net zero infrastructure, it needs an electricity network that is fit for the amount of renewables we need to get to net zero, and how do we pay for that? The problem is particularly acute when it comes to community energy.
There are definitely regional variations in terms of the support that groups get, and how that affects their ability to do projects.
Jaise: How to finance community energy projects is very challenging and there isn’t that much support from the government or community energy projects
Helen: The communities that have done well recently are those that are based in rural areas and are able to access rural community energy fund that has provided feasibility funding for projects looking to get started.
Kai: It’s really important for particularly new community energy groups to start up. If it can fund one staff member part-time, that can really support accelerating their projects.
Timothy: Smaller projects tend to raise most of their money through community shares, over the internet, or even just through face-to-face and local newspaper adverts. It would give the people investing a better deal than they could get from their bank account, and it would give the energy co-op raising money a cheaper finance than they would get from the bank.
Kai: There’s different things. I think there’s like a London community energy fund for example that the local authority there does. There’s different regional funding pots that help communities at different times.
Timothy: There’s loads of stuff to be done to make Britain’s houses more energy efficient, and easier to heat, and to keep dry and warm. Those are all great jobs with great meaningful impacts that hopefully lots of people will be employed doing, so it’s kind of a cost but it’s a great opportunity too.
What motivates people in community energy?
Timothy: It brings energy close to people’s homes, and you can see where it is coming from.
Helen: It’s something practical you can do to say that you’re trying to reduce your carbon emission.
Timothy: You’re a bit more connected to it, it’s easier for people to get involved in making the decisions about how it’s run as well
Helen: With climate change being quite a scary thing, community energy’s a practical thing you can do to say you’re doing something about it in your local area.
Angela: They know from their own social network, the people that are surrounding them, that it matters.
There’s this notion that smaller scale initiatives do not really make that impact, but maybe that’s an old notion now because they definitely do.
Sandy: People do also want to do something good for the planet, and for others, and for their community, and reduce the amount of emissions that they’re pumping into their local neighbourhood.
It can be for yourself but it’s also for your community.
Jaise: They’re thinking about ‘Oh how we can use that supply to meet our demand and how we can reduce the demand.’
Helen: That empowerment and taking control of that is one of the main reasons people do it.
Kai: The more community energy organisations you have in a region, because the networks really strong, they can support new entrants coming through.
Angela: Community energy is very much essential in reducing emissions as part of the climate change solution.
How do climate change and community energy overlap? They always do. They are not different; they are part of the climate change solution. Civil society led action such as community energy, that drive emissions reductions and have positive social economic impacts, they definitely relate to a lot of community energy initiatives.
How can we improve our energy efficiency?
Sandy: Essentially all retrofit means is retroactively fitting things to a property.
When we talk about retrofit in terms of energy and the climate we’re talking about the fabric of a house, the walls, the loft, the roof, the floor. Upgrading those to make them more energy efficient.
Repairs and maintenance to make sure there’s no leaks, there’s no drafts. Improving the quality of the building fabric.
Then you’ve got your heat source, do you use a gas boiler – which is using fossil fuels – or might you use something that’s electric?
And then you’ve got renewables. That’s where you’re actually generating electricity on your home.
Angela: Even when we think about retrofits, there’s a lot more things to think of other than the fabric of the house but the people who are staying. Will they be older people, or part of the vulnerable population?
Sandy: How people use it, you know where do they dry their laundry? Which rooms get really cold, which rooms are their favourite and are cosy.
Angela: These are things that should be thought of. I like to think about it using the intersectionality perspective, the causes and the impacts.
Sandy: I think that people don’t necessarily understand that they’re already doing retrofit stuff on their houses. When you’re redecorating and you have to take all the plastic off your wall, and you have to re-plaster – that’s retrofit – and that’s an opportunity to do something to improve the energy efficiency of your home.
Angela: What is the energy performance certificate of this building, or will it have better standards as before if it were retrofitted.
Sandy: Something that really encouraged people to do retrofit was seeing other people having done it. People would go into other people in their neighbourhoods and see what retrofit measures they’d had done.
By bringing together people who know each other, and seeing in their homes has been an entry point into it for a lot of people.
What needs to be done to make more community energy groups possible?
Angela: One might think that you can only do so much as a community, but what we’re learning is if you just have these essential connections or collaborations with people, or organisations, or actors, that can make the change. It is possible.
Kai: Organisations like Regen that have got a few policy specialists that will push Ofgem from across the Regen membership and across our community energy network. We’ll look for input and evidence form people of how the current rules are affecting them, or are creating barriers to their projects.
Angela: Those who were involved also learned how to use existing council powers to challenge and drive action.
Kai: Community energy organisations, working with their local authorities on this, whether it’s county councils, city councils, or even like local parish councils. This is something that over the past few years has really come up the agenda for them.
Angela: There was a recognition that you have to collaborate with the city council. And you know, it wasn’t always a smooth thing, but it happened and there was a case for change.
Kai: From 2019 onwards, so many of them have been declaring climate emergencies, and setting really ambitious targets for the amount of renewable energy generation they want, for the proportion of their energy use that they want to come from renewable sources.
Now they’re realising that if it’s too expensive to connect to the grid in their region, then that’s a key barrier to them being able to actually achieve the targets that they’ve set.
Angela: They have environmental motivations. There’s also something around social justice for example, or income generation when it comes to some community energy initiatives that also bring in income.
And other forms of governance such as if they want to participate in policy or decision making.
Kai: Community energy organisations can push for this sort of change by working with organisations, but then also working with their local authorities that have these net zero targets and making sure it’s flagged to them so that they can also report it and advocate on their part as well.
Can our country run on wind power?
Kai: Cumbria in the Northwest was the site of the first community own wind turbine.
That’s the beginning of community energy as we understand it now.
Timothy: Recently the Scottish government did a licensing round for new offshore wind development, and there is an energy co-op called Energy For All that is a partner in one of those, and this is the first time in Britain that a community energy group has got involved in that.
Alejandro: Normally, the use doesn’t produce any emission – because it’s come from the wind.
Kai: In the North West in particular, it’s always had that tendency towards wind, so I’d hope that communities there can start more projects up like that.
Helen: We’re funding some community engagement around a potential onshore wind farm in Denshore in Greater Manchester.
Kai: I feel like in terms of the advantages that the region has, wind and hydro are key ones.
Helen: Wind farms that were built back in the 1990’s might have been built with turbines that were maybe 750-Kilowatts, now people are taking them out and putting in 1.5-Megawatt wind turbines. So just because the technology has improved, and also the price has come down so much you can use the same site, take out smaller wind turbines, and put in larger ones.
How do we futureproof our infastructure?
Alejandro: Ecodesign is this philosophy of considering when you are designing something, what are the environmental parameters? Normally when you design something, you think about the final client, what is going to be the economic costs? So ecodesign includes environmental sustainability as a crucial parameter to whatever you’re going to be producing.
The main target to reduce the impact in the case of when it’s in the materials. One of the main problems we have now with wind is the blades. It’s a mix of materials, which it makes really difficult to recycle. They are super big, they are super heavy, so what do we do with those wind farms after 20, 25, or 30 years – what is the life of this?
Nobody thought ‘What’s going to happen at the end of life?’ So still, we are looking for materials that will make those blades much more recyclable at the end of life. At least we are conscious of that, and that’s very important. Starting to think with this lifecycle perspective, what is going to happen with this in 25, 30 years?
I don’t like so much to call it end of life, because that’s what we’re trying to avoid. Don’t think of things like a waste, think as a resource. This end of life it will be just a continuation, so end of life for this specific purpose, but we can repair, reuse, remanufacture, and if we cannot do that anymore, we’ll try to recycle.
Just throwing it away, you’re losing a lot of metal - so can we repair it, can we reuse it, can it go to another market so it can have a use? And when you have used it as long as possible, if that has been designed correctly, you should be able to recover all those materials that can be used to produce another thing.
Should smart bills be equitable?
Timothy: Smart meters in everyone’s home are the basic building block you need for everyone to be able to join in and get a benefit.
James: Typically, the way that smart meter data ownership works is that you as a householder, you own the data, but the only ones that actually have access to your consumption data are you, and your energy supplier.
Timothy: Some of my EnergyRev colleagues came up with this idea of flexibility justice, which is saying yes, it’s great if people can shift their energy use so that everyone’s not using the maximum energy at 6 o’clock in the evening which is typically when there’s a massive spike in electricity demand on the grid. So it’s great if we can avoid that, and people can shift their electricity use to other times of the day, because that means you need less generation, and less energy transmission – it’s just a more efficient use of the energy system. But not everyone can do that, you know, if you have to be out at work in the daytime and you can’t be doing your cooking ahead of time. If your kids are hungry then, if you need to turn on the heating, you know, your routine, your circumstances may mean you can’t be as flexible as some other people, and you just have to watch out that rewarding people for doing what’s necessary isn’t balanced by super high prices for people who can’t be flexible.
James: From our perspective like, anything that increases like energy literacy in the home, and consumer awareness of energy consumption, and commensurate with that, the carbon consumption – we’re generally all for that.
Timothy: Again, it’s that question of; it’s got to be for everyone, not just for people who can afford to pay for it.
James: There’s quite a lot of potential for the energy suppliers to derive certain insights from large scale smart meter data analytics, which often works in the interest of the energy suppliers.
We have a cooperative, which essentially means that interested householders can share their smart meter data, and it becomes easier for them to access their historical smart meter consumption data, but they can also participate in large-scale community energy events. So, 70 or 80 householders, because they’ve agreed to share to share their smart meter data with us, and they agreed to participate in what’s known as demand side response event. They can all collectively turn off their appliances at one point, and then we can evaluate how much energy in the aggregate that action saved. Really what we try to do is devolve power in terms of smart meter data ownership and empower householders to derive as much benefit as they possibly can from this increased granularity and accessibility of energy consumption data.
How can we use data for good?
Sandy: If people have smart meter data, then that’s quite useful for having a really robust baseline to model on. When we’re modelling different scenarios for people about ‘Okay if you do this kind of insulation you’ll save this much.’
James: Certainly in the UK and in Europe we’ve seen the scale of retrofit that really needs to be achieved ultimately, just from the public purse, and there’s a lot of emphasis nationally on unlocking private finance for retrofit as well.
Angela: You know, this is very much a smart technology thing, like technology and data, lots of things to think about, and how do you store this data? Privacy issues.
Sandy: If we have people’s smart meter data then it’s a lot easier to make informed calculations about how much energy they’re using and how much they could then reduce it by.
James: What we’re trying to do with this project is trying to think about how if you can establish certainty on what the savings would be around following an energy efficiency retrofit, you can essentially design either lending structures, or grants, or loans based around the on-bill savings.
Sandy: If you’re doing works on your home that are more aesthetic, you’re like getting your bathroom redone, you know if that’s worked because you’re using it, and you’re looking at it, and you’re happy with it or you’re not.
Whereas with retrofit, there are some things where you can just tell, like are you more comfortable? How do you feel? But actually being able to monitor like ‘How much is this impacting my energy usage? And is it hitting the targets that I wanted it to hit, or whether it’s just what you would like it to get to.
Angela: There’s a lot of difference between what comfort means for people, especially if you’re not a one person household, if you’re a family it’s like someone’s very cold all the time, someone’s very warm all the time.
We did a workshop to understand how a business model such as heat as a service could work. From a business perspective, and from a consumer perspective there are benefits.
James: It’s really about trying to design novel financing mechanisms for householders to directly engage with retrofit.
Angela: Even in terms of the retrofit it’s like bespoke solutions for whatever kind of building you have, and how you offer that kind of like comfort as a service.
How can we track our consumption?
Timothy: Smart meters, they are still being rolled out and it’s taking a long time.
Jaise: From an end user point of view there’s two key technologies which enables the smart grid. That’s the storage technology, I think most community has whatever battery, or some sort of storage, and then the demand-side measures.
James: The real advantage a smart meter data is that you have access to half hourly consumption data.
Timothy: Again, I think the first generation of smart meters there were all these stories where when you switched energy suppliers you needed a new smart meter and so on. You know, we need to do it better than that. They need to be for everyone, there needs to be some help in helping people read them and learn to work with them, although people get the idea fairly quickly, actually.
James: You can really look at your own energy consumption patterns and start to interrogate your own behaviour really. Identify the sort of low-hanging fruit for what times of the day you might be consuming more energy than normal, whether or not those periods of higher energy consumption coincide with periods of peak demand on the grid. Obviously then you’re going to be paying more for your electricity at that point.
Jaise: The most common now is these national grid demand flexibility scheme. They’re asking householders to switch the time of use of appliances. For example, if they’ve got a smart meter, they can do their cooking in a different time rather than 6 o’clock, and if they have more devices like heat pumps, ovens, electric vehicle charging points, and if they avoid having demand at a specific time, then they will get incentives – so that’s getting popular.
Timothy: Projects like there’s an organisation called Energy Local that have been working for some years, and they do projects where, where there’s a locally owned renewable energy generator, like a hydro plant, or wind, or solar farm – they arrange, I think at the moment with Octopus Energy, a special tariff where people get cheaper energy when it’s coming from the renewable energy generator just down the road.
This project was made possible by Regen Art Lab
A huge thank you to all the interviewees, with whom none of this would have been possible
Kai Hoare (Regen Energy) Angela Mae Minas (University of Manchester)
Alejandro Gallego Schmid (University of Manchester) Sandy Rushton (People Powered Retrofit)
Timothy Braunholtz-Speight (University of Manchester) Helen Seagrave (Energy North West)
Jaise Kuriakose (University of Manchester) James Fenner (carbon Co-op)
And a special thank you to the entire Regen Team
Especially Sophie Whinney, for her continued support throughout.
Created by Cameron Naylor
