Reduction in Community Energy support


As a first step towards narrowing the focus of this review, I will assume the importance of the work done by community energy organizations in the UK without seeking to prove it, though I do accept that the issue is open to debate. We will look at the risks to the sector referred to earlier, beginning with a quotation from Community Energy England’s  2017 report:

“Critical to the success of community renewables over preceding years has been governmental support through early stage funding. It was found that the projects included in this study utilised £1.9m in development funding, stimulating investment of over £190m towards project financing. Much of this early stage funding is no longer available in England (e.g. the Urban Community Energy Fund (UCEF), limiting opportunities for new projects, future growth and investment in the sector.
The removal of support mechanisms, including generation subsidies and tax incentives for investors, has had a strong impact on project viability. 31% of respondents reported limitations to their community aims and ambitions, as projects have stalled or failed due to a lack of viability.
In the face of reduced support, deriving the value of community energy at the local level was an important finding within the research. Through successful community energy activities, communities were shown to be reinvesting in the social, economic and environmental development of their local areas as well as looking to further their low carbon goals through a variety of innovative methods and projects.”
(https://communityenergyengland.org/pages/state-of-the-sector-report)

Two main supports, namely development funding and generation subsidies, have been removed or substantially reduced. The question of how these supports might be replaced or reintroduced is primarily one for discussion with government, and will not be addressed here, though the implications of support withdrawal will have to be considered in greater detail. The focus of this blog will be technological developments which offer the prospect of making community energy projects viable in the current difficult situation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage

    Introduction The need to limit the harmful effects of climate change is a powerful motive for preventing carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere, and for removing CO2 that is already there, but there can be subsidiary aims associated with carbon capture, and there are many methods of accomplishing it. According to a definition published in 2014, “Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) encompasses methods and technologies to remove CO2 from … flue gas and from the atmosphere, followed by recycling the CO2 for utilization and determining safe and permanent storage options” (RCN-CCUS, 2014a). A definition of carbon capture and storage (CCS) used by Torvanger (2020) “refers to a group of technologies that reduce emissions of carbon dioxide from coal-fired or gas-fired power stations, or from process industries." The term sequestration is also used for the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere or from combustion gases, and permanent prevention of its...
Read more

Climate fiction and climate action

The interactions between climate fiction and environmental activism are the subject of a paper by Alacovska and Holt (2023). They describe environmental activism as “grassroots, decentralised social movements” which attempt to address issues of “inequality and systemic injustice arising from anthropogenic climate change, environmental degradation and ecological collapse” by means of non-hierarchical collective organising. The main object of their paper is to propose methods for future research, but here we will only draw on their introduction to the subject and its background. They believe that the popular genre of climate fiction influences climate activism , with the potential to stimulate the imagination and to energise the “quest for the attainment of better climate alternatives”. This stands in contrast with much writing on climate change, which is concerned with data and “mathematical prediction models for forecasting and comprehending the gravity of global environmental challeng...
Read more

Solar installations in the UK.

It is no doubt safest to assume that any correlation between an increase in solar generation in the UK and declining consumption of electrical energy from the grid is no more than that; nevertheless, a correlation is suggestive, and it could be instructive to pursue it further. To do this we will need to know more about solar installations in the UK. Ofgem, the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets for the UK, publishes data on the total FiT PV installation capacity for each year. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/data-portal/total-installed-capacity-kw-installation-type Capacity in kW, as of 30 September 2017 is given as follows (here rounded to the nearest thousand). Community                                       287,000 Domestic              ...
Read more