Community Energy Literature Review

The following open access databases have yielded promising results for searches broadly related to CE, such as “distributed power generation”. Google Scholar has so far produced the most useful results for more specific searches. Google Scholar                                https://scholar.google.co.uk/ OSTI.gov (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) contains several databases; t he most useful    may prove to be t he Department of Energy Pages dealing with “Scholarly scientific publications resulting from DOE-funded research”.                                       https://www.osti.gov Microsoft academic   http://academic.research.microsoft.com/ OpenGrey http://www.opengrey.eu/ Science.gov https://www.science.gov/ ScienceOpen https://www.scienceopen.com/ Sparrho- (searches can be named and saved) https://www.sparrho.com/ WorldWide Science                        1 https://worldwidescience.org/help.ht

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                                           2,743,000 Non Domestic (Commercial)       2,464,000 Non Domestic (Industrial)            367,000 In the above table, the units are capacity in kW. What does this mean? The National Renewable Energy Labo

A Community Energy Group is investigating whether there is a clear relationship between the decline in the annual electrical energy delivered through the national grid and the increasing energy delivered by FiT registered solar PV installations.   (FiT = Feed-in-Tariff, the government subsidy). An article by Adam Vaughan in The Guardian dated 30 Jan 2018, notes that the UK electricity demand has fallen by 9% in the past seven years. An analysis of official figures by campaign group Sandbag found the UK fall between 2016 and 2017 was one of the biggest in several years, marking a striking divergence with the rest of Europe, where demand rose. (The UK’s power consumption fell nearly 2% from 355 terawatt hours to 348 TWh, while it rose across the EU as a whole by 0.7% from 3,239 to 3,262 TWh.) Vaughan suggests that a slowing economy, mild weather and the growing use of energy efficient appliances may be significant factors; he mentions the growth of renewables, but does not give s

An entry on the University of Wollongong   Research Writing Bookshelf refers to Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews , an Elsevier publication. The review leads to a number of recent open –access articles which might provide a context for community energy projects in the UK. Four of these, including a literature review, are listed below. Transition pathways for a UK low-carbon electricity system: Comparing scenarios and technology implications February 2018 John Barton | Lloyd Davies | Ben Dooley | Timothy J. Foxon | Stuart Galloway | Geoffrey P. Hammond | Áine O’Grady | Elizabeth Robertson | Murray Thomson Photovoltaics and wind status in the European Union after the Paris Agreement January 2018 Roberto Lacal Arantegui | Arnulf Jäger-Waldau Identifying barriers to large-scale integration of variable renewable electricity into the electricity market: A literature review of market design January 2018 Jing Hu | Robert Harmsen | Wina Crijns-Graus | Ernst Worr