Community Energy Literature Review

The UK sustainable energy organisation Regen  ( https://www.regen.co.uk )  sent a n update  to its members on 24 July commenting on proposals made by the energy regulator Ofgem in a document entitled “Getting more out of our electricity networks by reforming access and forward-looking charging arrangements” Regen commented: “A key limitation of Ofgem’s approach is that it focuses just on efficient use of the network. There is no objective in this work around decarbonisation and clean growth. This tends to lead to a narrow focus on current network costs rather than a strategic focus on what the future system needs which leads to proposals for increasing costs for distributed generation. We would like to see a test against the objective to decarbonise the UK’s energy system as set out in the Clean Growth Plan and Climate Change Act.” See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/clean-growth-strategy and https://www.theccc.org.uk/tackling-climate-change/the...

Open Knowledge Maps provide an interesting approach to the structure of a topic. Here is an example providing an overview of research on “decarbonising the uk”. Retrieved from https://openknowledgemaps.org/map/577ce977f89d6b5b48d7e75f5841e80c/  [26 Jul 2018].

The Energy Systems Catapult offers a free data search resource called the Energy Knowledge Exchange - see https://es.catapult.org.uk/projects/energy-knowledge-exchange/ This facility differs from an academic search engine such as Google Scholar: it is subject specific, being “designed to meet the needs of energy innovators”, and rather than returning references to research papers, its response to a search term is to return information under several different headings, such as web pages, projects, data, innovators, funding sources, related events and local – a further search opportunity for material related to selected geographic areas.   There is a browser extension version available for Chrome and Firefox.

A workshop on Regulating the Energy Sector  was held in Bristol on 13th July as part of the HoSEM project. The research team expect to publish workshop outcomes in a few weeks, but these notes indicate some of the questions discussed. The challenges in today’s energy market . Regulation and legislation applied to peer-to-peer (P2P) trading; buying and selling energy, data storage and protection, platform technology, supply and provision rights, consumer and climate protection, energy security. Whose is the responsibility for driving energy regulation? The regulation of new partnerships in the energy market. The implications of making data on energy generation and distribution public through distributed ledger technology. Preferential Policies Which energy system trends does UK regulation favour? Does it favour centralised low-carbon generation? Under what circumstances might it favour P2P trading? The future of P2P trading Will P2P trading be outsourced to...

Flexibility Markets for Beginners                                   Cardiff           5 th July 2018 An event with Western Power Distribution (WPD) and Community Energy Wales .   A link to the presentations from the day: https://www.regen.co.uk/Event/flexibility-markets-for-beginners-with-wpd-cardiff A link to the WPD guidance website can be found here , and all the animations that were played throughout the day can also be found on the WPD Youtube channel , the latest series are: The role of Local Flexibility The growth of Electric Vehicles The shift to Distribution System Operator       Other useful documents and resources: WPD community energy information – view here WPD community energy guides , podcasts and vid...

Bristol Energy Network Open Meeting Easton, Bristol                                                                                       3rd July 2018 Celebrating the 5th Anniversary of the Bristol Community Strategy for Energy. Aim: to review the Community Energy Strategy and define achievements and progression against the key themes, to discuss the journey of change that community energy groups have undergone, and to outline the key influencers of change and determine the next steps for groups in Bristol. Summary Iris Partridge, from Easton Community Centre, started with an overview of the Bristol Community Strategy for Energy – how it came about 5 years ago, who was involved and where we are now. Damon Rand then gave a glimpse of the future in acti...