Call to embrace community energy (From Times Series)
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Call to embrace community energy
12:06am Sunday 12th February 2012 in National News © Press Association 2011
The Government must overhaul the "closed shop" energy market by embracing community schemes, according to a new report.
The study by social and economic think-tank ResPublica warns that failure to support the community sector will have serious consequences on the Government's climate change, emissions and fuel poverty targets.
It sets out a series of recommendations to open up the market which is dominated by the big six energy companies.
The Friends of the Earth-backed study - entitled Re-energising our Communities: Transforming the energy market through local energy production - argues that local communities should be at the centre of new projects to harness renewable energy.
Ed Mayo, ResPublica fellow and director general of Co-operatives UK, said: "The beauty of renewable energy that is co-operatively owned and community level is that it solves the twin issues of social acceptance and economic efficiency.
"This report is right to call for intelligent nudges to make it easier for people to come together, reversing decades of energy policies limited to big is beautiful.
"Everyone benefits if we can draw community energy production into the centre of the new energy economy."
The report calls for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to recognise the need for a co-ordinated support programme for community energy.
It said that schemes such as Torrs Hydro - the UK's first community-owned hydropower scheme in New Mills, Derbyshire - could be replicated across the country.
The report's authors, Caroline Julian, senior researcher at ResPublica, and Julian Dobson, a research associate at the think-tank, criticised the energy regulator for not doing more to support renewable energy.
Comments(4)
itsamess
says...
7:23am Sun 12 Feb 12
Wind power simply does not generate sufficient power needed--although some new ideas have proved more reliable.
Nuclear power with the new reactors are way ahead of the field--but of course we have too many protesters.
Foods are rapidly rising as here we are growing less as fields are being covered by solar panels--less animals able to be bred as the land is being covered. Other fields turned over to crops for bio fuels.
What will we do when we run out of grown foods and animals?
newscritic
says...
12:40pm Sun 12 Feb 12
itsamess
says...
12:52pm Sun 12 Feb 12
Far better to manage our own energy than paying the French higher rates to supply us--and control prices here.
The biggest operators of wind turbines and solar panels use british companies to import (so called) german panels (top quality) which are cheap chinese copies. The germans also get the installation contracts when we have true quality p/v panels which are top grade manufactured in this country and they never get a look in.
newscritic
says...
5:36pm Sun 12 Feb 12
itsamess wrote:If the UK nationalised the energy companies for non-profit, our energy costs would plummet.
newscritic
Far better to manage our own energy than paying the French higher rates to supply us--and control prices here.
The biggest operators of wind turbines and solar panels use british companies to import (so called) german panels (top quality) which are cheap chinese copies. The germans also get the installation contracts when we have true quality p/v panels which are top grade manufactured in this country and they never get a look in.
The UK could at the same time use British manufacturing to supply all our energy needs in the UK using British workers.
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