Clean Technica | By: Tom Nockolds | August 3rd, 2017:
Community energy is a global phenomenon. Wherever we find people, we tend to find communities stepping forward to have a greater say and determination in what their future energy supplies should look like. These people are ensuring that their communities are getting what they want and need from the transition to clean energy.
This is also an often-misunderstood field.
For example, community energy is not a scale of renewable energy development. Simply installing clean energy next to a town, matched to their power demands, does not make it a community energy project.
I was taken aback recently when I was asked why a “cottage industry approach to clean energy development” is a good thing. I reminded this person that the iconic Middlegrunden Wind Farm outside Copenhagen was in fact a community energy project, and when it was commissioned in 2000 it was the biggest wind development in the world. Anything but cottage.
Ownership is similarly often misconceived as being the defining characteristic of community energy, but even this is a bit too simplistic. Community owned renewable energy (CORE) is a thing, no doubt, but it’s not the only thing that makes for community energy.
At Community Power Agency, for instance, we talk about the benefits and motivations that underpin these community energy projects. We refer to five broad areas of benefit: political, economic, environmental, social and technological. The more a project delivers on these areas and the closeness with which this delivery matches the motivations of a community, the stronger it should be judged as a model of community energy.
I’m passionate about how the act of community energy development is invariably a creator of skills, expertise and capacity within communities. This benefit sits at the intersection of the ‘social’ and ‘technological’ benefit areas and could be a global driver for a faster transition to clean energy.
To read original full article – published in The Beam – please click here.
