For anyone interested in community energy projects, today was an exciting Monday. Not only is it the start of the Big Energy Saving Week with plenty of events happening throughout the week to promote energy efficiency, but today also saw the launch of DECC’s community energy strategy. To announce this launch and to honour the environmental charity Groundwork London for their home energy visits in the Manor House area, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Davey and Greg Barker, Minister of State for Climate Change visited a breakfast event at the local Redmond community centre. LoLo student Paula Morgenstern was there and reports from the event.
The Redmond Centre is my local community centre, so I know plenty of people there and it was a great opportunity for me to share the energy card game some of us had developed for last year’s Green Man Festival (see here http://www.lolo.ac.uk/newsandevents/page/id/65 for a report about our adventures at Green Man). It’s an easy game based on Bruce’s Play Your Cards Right and aims to give people a better feeling for how much energy different day to day activities use. Many people are surprised at how much energy a hot bath uses (5kWh), but how little a low energy light bulb (only 0.06kWh in 4 hours). Even Greg Barker, Minister of State for Climate Change, could learn from the game in that cooking an oven based meal for the whole family uses much more energy (3kWh) than a rooter during the whole day (0.18kWh).
But as fun as the energy card game may be, the real purpose of the breakfast event was of course a bigger one: The environmental regeneration charity Groundwork, who carried out more than 300 home energy visits over the last 12 month in the London borough of Hackney, was awarded the community action award for tackling fuel poverty by Greg Barker. A very happy project team shared the key to the success of the project: Especially for community energy projects, it is vital to understand the community where a project is to be delivered – that is its values and its diversity. With many members of the Groundwork team firmly rooted in the Manor House area themselves, the initiative could show this exemplarily.
Ed Davey, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change who likewise attended the breakfast event (to the delight of the organisers who joked that they had spent month trying to convince one minister to come for a visit and now two showed up at once) used the opportunity to launch DECC’s first ever community energy strategy (available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/community-energy-strategy). Apart from strengthening and supporting community investment in renewable electricity and heat, the strategy also proposes some further investment in energy efficiency, the continuation of the Big Energy Saving Network between sector organisations and community groups and support for collective switches of energy suppliers.
Throughout the event it was very clear that especially in less affluent communities, community energy is only to a certain extent about carbon emissions while the reduction of fuel poverty through both the provision of cheaper energy and demand reduction through fabric measures as well as education is central. People’s reactions to our energy card game also illustrated the importance of costs in this context – never before have been asked so often what the cost equivalent of each energy use was. But the best schemes such as Groundwork’s home energy visits manage to cut both cost and carbon – and achieve more still: they put a spring back into the community’s heart.
*Photo: Greg Barker, Minister of State for Climate Change playing LoLo’s ‘Play your Energy Cards Right’ with UCL student Paula Morgenstern