Written evidence submitted by Marianne Brown, Communications and Community Engagement Manager, Bristol Energy Co-operative and Dr Gareth Dale, Reader in Political Economy, Brunel University (BSE0110)
Harnessing Community Energy Projects to Engage the British Public in Achieving Net Zero
Executive summary
The focus of this submission is on question 4: How should the Government be more positively engaging the public with the energy transition? As secondary questions we consider questions 1: Has the Government properly explained the potential benefits of the energy transition to the average citizen?, and 3: Is there a need for public campaigns to counter the anti net zero narrative?
Our case is that community energy projects offer a means not only of developing the renewables sector, but of fostering a sense of popular ‘buy-in’ to the energy transition. Achieving the net zero target by 2050 requires the participation of significant segments of the citizenry during the transition process. Community energy’s political contribution to the net-zero transition is likely to carry greater force than its direct (or ‘economic’) contribution in terms of the renewables roll-out.
Our case draws upon research undertaken in the community energy sector, largely in Bristol and South West England, as well as in London. Our research has included a commissioned opinion survey as well as several dozen interviews that we undertook with actors in the community energy sector, ranging from community activists to town planners and energy experts.
Disclosure
One of the authors, Marianne Brown, works in the community energy sector.
Introduction: Community Energy
Community energy refers to people coming together in their local area to develop, own, or benefit from renewable energy projects and energy efficiency initiatives. Such projects may be led by cooperatives, community interest companies, or social enterprises, with the multiple aims of reducing carbon emissions, reducing energy bills, and supporting local economies. Projects usually involve generating renewable energy (mainly solar and wind), or energy-saving and energy-storage schemes. Revenues are usually reinvested into the project itself and the community.
Ownership models in community energy
In the UK, according to the most recent State of the Sector report (by Community Energy England, CEE), there are 69,500 members of community energy groups, whose projects generate over 600 Gigawatt hours per year. These include several different models of ownership:
1. Community ownership. Here, the project is wholly owned and run by a community group (e.g. a co-operative or community benefit society). In this model, normally, funding is obtained through a community share offer, and/or from grants and loans. The revenues are reinvested locally or distributed to members.
2. Co-ownership or joint ventures. In these, a community group joins forces with a private company or a local authority; together they create a SPV for the project, or other form of legal agreement, to stipulate the share of risks and returns.
3. Community investment. Community members invest in part of a project owned by a third party (normally a private developer). This model is generally preferred by developers: they undertake most of the planning and construction, after which, through a governance model, they share revenue. For example, a community invests 10% into the project, their return is 10% of revenues.
For the purposes of this submission, under ‘community energy’ we do not include community benefit schemes from commercial projects. In these, a commercial developer, e.g. a wind farm, funds a community benefit programme. Such schemes may contribute to community buy-in to the energy transition, but less meaningfully than in models with significant elements of community input into the planning process and community ownership, as in those outlined above, in particular models 1-2.
Public awareness of the community energy sector
Public awareness of community energy in the UK is relatively low. According to an Ipsos poll we commissioned in 2023, 3% of the public know at least “a fair amount” about the concept of community energy, 10% know “just a little,” and 13% have heard of the concept but know “almost nothing” about it. The majority had never heard of it. Despite this limited awareness, there is notable enthusiasm for community energy initiatives once individuals receive basic information about them. The same survey found that nearly half of respondents agreed that community energy is a more sustainable way of generating electricity than that produced by the big commercial suppliers, and around half believed that community energy could provide a source of income for local communities. More recent research has supported this positive outlook. A report published by Common Wealth in early 2025, based on polling by YouGov (of 4862 adults), indicated that over three-fifths of the public would support a community-owned renewable energy project in their area, compared to 40 per cent support for a privately-owned project; 53% of the public would be willing to reduce their energy consumption to support a community energy project, and around a quarter would be willing to invest time, and 14% were inclined to invest financially in such projects. Interestingly, the results from this YouGov survey indicate higher levels of likelihood to participate among ethnic minority respondents, with the difference especially large on the willingness to invest time and money in community energy projects.
These findings suggest that while general awareness of the community energy sector is currently limited, there is significant potential for public support and engagement where individuals are educated about the benefits and opportunities associated with community energy initiatives.
Case study 1: Barton Heat
Our first case study is Barton Heat in Bristol, an initiative based in the Barton Hill Estate, which is among the most deprived areas in the UK. Most of its residents identify as Muslim and non-white, and more than half of the children there are in poverty. The estate itself is run down, and in 2023 one of its blocks had to be evacuated due to concerns over its structural integrity. One person told us of the residents’ “feeling of segregation.” The flats, she went on, are afflicted by problems of “mould and damp. The children are going through respiratory issues, anxiety, all those things.”
Of particular salience to our submission to Parliament, the Barton Hill area has a record of community involvement in and against energy/environment projects. One such, in 2017, saw residents mobilise against planning applications for two gas-fired power plants. Another has seen a residents’ campaign organising against the council’s low traffic neighbourhood (LTN) plans. One might suppose that opponents of LTNs would also oppose community energy projects but this is not the case at all.
One interviewee, a resident of the Barton Hill Estate, told us that, although the LTNs aim to improve accessibility for walking and cycling, some residents feel “not listened to.” Their trust in the authorities “has worn thin.” Another resident added the important insight that at the heart of the resistance to the LTN lay “the feeling of being powerless rather than any sense of being ‘anti-net zero’.”
Significantly, the anti-LTN group and the Barton Heat group meet in the same community café, and they interact on generally friendly terms. Barton Heat’s aim is to explore the feasibility of providing renewable energy-based heating and hot water solutions for the area’s run-down housing blocks. The project builds upon the community's prior success in opposing a diesel power station, which led to the development of a battery storage facility on the same site. In recognition of the community support that had gathered behind these initiatives, the facility's owners allocated funds for further community energy projects, with Barton Heat the principal focus. The feasibility study for Barton Heat encompasses several objectives, including (i) to assess the potential of integrating renewable energy technologies such as photovoltaic panels and heat pumps (ground, air, and water sourced) to meet the heating and hot water needs of the Barton Hill housing blocks; (ii) to look to connecting Barton Heat with Bristol's broader Heat Network, developed under the “Bristol City Leap” initiative; (iii) to explore the establishment of a community energy organisation that can manage renewable energy generation in the Barton Hill area.
The project is a collaborative effort involving several local organisations and initiatives, as well as student placements from the architecture and engineering departments of the University of the West of England (UWE). One of our interviewees, a resident active in Barton Heat, described the scene: “A bunch of architecture students have come to look at the tower blocks. They talk about hanging solar panels off the sides of tower blocks. After Christmas, engineering students will consider the practicalities of it. What we hope to do, coming out of that, is with Bristol University working in parallel, [to] weld all that together in a knowledge transfer partnership proposal. To put together what would be needed to take this to a real business proposition: to actively hang solar panels on the side of the buildings.”
Another Barton Hill resident eloquently described her reflections on the proposals: “As I sat in the room watching students present digital designs of Barton Hill’s eight high rise buildings, covered with vertical solar panels, something stirred in me. These are the same buildings we live in buildings that, for years, have symbolised neglect and struggle. But through the students’ eyes, they were reimagined as something clean, green, and even beautiful. For a moment, I saw Barton Hill not as it is, but as it could be.”
The key takeaways we drew from this research: (i) successful community energy initiatives are eminently feasible in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods; (ii) community energy projects can appeal even to residents who, prima facie (e.g. through opposition to LTNs), adhere to ‘anti-environment’ narratives. This, we believe, offers an important lesson for policymakers looking to continue and accelerate the net-zero agenda.
Case study 2: Ambition Lawrence Weston
Our second case study is also in an area of high deprivation, this time on the north-eastern outskirts of Bristol. It provides useful lessons on how policymakers can engage with local people about the energy transition. In 2023, construction completed on England’s largest onshore wind turbine. The 4.2 Megawatt-capacity turbine is 100% community owned, generating £100,000 in annual community benefit payments as of February this year (2025). Residents decide, through regular consultations, on the disbursement of the revenues. The project is managed by Ambition Community Energy, an offshoot of community organisation Ambition Lawrence Weston (ALW), based in Lawrence Weston, a post-war housing estate. Local people founded ALW in 2012 to address what one interviewee, a Lawrence Weston resident, described as a feeling that the area was Bristol’s “forgotten estate”. He described a general sense that people in the area felt forgotten by local and regional authorities and that in order to change “their lot in life”, they had to take action themselves. “We come together thinking no one else seems to be wanting to help us, no other politicians or decision-makers, so we need to get off our backsides and try to improve the place ourselves,” he said.
To do this, the group undertook extensive community engagement activities. This involved training up a group of local people to go door-knocking on every home in the estate with a set of three questions. These were “What’s good about Lawrence Weston, what’s not-so-good and what needs changing?”, the resident told us. Over 1,200 people responded to the survey, which was used to create a five-year Community Plan. This plan was then enacted through the Neighbourhood Development Plan. Among the suggestions were a new community centre and a community-owned wind turbine.
During this time, city-wide community energy group Bristol Energy Cooperative (BEC) approached ALW to work together on a community-owned solar farm project in the area. In exchange for their support, residents would receive profits from the farm.
One resident we interviewed described how the extensive community engagement work undertaken to secure planning for the Community Development Plan, the solar farm and the wind turbine encouraged residents to feel more engaged with the political system. Election turnouts have increased, he says, because people feel more empowered and have a better understanding of their rights. He attributes this to the positive changes residents have seen delivered in the community, from the construction of a new community hub to the improvement of cycle paths and public transport services. What matters most to people struggling to get by in the area, he said, is not how to save the planet but how to put more money in their pockets. If insulating homes saves money in these hard-pinched times, he suggested, that will be of more interest than the overall net-zero agenda of cutting carbon emissions.
Case study 3: Future Energy Landscapes
Our third case study is in many ways the antithesis of Barton Heat and ALW. Future Energy Landscapes (FEL) focuses on semi-rural populations where larger renewable energy projects could be built. FEL was developed by the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) and CPRE (the countryside charity formerly known as Council for the Preservation of Rural England). The aim is to engage local communities in the planning and development of renewable energy projects, such that these align with community preferences and considerations of landscape preservation. People’s emotional attachments to their area, and their feelings for the local landscape, are seldom taken into account in policy formulation - for how do you measure something like a person’s emotional attachment to a place?
We asked Neil Best, a senior planner at CSE, what lay behind the FEL initiative in the 2010s. A key reason, he explained, was concern at the “rising amount of conflict between communities and the development of renewables, especially wind turbines.” The public backlash against renewable energy projects, to a large extent, derived from the sense that “people feel like they don’t have a say.” One participant at a FEL workshop last year in a village in South Gloucestershire told us that she sees it as a good way to help visualise how the community could transition to renewable energy in a way that places a strong emphasis on local residents’ emotional attachments and knowledge. To date, no projects have been realised as a direct result of FEL, but this is likely to change soon, as more workshops are being held this year.
The FEL process is structured around interactive workshops where community members discuss renewable energy options that might work in their local area. At the workshops, local residents are invited to link a variety of emotions to possible energy sites in their area, to stimulate discussion over the costs and benefits of different projects. CSE then calculate how much of the local area’s energy needs these would meet, and the costs involved and the potential revenues. The process is designed to give local residents as much agency as possible, and to give them the chance to imagine how a local energy project could work for them and for their community. The workshops work best when there are different opinions in the room so that the organisers are not simply “preaching to the converted”, Neil Best told us.
This deliberative method fosters the emergence of informed consensus on types and possible sites for energy infrastructure, balancing the need for sustainable energy with the preservation of local landscapes. By facilitating community discussions, FEL seeks to generate community consent for renewable energy developments as well as providing information to planning authorities to help ensure that policies are put into place that are not only ambitious in energy-generation terms but also are protective of community values in respect of the local environment. “Whatever the FEL process ends up with,” Neil Best explains, “it’s driven by the people who take part. The outputs are owned by them.” As a result, in future, if a scheme emerges from FEL discussions, “they are more likely to support it because they’ve been involved.”
Conclusion
Community energy projects—initiatives that allow local groups to generate, own, and manage renewable energy resources—can serve as a powerful tool to engage and involve the British public in the energy transition. These projects not only help reduce carbon emissions but create social and economic benefits that foster long-term commitment from communities.
Our research in Bristol and the South West, in urban and rural areas alike, suggests that many communities feel that decisions over energy projects are being taken remotely, imposed on their area, and that they are not involved in deliberating the trade-offs between the available options. One of the most effective ways to engage the public with net-zero goals, we suggest, is by offering them direct ownership and involvement in community energy projects. The government should incentivise the creation of community-led renewable energy cooperatives, where individuals invest in and benefit from local solar farms, wind turbines, and bioenergy facilities. By allowing local residents to own a stake in these projects, the government would foster a sense of empowerment and financial interest, motivating wider participation. Government-backed initiatives, such as subsidies or low-interest loans for community groups, can help overcome initial funding barriers.
Through a combination of grassroots participation and government backing, community energy projects can become a cornerstone of the UK’s sustainability strategy, driving collective action and making the net-zero goal more achievable for all.
April 2025