What a day to hold our first online meeting for Community Energy groups!
In February we ran an online event inviting emerging groups to join us to share experience and knowledge about challenges and opportunities we’ve managed over the last decade. It was an auspicious date to have the event (although we didn’t know that when we organised it) as it was also the day the Local Power Plan landed. The plan promises to directly support over 1,000 local and community energy projects by 2030. It also commits to moving forward the policy and regulatory changes needed to make those projects happen: enabling us to connect our projects to the grid, or receive a stable long-term price for our exported power.
Community Energy is growing. In 2024 there were 31 new groups in the UK, bringing the total in the country to 614, according to Community Energy England’s State of the Sector report. That means a lot of organisations looking for tips on different approaches on a huge range of topics, like the advantages of different types of non profit structure, how to partner with local authorities, and engage with members to name just a few.
The nature of Community Energy is that we are as diverse a bunch as the communities we serve. While BEC’s projects are mostly solar, other groups have wind turbines, hydro or heat generation. Some focus on low carbon transport or energy storage – there is a huge variety of work going on energising communities across the country. Set up in 2011 and with 25 solar projects, we’ve been around the block a long time – that’s why we wanted to share our experience and knowledge with emerging groups for whom it might be useful.
We invited people who were interested to send in questions ahead of time. Some were more general, about our legal structure and relationship with landowners, and others were more specific, regarding ways to share the output of multiple generation assets between different properties and the merits of different power supply agreements.
It was a fascinating discussion, huge thanks to everyone who joined. If you would like this to be a regular event, do let us know. We’d love to hear what you think.
