Renewing my faith in Renewable Community Energy

Last night I met at Bournemouth University with about 20 like minded souls all keen to contribute to responding the the Climate Emergency, and in particular, to whether we can create some form of community engaged and powered renewable energy supply for the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole area @BCPcouncil, and potentially wider Dorset.

It was great to see some familiar faces, including Pete West, who was previously Carbon Reduction manager for Dorset County Council, but now is one of the Directors involved in https://www.dorsetcommunityenergy.org.uk/ There is some impressive work quietly going on across Dorset, and we should build on that.

And with my colleague Karen Thompson, I relayed a little of the work that we have done under the Poole Tidal Energy Partnership banner (www.ptep.co.uk), though we did not succeed in building anything, we learned a lot.

To fanfare, @BCPCouncil recently announced that they were moving to a green tarrif for energy supply. This is under a national framework for Local Authorities run by Kent County Council, https://www.laserenergy.org.uk/, and one of my concerns was that the scale of this framework precludes the smaller, true green energy suppliers, in favour of the big 6, who are busy trading in carbon credits and other obligations, not just building additional renewable capacity. However, that framework does allow the council to generate and use its own energy.

Lots of comments about ensuring that the initiative is truly for the benefit of the local population, reducing fuel poverty, and not just some commercial exploitation, or indeed the council fixing its own energy consumption.

It felt like a renewal of ambition to do some good in this space.