Community Energy: taking stock, moving forwards?

At the halfway point in the CISE (Community Innovation for Sustainable Energy) project, we have already found that the community energy sector is extremely dynamic and moving very fast. As a result, the panel discussion event ‘Community Energy: taking stock, moving forwards?’, hosted at UEA London on March 8^th 2012, provided a timely opportunity to take a step back and reflect on recent developments within UK community energy and on their longer-term implications.

Chaired by Professor Yvonne Rydin (Director of the UCL Environment Institute), a panel of 5 community energy experts (Chris Church – Trustee of the Low Carbon Communities Network; Rebecca Willis – Independent Researcher; Rufus Ford – Scottish and Southern Energy; Patrick Allcorn – DECC; Damian Tow – Brighton Energy Co-op) were each asked to reflect on the following questions:

· How have recent developments in national energy policy affected community energy initiatives?

· Have responses to these policy proposals galvanised and/or unsettled the community energy sector?

· What should be the key priorities looking ahead; who needs to be involved, and how?

How have recent developments in national energy policy affected community energy initiatives?

Whilst there was recognition that recent policy developments had, for example, provided a ‘kickstart’ to renewables and had significantly raised the profile of community energy groups, this optimism appeared to be offset by real concerns over the longer-term picture. In particular, there was concern that community energy was something of a ‘squeezed middle’ as energy policy was being developed only for large-scale energy providers or for individual householders, and was therefore failing to account for the specific challenges of community-scale delivery. At the same time, some panellists suggested that these challenges were well-recognised by both policy makers and large-scale energy providers, both of whom were already working hard to create a coherent and long-term structure within which community energy initiatives could flourish.

Have responses to these policy proposals galvanised and/or unsettled the community energy sector?

The panel recognised that the community energy sector is extremely dynamic and diverse which often made it difficult for large-scale energy providers and policy makers either to receive clear messages from the sector or to develop appropriate and long-term frameworks for its development. At the same time, other panellists argued that existing policy was insufficiently ambitious with regard to how far community energy might be scaled-up. It was suggested that, within the existing energy market and policy domain, community energy was being seen as a small-scale ‘soft and cuddly’ sector and that, as a result, policies were being designed that failed to allow scope for significant and long-term expansion of the sector. Here, panellists suggested that the UK could learn important lessons from Germany where community wind, for example, is a major sector contributing almost 10% of Germany’s electricity.

What should be the key priorities looking ahead; who needs to be involved, and how?

For community energy practitioners, the challenge appeared to be one of developing clear evidence of the value of community energy projects – both in terms of their potential contribution to the future energy mix, but also in terms of the wider benefits initiatives can have within their communities. This, panellists argued, needed to be accompanied by strong leadership within the community energy sector to ensure it could have a strong voice within policy debates.

For policy makers, key priorities involved continuing to support the community energy sector not only financially, but also with respect to mobilisation and engagement in key policy discussions. At the same time, the message from the panellists was very clear that future policy for community energy needs to be transparent, clear, equitable and stable in the longer-term.

Regarding who should be involved, panellists appeared agreed that none of the current major players could or should be excluded. Instead, they called for the development of strong partnerships between community energy groups, large-scale energy providers and commercial developers, local authorities and central government and its agencies, based around the central recognition that a successful community energy sector would work for the benefit of the whole of society and not just for the few.

Yvonne Rydin, chair of the discussion, has also blogged about this event. Read her thoughts here.

Framing complementary currencies as forms of grassroots technology

In a recently published chapter I have argued that complementary currencies can be conceptualised as forms of grassroots technology. One advantage of this particular, and hitherto rare, framing, is that it opens up the possibility of exploring their evolution using theoretical tools from the innovation literature. Thus the chapter applies insights from Strategic Niche Management – a theory that seeks to explain the trajectory of technological experiments – to the early stages of the Totnes Pound. It concludes that theory does have some purchase in explaining some of the problems that such radical grassroots experiments can encounter.

Complementary currencies are forms of exchange that are intended to function in parallel with the mainstream monetary system. In many cases they are associated with the ideas of ‘new economics’, in particular with critiques of the prevailing capitalist debt-based monetary system. The most recent wave of complementary currency activism began in the 1970s with isolated experiments. The 1980s saw the emergence of LETS and Time Banks as two ‘models’ which have diffused and mutated. The field has become more complex in recent years, with a range of further experiments emerging.

Academic interest in complementary currencies has generally been marginal (although some would argue the margins are where the interesting things happen…). However, there is loose cross-disciplinary community that gets together periodically, most recently in Lyon last year. Within the UK context it is geographers who have generally shown the most interest in currencies, interested in their potential to create ‘alternative economic spaces’. Currencies have also been researched as potential policy instruments and as social movements. However, they have rarely been conceptualised as forms of innovation. Of course, whilst innovation is not necessarily synonymous with technology, the two are often closely entwined. In the case this particular chapter, the framing of complementary currencies as technologies owes a debt to Brian Arthur’s recent work on the evolution of technology and his definition of technology as a purposed system. Indeed, he uses the monetary system as an example of a technology.

If the global diffusion of currencies is one observable trend within the field, another is the high failure rate of individual systems. Our Leverhulme funded Grassroots Innovation: Complementary Currencies project seeks to explore some of the factors that underpin both of these trends. More specifically we have been looking at patterns of replication, scaling up and translation. To do this we have been drawing on innovation theory, more specifically, the work on innovative niches that have come out of the ‘sustainability transitions’ literature. This literature highlights the difficulties that new technologies face when trying to compete with existing, incumbent socio-technical systems. However, the case studies have generally focused on how technologies emerge in a market context. To date, little attention has been paid to those innovations that emerge from civil society. This is despite the fact that it is arguable that civil society can play a significant role in the emergence of environmental innovation, such as its role in the development of organic agriculture.

In the case of the Totnes Pound, it was an initiative that emerged from the Transition Town Totnes project, the original site of the Transition Town movement. It therefore provides an example of how a social movement organisation can instigate a form of grassroots experiment. Conceptualising the embryonicTotnes Pound as a technological niche provides a number of important insights into currency development. The first is the way in which the currency fulfils different functions for different ‘relevant groups’. Understood as technologies currencies exhibit a certain degree of interpretive flexibility. Reconciling these different functionalities becomes a key task for currency organisers, as does the task of balancing the need to make promises about the currency in order to build the niche with the need to dampen expectations about the performance of an under-resourced experiment. Niche building itself becomes an exercise in either the successful delivery of multiple functions or drawing people into the problem frame that underpins the experiment. The literature suggests that learning processes are an important aspect of niche development. In this particular case the learning processes that unfold are generally first order, tacit and curtailed by the limited resources of grassroots organisations. Other insights from niche theory are also of relevance to the case, such as the emergence of a putative ‘global’ niche of Transition currencies and the insight that crises of the current socio-technical system may be a necessary precursor for niche ‘breakthrough’.

The chapter is a tentative step in exploring the currency field through a technological framing. The growing diversity of currency systems allied to the wider canon of innovation theory points to the potential for much more work in this area. More generally, the collection itself illustrates that civil society remains a fertile site for various kinds of environmental innovation.

Discussing Design Activism and Community Energy at the AAG conference

Sabine Hielscher from the CISE team attended the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in New York at the end of February. The conference brought together over 7000 delegates with around 50 sessions running at the same time over a period of five days. It was ‘big’ conference, making it a great place to meet other researchers and hear some interesting presentations.

The CISE paper was accepted as part of the ‘Design, Design Activism and the Democratic Production of Future Natures’ session. This session considered ‘the tensions and possibilities that design activism and the idea of social design politics generated for a politics of space and possibly a new politics of the environment’. The session organisers (Damian White and Cameron Tonkinwise) asked for sociological and geographical explorations of phenomena like the Transition Town movement and forms of design politics/ activism.

The CISE team took this call for papers as an opportunity to explore some of the similarities between design activism and community energy and to reflect on the ways they can learn from each other. Both areas:

Instigate and experiment with sustainable grassroots changes

Focus on practical actions and regard lobbying activities as secondary

Aspire to spread and amplify their efforts

Drawing on the CISE work (i.e. in-depth community energy case studies, interviews with key inter-project community energy intermediaries) and secondary literature on design-based social innovations, the presentation examined these ‘niche spaces’ in order to discuss in more depth the dilemmas between either concentrating on project based practical action or engaging in strategic lobbying efforts.

In our presentation we concluded that experiences with community enery in the UK indicate that in order to spread current practical action, design based social innovation needs to become more strategic and engage in lobbying activities and alliances that help to create broader political spaces that increase the possibilities for practical project based actions.