Waking up to an alternative energy future

Justin Woolford, Senior Campaigns Manager - Social Goals, at The Co-operative, introduces us to the 'Discover Community Energy' tour currently underway in Germany. The tour, part of a wider project for The Co-operative, is being jointly run by Forum for the Future and Carbon Leapfrog. This fact-finding mission seeks to discover what made the communtiy energy revolution possible in Germany, and to explore what's possible in the UK.

The Co-operative believes passionately in the potential for community renewable energy to help combat climate change, improve energy security and bring benefits to communities across the UK. That’s why we’ve just kicked off ‘Discover Community Energy’, a four-day tour to Germany for some of the UK’s most influential civil society leaders, including the WI, the National Trust and the Council for the Protection of Rural England. Our aim is to see community renewable energy in action and explore what’s possible in the UK.

Yesterday we visited Schönau, a town of 2,500 in the Black Forest that started a renewable energy revolution in the 1980s in response to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The community set up EWS Energy and bought the local electricity grid. Today this co-operative enterprise supplies over 115,000 households across Germany with renewable energy and supports the children affected in communities around Chernobyl. Schönau’s identity is now inextricably linked to this renewable energy heritage and its motivation to create a safer energy future.

There’s a tangible sense of enthusiasm in the group this morning as we head to Freiburg and surrounds to see one of Germany’s leading renewable energy districts and grapple with how to construct an alternative energy future in the UK. There’s no doubt we could do a lot more to harness the potential of our vast renewable sources of wind, water and sun. And do this in a way that benefits communities and reinvigorates a local sense of pride and collaboration.

Two things seem critical: broad involvement and ownership that unites a community; and structural change that supports ‘energy democracy’ and enables communities to break free from the stranglehold of the big energy companies and steeply rising bills. The first task, perhaps more important than the immediate fight to shore up incentives for renewable energy such as Feed-In Tariffs that the Coalition Government is currently deconstructing just as they start to have an impact, is to wake people up to the fact that there is an alternative future.

Live updates on the tour can be followed on the Forum for the Future Twitter feed, and by following the #communityenergy hashtag.