The Communities taking Renewable Energy into the own Hands

Late last year we - Co-operatives UK and The Co-operative Group - published a new report which reveals the growing number of people who are choosing to start renewable energy co-operatives in their communities, against all the odds.

What is exciting about the report is that it is the first and most comprehensive guide to what amounts to a new movement of communities who are taking action for greener energy into their own hands.

In a time of doom – when all talk is of cuts, unemployment and rising prices – this report highlights a different story. Despite, or maybe even because, of the wider economic woes, people across the UK are creating a co-operative movement for green energy.

There are now 43 communities who are in the process of or already producing renewable energy through co-operative structures. They are set up and run by everyday people – local residents mostly – who are investing their time and money and together installing solar panels, large wind turbines or hydro-electric power for their local communities.

The report highlights a series of examples. Like Ouse Valley Energy Service Company, which is owned by 250 people who have installed solar panels on a local brewery. Or River Bain Hydro, which installed a hydro electric power generator in its local river with investment of £200,000 from around 200 people.

The report also shows that together across the UK local residents have invested over £16 million in these co-operatives. These range from over £4 million which has been invested by over 2,700 people in Westmill Wind Farm in Oxfordshire, right through to around £38,000 which has been invested by around 34 local residents to install solar panels on a local primary school in Nayland, Suffolk.

Overall, Co-operative renewable energy in the UK is a testimony to the fact that green economy co-operatives are the fastest growing part of the UK co-operative sector, having grown by an astonishing 24 per cent since 2008.

What amazes me about this growing movement is that it is emerging against all the odds. This government's rhetoric about supporting community owned renewable energy has not yet been backed up by an integrated plan to make it a reality. As many of the people in renewables co-operatives in the report say, there's a lot stacked against communities on this – changing legislation and red tape, not to mention hard economic times.

For a start, government legislation keeps shifting, and there's no better example of this than the government's recent slashing of the solar Feed in Tariff. Whilst we recognise that the solar tariff was generous, the early and dramatic nature of the cut means several energy co-operatives have been put on hold.

Like many, Co-operatives UK and The Co-operative Group are campaigning on this in the hope that government will introduce the planned premium community tariff that encourages communities to create green energy together. But the fact that it was cut at such short notice has been a serious set back for many co-operatives.

Planning hurdles and bureaucracy are also a major problem for small community renewable schemes. With complex planning regulations and a wide range of organisations to deal with – the Environment Agency, Distribution Network Operators, local authorities, funders and so on – it is hard for small community renewable schemes, often set up and run by local volunteers, to get things set up.

River Bain Hydro, for example, has successfully set up a hydro electric scheme in North Yorkshire, despite spending a large proportion of its limited time negotiating with power companies because of a lack of co-ordination. As they explain: "Between the power house and the grid, a distance of a hundred yards, we ended up with five different organisations involved in delivery."

With a financial crisis, cuts and difficult environment, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that people across the UK are coming together to create green energy themselves. The co-operative sector, which has always been there to support people trying to make a difference, is doing all it can to help – whether through schemes to support community shares or through The Co-operative Bank's commitment to invest £1 billion in renewable energy by 2013, and its broader support for new co-operative enterprises.

As we all know now, we have built an economy based on a financial house of cards of banks, bonds and bail-outs. When you strip away the hype and hope, the only feasible alternative strategy is one that is based on bootstrap development of local enterprises such as these, making use of the three unlimited sources of wealth we have – people, ingenuity and renewable energy.

• Ed Mayo is Secretary General of Co-operatives UK, the trade association for co-operative enterprises

Please not that this article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 14.40 GMT on Friday 6 January 2012.

Carbon Trust launches new office tool - £500m savings

Employees could save UK businesses and public bodies £500m and two million tonnes of CO2 – equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of all the households in Birmingham – thanks to a new, online office tool called ‘Carbon Trust Empower™' launched today by the Carbon Trust.

By engaging employees in cutting energy use, paper waste and travel, Carbon Trust Empower has the potential to save a typical small business over 15% of their energy bill or more than £6K per year – equivalent to powering 3.5km of street lights for a year.  Larger businesses* that base their approach on this tool could save £150K and over 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.

Each individual employee’s efforts can amount to carbon emissions reductions (220kgCO2) equivalent to heating the average household for a month**.

Whitbread and Oxford City Council have already signed their staff up to use the online tool that enables employees to make practical commitments through an interactive animated tour of a typical workplace, and which can provide the springboard for larger organisations to raise the bar through ambitious internal behavioural change programmes.

Employees are able to explore energy saving opportunities throughout their office – starting by considering how they arrive for work, with options to join a company carpool or travel by public transport, before moving on to their desk, where they can commit to switch off their PC when not in use, print double-sided, and teleconference rather than travel. The virtual journey also helps staff cut energy waste in other parts of the office, such as the reception area, kitchen, corridors and toilets.

As well as helping individuals create and keep track of personal action plans, Empower provides a wealth of engaging workplace facts and enables office managers to view the sum of their employees’ individual energy savings.

Richard Rugg, Director of Carbon Trust Programmes, said:

“Companies often struggle to harness the huge energy savings that an effectively engaged workforce can help deliver. Part of the problem employers face is making actions practical, fun and sustained. By creating a virtual tour entirely from an employee’s viewpoint, every aspect of Empower has been designed with the end-user in mind.”

He added:

“Employees are a critical ally in cutting energy waste.  Get them onboard and reap the rewards in lower bills and reduced carbon emissions.”

Chris George, Head of Energy & Environment, Whitbread Hotels & Restaurants, commented:
“Whitbread has a clear target to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 26% by 2020.  To get there we have embedded sustainability into the heart of our business and we are working closely with our teams and business partners to reduce energy and water consumption.

We believe that Empower is a strong learning platform which will help our teams to understand how we can work together to reduce energy consumption within our portfolio of buildings in the UK.  It is a straightforward and user-friendly tool, which is easily accessible online and may lead to tonnes of CO2 emissions being saved across our business.

It also demonstrates that as we save energy, we also save money, bringing real commercial benefits to the bottom line.”

Paul Robinson, Team Leader, Energy and Climate Change at Oxford City Council, said:
"Oxford City Council is committed to tackling climate change, and engaging and empowering employees is a critical way for us to make significant carbon and financial savings.  The new Empower tool is great fun to use and we intend to roll this out to all our staff in the near future as part of our commitment to reduce our operational carbon emissions by 28% by the end of March 2012, relative to the 05/06 baseline emissions.  We will also encourage our Low Carbon Oxford partners to use it with their staff too."

Companies can encourage their employees to sign up to energy saving at www.carbontrust.co.uk/empower. Companies interested in tailoring the software for their own business should call the Advice Line on 0800 085 2005.

By following the Carbon Trust’s top tips for office energy efficiency, companies could make annual savings of over £200 per employee:

Turning off your PC and monitor in the evening could save £39/yr per person

Keeping blinds open and turning off lights when there is enough daylight, or when areas are unoccupied could save more than £10/yr per person

Accepting a slightly (1°C) reduced temperature in the workplace could save over £4/yr per person

Using the phone or video conferencing to avoid four car journeys could save £150/yr

Reducing paper use by only printing when needed, and printing double sided could save £20/yr each per person

Businesses need to get ready for low-carbon world...

Ex-UN climate chief says business should get ready for low-carbon world

Last month's Durban climate talks have given a strong signal that governments are serious about tackling global warming

• •  reddit this

• Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 January 2012 16.46 GMT
• Article history

Yvo de Boer in 2010. Photograph: Henning Kaiser/AFP/Getty Images

Businesses should be putting plans in place this year to prepare for a low-carbon economy, having been given a strong signal from the latestclimate change negotiations that governments are serious about tackling global warming, according to the former United Nations climate chief.

Yvo de Boer said the message from the Durban climate talks in December, which ended with a dramatic last-minute deal to forge a new legally binding climate agreement, was that businesses ought to press ahead with moves towards operating in a low-carbon world. He said that businesses should interpret the talks as a "clear signal that the international community is committed to taking the climate change agenda forward, that market-based mechanisms [such as carbon trading] will continue and that there will be clear reporting guidelines" on carbon dioxide emissions, which will affect companies.

De Boer, now special adviser on climate change to KPMG, was the architect of the Copenhagen climate summit of 2009, at which countries made voluntary commitments to cut their emissions by 2020. Many countries, green campaigners and businesses complained that the system of voluntary commitments did not provide the certainty needed to spur the development of a low-carbon economy across the globe.

The breakthrough at the Durban climate conference was that all countries, developed and developing, agreed to start work on a new worldwide agreement, to be signed in 2015, that would stipulate legally binding – not voluntary – emissions cuts to kick in from 2020.

De Boer told the Guardian that moves to create a global legally binding agreement were good for businesses. He said business leaders had stressed to him that they needed greater certainty from politicians, in order to make the right decisions to stay prosperous in the future. Only a global, legally binding agreement on the climate could provide the sort of guarantee that generates a wave of investment in greener technologies, and meaningful efforts to cut greenhouse gases. Such an agreement would also help to ensure there was a level playing field across in terms of business regulation – and this too would work to the advantage of companies, which could be reassured that their rivals were facing the same constraints.

He said that it was a "mistake" to think, as some people have argued, that a "bottom-up" approach – whereby countries and industry would make voluntary commitments to cut emissions – would be sufficient to reduce emissions by the drastic amounts needed in order to keep temperature rises within relatively safe levels.

His views are broadly shared by Lord (Nicholas) Stern, author of the landmark 2006 Stern review of the economics of climate change. Stern told the Guardian that the efforts of many businesses and nations so far to cut emissions would not have happened without the impetus given by the international negotiating process.

However, some close observers of the talks, including the UK's former chief scientific adviser Sir David King, take an opposing view, arguing that the annual climate talks that have been running for nearly two decades have borne little fruit and that nations should focus instead on a series of voluntary, non-binding pledges and on encouraging industry to cut emissions.

Stern also warned that the current pledges on greenhouse gas emissions from governments around the world would not be sufficient to stave off dangerous climate change, and must be strengthened.The Durban agreement was snatched at the last minute after the talks, which were supposed to end at teatime on 9 December, carried on through two more nights into the early hours of Sunday morning. A last-ditch compromise among the European Union, India and China over the wording of how a new agreement should be described – the words "legally binding" were replaced by "an agreed outcome with legal force" – enabled the talks to end in consensus.

"Slowly but surely, like it or not, the world is moving forward on climate change, with business now able to seriously calculate the implications of a low- carbon economy," De Boer said. "The meeting in Durban was its usual roller coaster ride, ending with a surprise commitment to continue the Kyoto Protocol, along with a raft of other climate change agreements. While the outcome has signalled a breakthrough for a political consensus on climate change, the outcome for business is only just becoming clear."

He said the agreement at Durban to continue with the Kyoto protocol beyond 2012, when its current provisions expire, would also have a big effect on many companies. "Business can be confident that market-based mechanisms such as the clean development mechanism [under which carbon credits are issued and sold] will continue," he said.

The clean development mechanism has generated billions of dollars in investment in low-carbon technologies around the world since it came into force in 2005, but in the last two years the investment pipeline has all but dried up, because of the uncertainty surrounding the future of the Kyoto protocol.

De Boer said the "Durban platform", the name given to the deal reached there to negotiate a new legal agreement, showed that "an international agreement for global action on climate change is within our reach and should therefore be considered within every forward looking business strategy".

He said: "With a pinch of luck, by 2015 [when the new agreement should be signed] the current economic crisis will be behind us, creating a more benign climate for governments to make commitments the world needs in order to tackle climate change effectively and business needs to survive and prosper."

But he warned that the science of climate change was becoming clearer, making it more obvious that our current efforts to cut emissions have been insufficient, and that much more needs to be done. "Our concrete actions have not taken us anywhere near where we need to be to keep temperature rises below 2ºC [which scientists regard as the limit of safety]," he said.

De Boer stressed the key role for business in tackling global warming, for instance through investments geared to cutting emissions in the developing world. At Durban, countries agreed most of the terms by which money can start to be released under the "green climate fund", under which $100bn a year in financing should flow from the rich to the poor world by 2020. "Prior to the conference it was unclear what role business would play in the fund; the worry was that the private sector would be sidelined," he said. "Thankfully, Durban saw confirmation that the fund will have a facility to fund private sector initiatives. It will seek actively to promote business involvement and catalyse further public and private money."

De Boer said this should mean more public-private partnerships in developing nations working on green growth, which should create jobs, alleviate poverty and improve infrastructure as well as tackling climate change.