Consultation response
Call for Evidence response: Energy Security and Net Zero Committee on ‘Unlocking community energy at scale’
Feb 2025
In November 2024, the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee launched an inquiry to consider the policy, market and regulatory reforms needed to support the growth of community energy and realise in full the sector’s potential contributions to achieving the UK’s net zero targets. The Committee’s role is to scrutinise the policy, spending and administration of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and its public bodies, including Ofgem and the Committee on Climate change.
Community energy is at the heart of the government’s ambitions for clean power by 2030 and will be central to the future role of Great British Energy through the Local Power Plan.
UKERC welcomes this inquiry and the UK government’s ambition to achieve clean power by 2030, including 8GW of local and community-owned energy. GB Energy and the Local Power Plan (LPP) represent a significant opportunity to reinvigorate the community energy (CE) sector in the UK, which has stalled in recent years, largely due to a challenging policy environment since 2015, including removal of the Feed-in-Tariff, restrictions on onshore wind development, and removal of tax relief. Increasing the involvement of citizens and communities could help accelerate the energy transition.
We provide evidence on how GB Energy could support community energy projects, incentive programmes, regulation, grid connection and planning processes. We also support the call’s emphasis on community energy including renewable electricity generation, renewable heat, efficient use of local power, energy demand reduction and efficiency projects. Community Energy is not just about generation projects and some of the most exciting community-led work is seeking to integrate across heat, power and transport to deliver a smart, flexible, clean energy system.
Read UKERC’s full response here.