In the shadow of the Didcot power station in Oxfordshire, a small group of people sat around a kitchen table and thought “let’s replace it” with green community energy.
That was in 2011. Now, in 2024, that little group has become the Low Carbon Hub with 1,773 members and 55 renewable energy installations around Oxford, including two hydroelectric dams on the River Thames. Meanwhile, the Didcot power station is half-demolished, no longer burning coal or belching greenhouse gases into the air.
“The ambition was really that we just believed a better energy system is possible, one that’s not powered by fossil fuels, and one that benefits local people,” says Beth McAllister, the head of communications for the community energy group. “We build renewable energy projects that are owned by people and that benefit local people. All of our profits go back into sort of community action.”
The hub does what they call a “double carbon cut”: profits from the sale of excess electricity back to the grid partly go back to investors as a small return, but the rest is spent on community benefits such as better insulating schools and other buildings. This means less energy is used to heat them.
Barbara Hammond, the founder of the group, started ambitiously: in 2008 she helped set up Osney Lock Hydro, which uses energy from the river to power the equivalent of 50 homes. She has a history in renewable energy; from 2000 until 2010 she led the UK’s renewable energy programme.
The Low Carbon Hub now boasts the largest community-owned solar park in the UK, Ray Valley Solar, which was connected in July 2022. It generates 19.5 GWh of electricity every year, enough to power more than 6,000 homes.
But the UK does not have local grids, so electricity generated from local renewables is not kept in the area but sold back to the National Grid. This means people cannot point to the solar farm or the hydroelectric dam and say, “that powers my home”.
The Low Carbon Hub hopes that will change. McAllister said: “[We’re aiming to] see how we can do that kind of local trading, so communities, at a really local level, can be generating electricity and also selling locally and benefiting from it.”
There was a great appetite for truly local community energy, she said. “The hydro project was a pilot that really wanted to look at what could happen if we have that local, community owned hydro that’s there, and how could we sell that power direct to households or businesses. The results were that people really want it. It would really benefit local communities, because they’d be able to be much more flexible about the way they use electricity.”
There has in recent years been very little government support for community energy since David Cameron’s decision to “cut the green crap”, and grants to install solar panels were slashed in 2015. There have also been no policy changes to allow local grids to set up and sell locally produced energy to people who live nearby, rather than selling it back to the grid.
Groups like Low Carbon Hub have increasingly been working to decarbonise their local areas. There are now 600 community energy organisations in the UK, of which Low Carbon Hub is one of the biggest.
“We’re definitely growing,” McAllister said, “and I think people are really starting to understand the value of community energy and the fact that it really benefits local people. But I think a better policy environment would definitely help drive that.”
Among the beneficiaries are schools, which have suffered years of budget cuts. Having solar panels paid for by community energy groups has cut their energy costs.
“All of our hosts save money on their electricity bills,” said McAllister. “They buy their green electricity produced on the roofs directly from us, at a discount. It depends on the school, on the size of the school, so some use 20% of the energy that is produced, some use 50%, but they’re making savings.”
McAllister feels optimistic about the future under a Labour government which has been making supportive noises about community energy.
“It was challenging when the grants for solar were cut. It made it harder for solar installation to work financially,” she said. “But we’re really excited about things like GB Energy and the local power plan, because they really seem to be supportive of community energy. And [Labour] put in their manifesto that they want £5bn for community energy over the course of their parliament. So I think they really get it, and it could be a real gamechanger for community energy, where we can have that funding go directly into the communities that will benefit.”
