Hello and welcome to Just Have Another Think, our monthly look at the ecological environmental and
social consequences of our 21st century climate emergency. In last month's video we looked at
some of the ways that you can personally make changes to your own lifestyle to reduce your
carbon footprint. One of the ideas in that video was to get involved in climate change mitigation
activities that are going on within your local community. Community projects are one of the most
powerful and effective ways to really capitalize on collective action and one of the most
impressive and inspirational examples here in the UK is an organization called The Low Carbon Hub,
based in Oxfordshire in the south of England. The initiative was founded in 2011 by former head of
UK renewable energy programmes at the department of trade and industry Barbara Hammond, and Saskya
Huggins who brought extensive experience in fundraising and corporate responsibility
from her work with the international development organisation Oxfam. Their goal is clear, as you
can see from the front page of their website... "the low carbon hub is a social enterprise that's
out to prove we can meet our energy needs in a way that's good for people and good for the planet".
Anyone who's been involved in the implementation of energy infrastructure projects will know
that they're actually an extremely complicated undertaking with multiple stakeholders across many
organizations, so a collaborative approach has been the key to unlocking the resources necessary
to succeed. Today the low carbon hub puts partnership at the heart of everything they do,
working alongside local communities, university academics, city and county councils, as well
as private partners, pulling together all those different skill sets and coordinating them in the
most effective way for any given project. They're not just coordinators of external projects though,
they also own and run their own installations, generating a financial benefit for local
communities. The idea is that those projects should result in a genuine cost saving for the end
users. That frees up capital that the low carbon hub can then leverage with investors to implement
more projects and so on and so on. During a recent web chat Barbara and Saskya told me that there's
a real groundswell of private citizens who want to put their savings to work in their local community
on projects that provide a tangible benefit as part of the drive towards decarbonisation.
The very first project that the hub ran was to install community-owned solar panels on the
roof of a church building. Funding was provided by local people who were keen to get renewable
energy into their area. That was followed by similar initiatives to get solar PV onto the
roofs of about 30 local schools. The Hub supplied and installed the panels and effectively became
an energy provider for the buildings. The church and schools got a discount on their energy bills,
so they benefited financially, and the Hub received the remaining income. Part of that income
goes to pay interest to the local people who invested and the rest goes towards new projects
and community benefit programs. It also enables the Low Carbon Hub to raise further investment
in leveraged funding from grants and contracts. As well as that their community energy fund recently
raised more than 3 million pounds at the start of 2021 largely from local residents who are keen to
see more green energy projects coming online. The rate of change in the renewable energy sector is
quite breath-taking at the moment. The existing centralized fossil fuel driven distribution system
was designed to be a one-way street going from power plants to your house.
The new power structures of the 21st century will be distributed networks where energy is going in
all sorts of different directions both in physical space and virtually across different timelines
during a day depending on the needs of consumers and the balancing requirements of grid operators.
As we move into a fully renewables based world with a rapid transition to zero carbon transport
and zero carbon space heating, millions of cars, buses and trains will be powered by electricity
and millions of homes will need to be upgraded to modern energy efficiency standards with non-fossil
fuel space heating and cooling. The Low Carbon Hub are now looking at broader flexibility services
as part of a new initiative called Local Energy Oxfordshire or Project Leo - one of the UK's most
ambitious, wide-ranging and innovative energy trials backed by 15 million pounds from the UK's
industrial strategy challenge fund and another 25 million from project partners. As part of
that broader community initiative the Low Carbon Hub installed a hydropower facility in Sanford
on Thames, just south of Oxford, in 2017. It's the largest community owned hydro scheme on the
river Thames generating enough power for about 450 local homes. Sanford is a real haven for wildlife
so it was vital that the environmental impact of the hydro scheme was kept to an absolute minimum.
The project team achieved that by constructing a fish bypass right next to the installation.
The bypass includes natural elements like a resting pool and spawning grounds
designed to allow the local wildlife to flourish completely unaffected by their new neighbour.
The Hub are also working to install ground-mounted solar panels on existing low-grade farmland where
appropriate. The economies of scale for ground-mounted solar are far better than
rooftop solar and as a result of the precipitous drop in the cost of panels these installations
are generating five times the income of their original roof mounted ones. Just as with the hydro
installation though the environmental concerns are paramount, and in that respect the partners
have found that solar ground mount, managed well, can actually contribute to biodiversity
and increase levels of carbon capture into the soil. To optimize the efficiency of energy use
for all these installations and therefore minimize energy demand, Project Leo will run
household experiments with very smart meters that give the householders much more detail about their
own usage and allow them to choose the level of control that they're most comfortable with.
Technology will clearly play a very important role in our renewable future but ultimately it has to
be accessible to all the people across all sectors of society. Left to market forces alone it'll most
likely be the folks who can afford a new electric vehicle or solar panels on their home that stand
to benefit the most and as usual it'll be the less well-off in society that'll get left behind with
old expensive inefficient and carbon intensive kit. The challenge is to ensure that everyone
is included whether they live in a five-bedroom executive home or a one-bedroom council flat,
and that's really one of the fundamental benefits of community schemes like the Low Carbon Hub. It's
a model that could easily be adapted anywhere in the UK and pretty much anywhere in the world where
local communities want to have greater control of their energy production and consumption. I'm quite
sure there'll be viewers out there who'll argue that these sorts of projects should be the sole
responsibility of local or national government and energy distribution network operators
and that it shouldn't fall to local citizens to mobilize resources, raise money and manage
the installation of critical infrastructure. But the reality is that we simply no longer
have the time to sit patiently waiting for those established institutions to implement solutions,
so coordinated collective initiatives like the low carbon hub will play an increasingly important
role in our race towards decarbonisation over the course of the coming decade. I'll leave links in
the description section to the Low Carbon Hub's website and some of the other community-led energy
initiatives currently operating, and if you're already running a similar program in your part of
the world or if you're planning to set one up then it'd be great to hear from you in the comments
section below. That's it for now though. Thanks very much for watching, and I'll see you next time