A look back at Scene's latest trip to Bhubaneswar, Odisha. Through meetings and conferences, Scene and the University of Edinburgh launch the first iteration of the Urjaa Samadhan platform gaining interest, feedback and potential partners for the future.
Community energy in the UK is a fledgling sector that has grown over the last decade from representing a negligible proportion of the total renewable energy sector in 2005 (<0.01%) to just under 0.4% in 2015. It appears we are at a cross-roads now: was this a brief window of opportunity for the lucky few, or are there prospects for a far-reaching civic energy scenario?
What happens in the initial stages of renewable energy penetration in developing regions of the world will set the stage for good practice in community ownership and engagement. In Mexico, it is now time to engage a variety of stakeholders including communities, academics, private developers, government and NGO’s to design policy frameworks that can effectively demonstrate benefit sharing with local communities. There is currently the political momentum to rally behind supportive policies for community energy projects, presenting a unique opportunity to bolster initiatives around systemic poverty alleviation through generating local productive activity and economic diversification.
For social enterprises to be seen as legitimate actors in the energy sector and justify policy reform, there is an urgent need for evidence of both the costs and benefits of local ownership models relative to conventional models.
In a study commissioned by the Climatexchange, Scotlands centre for expertise on climate change, we explored the comparative costs of commercial and community-owned renewable energy projects over time.
The idea of a community feed-in tariff has been much debated in the UK over the past few years. Internationally, some very supportive authorities have initiated 'COMFiTs' (Nova Scotia, Canada is a world-leading example), so could it be possible here in Britain where community energy has become an important element of the renewable energy sector?
The idea of extending the capacity range allowed within the FiT for community projects, from 5MW to 10MW, was presented in DECC's Community Energy Strategy in January 2014. after consulting on this idea, it was eventually not translated into policy.
Scene co-director Vijay Bhopal is the first recipient of the Entrepreneur Award at the inaugural Scottish Renewables Young Professionals Green Energy Awards.
Vijay was among 11 winners at a glittering ceremony in Glasgow on May 28.
Vijay is one of the founders of Scene Consulting, a Social Enterprise focused on growing the community energy sector through project consultancy and research.
Set up in 2011, Scene have carried out detailed research and project development work in the community energy sector for a variety of public and private clients and studied and published on technological, social and economic aspects of community energy across the globe.
Scene visit a unique three turbine development in Lanarkshire, providing some thoughts on the modes of community energy and new models of shared ownership.
Yesterday, I was given four in-cohesive minutes to respond to the question, "Can the transition to a sustainable future can be locally led?". This is what I said:
First off, an observation: from a climate change mitigation point of view, it's not going particularly well. At least, if the yardstick of (dis-)progress is to be measured by human greenhouse gas emissions (the size of the actual flux of CO2 into the atmosphere).
In connection with my MSc thesis I am interning at Scene to develop an initial version of a framework to measure the socio-economic benefits of community renewables. My thesis aims to be a starting point for a potentially larger research project on the assessment of the socio-economic impacts of community renewables to be carried out by Emily Creamer (Edinburgh University) and Anna Harnmeijer (Scene).
From feasibility to construction - Scene have supported the development of a micro-hydro scheme in the Scottish Highlands, with the scheme recieving official FiT pre-accreditation in December 2014.
