Use Decentralised Energy

Izzy: Hello and welcome to the Carbon Copy Podcast with me, Isabelle Sparrow. 

Brad: And me, Bradley Ingham. 

Izzy: We’re back with our penultimate episode in our Do Something Bigger series, where we explore 25 local actions that are helping communities across the UK tackle climate change. 

Brad: Today’s episode is called Use Decentralised Energy. And it’s all about taking power, quite literally, into our own hands. Because when we talk about the energy transition, it’s not just about swapping fossil fuels for renewables, it’s also about who owns and controls that energy. 

Izzy: There are just six big companies that dominate around 70% of the UK electricity market. But across the country, alternative solutions are happening through community-owned wind turbines, solar cooperatives, and local heat networks that keep both energy and profits close to home. 

Brad: According to Community Energy England’s latest State of the Sector 2025 report, there are now over 600 community energy organisations across the UK, together generating 411 megawatts of renewable electricity, enough to power more than 212,000 homes. 

Izzy: That’s the equivalent of cutting 120,000 tonnes of carbon every year, all while reinvesting millions back into local economies and community benefit funds. 

Brad: But despite that growth, the report warns that progress is slowing. To reach the government’s target of 8 gigawatts of community and locally owned energy by 2030, the sector needs to double in size every year, a huge challenge, but one that could transform how we produce and share energy across the UK. 

Izzy: It’s important to remember that it’s not just about cutting carbon either. Local energy projects mean greater resilience during power cuts, lower bills for households, and gives communities more control to shape their energy future.  

Brad: Before we go any further, I think it’s probably worth explaining how our current energy system actually works, because it’s not exactly simple. 

Izzy: Yeah, right now most of our electricity in the UK flows through the national grid. The power generated at big power stations like gas, nuclear or increasingly offshore wind, is then transmitted through huge high voltage cables across the country. 

Brad: Once it gets near where it’s needed, it passes to regional operators called DNOs… that’s short for Distribution Network Operators. They’re the companies that take that high-voltage power, step it down, and deliver it to your street, your home and your kettle when you’re making a lovely brew!  

Izzy: This system was designed decades ago, for a one-way flow of energy from a few big producers, down to millions of passive consumers. But now, things are changing fast. 

Brad: Exactly. With solar panels on roofs, community wind turbines, and new battery storage popping up all over the place, we’re no longer just using electricity we’re generating it too. The grid suddenly has to handle power moving both ways. 

Izzy: And this is where decentralised energy comes in. It’s about shifting from a top-down system to a network of local hubs where power is generated, stored, and shared close to where it’s used. It makes the whole system more resilient, more efficient, and crucially, more democratic. 

Brad: So let’s get into it, our first guest today is artist and filmmaker Hilary Powell, who together with her partner and fellow artist, Dan Edelstyn, created Power Station. This amazing project, and now film, was about using creativity to share a powerful message about local energy and ownership. Here she is talking about how it all began. 

Hilary: So Power Station began by reading works like Power to the People by Ashley Dawson in America, that looked at reclaiming the energy commons and then Ann Pettifor and the Green New Deal’s group, A Case for the Green New Deal and a sentence like leapt out of that was “every building a power station” and this idea that if we didn’t want to repeat the power monopolies of fossil capitalism, if we are going to make a just transition, then the way we look at our energy needs to be like community-owned, local, kind of a reconnection with what we consume and also with our own power as communities to make change in the face of political inaction.  

So Power Station just began with the idea that could we turn our street into a power station and kind of use our street as a microcosm for a bigger kind of societal commentary or an issue. So we basically wanted to try and get our street to be powered by solar, you know, with bigger ambitions for heat pumps and community energy. And it was just a matter of going door to door to our neighbours and asking who might be in for getting involved. But always it was about a story about this as well. Like we from the very beginning it was framed as this is going to be a film, like it was kind of a we set ourselves that challenge like can we turn our street into a power station? How can we tell a story of a community coming together to take action and document all the trials and tribulations of that and particularly the barriers to action that we faced. We were sharing with the community as we went and we’re now released a feature film that kind of tells that story. 

And I think it’s important the storytelling because you know lots of people are doing these amazing actions all around the country but they’re kind of going below the radar. So we wanted to create you know with our skills as filmmakers and artists a compelling kind of contagious story of what it could look like if we actually came together and took control of the narrative around what we can afford and not as a society and where we need to invest. So we’ve kind of pretended to be the government really and unleashed this kind of investment on the street through various forms of crowdfunding and art making and spectacle to kind of tell that story and reach out across the nation through a feature film distribution. 

Izzy: I absolutely love this project and this idea, it’s such a beautiful way to involve people with community energy and it’s really quite a brave thing to just turn up at people’s houses to tell them about the idea. I wondered how the reality of trying to communicate with their neighbours in this way actually played out. 

Hilary: I think it was being in lockdown and that sense of possibility that emerged from the WhatsApp groups that sprung up but like people really wanting to like connect and help neighbours; although when we put it in the WhatsApp group it really went down like a lead balloon because it just sounded a bit ridiculous like who’s up for free solar and becoming a power station! [Laughs] It was like “Oh! No one’s reacting!” At the beginning lots of doors shut in our faces or just like the bemused looks but there was a core group of neighbours who became really enthusiastic and they actually did lots of the door knocking with us so we became a little street team on Saturday mornings going around. We always asked people are you up for the project but also are you up for being filmed which is another layer and are you up for putting up this poster and and we had a poster that said power station, which is quite enigmatic it wasn’t like, we’re starting a community, you know it wasn’t very descriptive but it really helped because people were like well what’s this power station and Dan was very good at saying “I’ve got blue tack we can put it up now” so we were so everyone had this there were loads of posters the windows were getting full so it really became more contagious. 

Our dream was that we’d all be linked up in a traditional kind of community energy shareholder kind of situation that we all shared the energy from rooftops, but legislation doesn’t allow that so actually every house that has the solar has their own individual systems, and the first wave that we raised money for from sleeping on our rooftop, Octopus actually were the installer. They are just quite small systems but so in the summer months, it’s mainly power in the house but there’s not so much capacity for storage, but there’s good tariffs. But the second wave where we worked with Pop Energy who are kind of embracing the street-by-street model that we were putting forward that actually there was there are great advantages to kind of not doing this of individual household doing it collectively. They have better battery systems, and they’re really nerding out on how much they can store and release to the system and we were working with local schools because we felt frustrated by the fact we couldn’t get our kind of dream street system working here at present. We work with Solar for Schools who have a national cooperative so we got solar panels onto schools and that was amazing because that was much more visible like how, because they make it very visible with their platform like how much the solar panels are generating because they use it as an education tool. So that was great so five local schools have got solar through us working with Solar for Schools. 

Brad: We’re now going to head slightly further south to Brighton and Hove to hear from Kayla Ente, Chief Executive of Brighton & Hove Energy Services Cooperative, or BHESCo for short. BHESCo are a community energy organisation that give advice to councils and communities on how to take a more structured and informed approach to decarbonising their communities. Kayla told us all about their revolutionary programme to help communities get access to solar power. 

Kayla: We’ve introduced a new programme called Solar Powered Communities. And this is a programme where for no upfront cost, the home, and they don’t even have to be the home-owner. They can be a tenant that gets their landlord’s permission. We would design and install solar panels and battery storage for that household for no upfront cost. 

And the way that the programme is designed is that the system is designed in a way to maximise the generation, combine that with storage so that the householder gets as much benefit from that clean renewable energy as possible. They also get all of the rights to be compensated for the export of that electricity to the grid. That price can be as low as 17.9p per kilowatt hour. The average price of electricity now offered by energy suppliers is about 24p. So, they’re saving immediately on their solar electricity, not paying anything upfront, in most cases, sometimes because the design is expensive, they have to pay a small upfront cost. It’s no more than £750 usually, and if that was a real problem, we could work out something for that householder. The important thing is that people are getting access to clean renewable energy that they can use in their home for no upfront cost. So they don’t have to have the money saved. 

Izzy: This is a very impressive offering that BHESCo are giving to their local community at a household level, but we wanted to know what was being done on a larger scale to address the issue of locally generated energy. 

Kayla: We wrote a decarbonisation plan for a village that’s within the boundaries of Brighton and Hove. But it’s kind of a rural village that’s outside the urban area. And so what we did is we projected how much electricity the whole village would use if they all changed to electric vehicles and switched to heat pumps from their gas boilers. And then we made a projection of how we could generate that electricity. 

So we optimised the rooftop solar, and then we looked at a wind turbine. And we sized the wind turbine for the future energy needs. And now we’re looking at, okay, we know there’s going to be constraints on the local grid of the local network. And so we would incorporate battery storage for that. And then finally looking at how we can sell that electricity to residents using the grid as the means of delivering that electricity. So really working with the grid operator to be able to sell that electricity locally. Now that is only available through an Energy Local type of model at the moment. They’re a social enterprise based in the north of England. And if we have to, we would work with them to do it. But there are some constraints for us in terms of the cost and the governance that is required right now under the regulations in order to be able to make that happen. And so hopefully the regulator will change the regulations to allow community energy organisations, social enterprises like BHESCo to sell that electricity locally. 

You can’t put up a wind turbine overnight. You need to get planning permission. That can take quite a long time. I mean, on average, I think it would take at least three years to do that. The wind turbine would generate significant benefits for that community. So we would set up a community benefit fund and the local organisations, the local groups could decide how that money is going to be spent. Are they going to plant hedgerows, trees, woodlands, upgrade their community, village hall, all these decisions. And it creates money to drive the local economy. It’s kind of a win-win on every level. There’s no way that people don’t benefit from these projects. It’s just a question of changing the established rules and regulations, which in many ways are protecting the energy suppliers and keeping us enslaved to a centralised energy system and to the prices that energy suppliers charge. 

(music in) 

Izzy: Does your community have the potential to generate its own power? Maybe your street could be the next Power Station? 

Brad: Why not share this episode with your neighbours or head to carboncopy.eco, where you’ll find stories and guides on how to start your own community energy scheme, from rooftop solar to shared battery storage. 

Izzy: Because when we keep power local, we strengthen our communities too. 

(music cut) 

Izzy: While organisations like BHESCo are making community power possible, much of our energy infrastructure in the UK is really pretty outdated. And that’s where our next guest comes in. 

Brad: That’s right, way, way up north in the Orkney Islands, a pioneering initiative called ReFLEX has been helping households adopt electric vehicles, solar panels, heat pumps and batteries – essentially to create a whole mini energy system on the islands. Gareth Davies from Aquatera the business leading on the ReFLEX programme told us about how Orkney has been a place of renewable innovation for many years. 

Since the early 2000s, there’s been quite a widely held aspiration within Orkney for there to be local wind farms that could benefit the local community as well as offer clean energy. 

Those projects, if they’re profitable, obviously would generate revenue that could then be either used for local good or help back initiatives relating to the journey to net zero or used for wider initiatives, within the community as was decided. 

Orkney’s been a place where smaller scale community initiatives have been taking place for probably 20 years now. And actually, there’s also been local ownership consortiums where it hasn’t necessarily been a community, but it’s been a group of people from within the community that have financed projects and then developed them. So the level of local ownership of turbine capacity in Orkney is very high. 

The ReFLEX project as we call it was funded by UKRI under the PIFA program and that project aimed to recruit customers from our communities into a system of support which ReFLEX was providing to help enable transition to happen more quickly and more smoothly for those customers. And what we were able to do was to set up ReFLEX so that it could offer tariffs, it could offer support for getting chargers or heat pumps or solar panels and things like that put into people’s houses. We set it up so that people could get access to electric vehicles under a lease option or under purchase of secondhand options and basically trying to fill some of the gaps that existed in our supply chain in terms of making it easier for people to get access to these transition solutions. 

We had a thousand members that signed up in Orkney by having that mass, the critical mass, to be able to go for example to our DNO and say look we’ve got 300 customers who want to adopt batteries or we’ve got 200 customers that want to put solar on the system.  

Brad: It’s such an ambitious project, but Gareth also told us that there have been some challenges along the way. 

Unfortunately, what we ended up doing was getting stymied by the system. The rules and regulations kept putting barriers up for us and that meant that we found it very difficult to deliver the collective system approach and it was almost as though the system wasn’t ready for that kind of innovation which was somewhat ironic given that the PIFA program was designed to bring innovation into the whole energy system. So although it blocked us doing that, the interest was so great that many of the householders went and did it themselves on a one-by-one basis. And so for example we ended up in 2020 when ReFLEX started we didn’t really have any battery solar systems in Orkney. We’ve now probably got 200 houses with battery solar systems but all of them are uncontrollable and not able to be used for balancing, but they’ve helped the householders drive down their bills and provide those individual benefits but there’s no collective benefit from it. 

Izzy: So these challenges of regulation are something that’s affecting our ability to reach net zero across the whole country. Gareth spoke about the bigger picture in terms of the steps that need to be taken by any place looking to decarbonise at scale. 

Gareth: There were a number of obstacles and challenges towards net zero. At the time, it was felt there might be some technical challenges in terms of having the technology available to do what was needed to be done. There was then accessibility to technology issues in terms of enabling householders or areas of the country to get access to the right technology at the right time and right place to enable net zero to take place. And one of the challenges there is the classic chicken and egg situation where you’re changing from a carbon-full to a carbon-empty system. So do you provide the infrastructure for the carbon-empty system in advance and then pull the users through? Or do you somehow take the users on a journey first and then provide the infrastructure to back them up? And by its nature, infrastructure that’s necessary for the transition has to be there before the transition takes place. And I think that that choreography of how much infrastructure? Is it universal or is it street by street, community by community? that was exactly where ReFLEX wanted to play and help canvas opinion about the willingness to change at times to shape opinion within sensible areas for change to happen, and to be an advocate for getting agencies and organisations to back that journey of change. 

Around 2022 we started a project called ICNZ, the Island Centre for Net Zero, which was a collaboration between Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles, under what’s called the Islands Deal, which is very similar to the city deals that you’ve heard about in other places. We wanted to give people visibility of their own carbon use in a way that was appropriate for islands. And we found that the existing calculators were basically based on kind of urban settings and they didn’t acknowledge things like ferry movements or using an aircraft regularly for travel. We don’t have gas. We don’t have trains. 

The calculators didn’t reflect the lives that we lived as islanders. So we developed an island calculator and we’ve rolled that out at an individual level, but also at a business level. And latterly, we’ve been working on that as a community calculator as well. 

Izzy: So I think what Gareth is saying is that it’s really important for communities to understand how they use their energy and much of it they need and that can influence the infrastructure that’s need and the regulation to support it.  

Brad: All of this costs a lot to implement though, and without strong backing from local or national government, it can be hard to get going. Hilary told us how she and Daniel raised the money to make Power Station happen. 

Hilary: Our biggest challenge for this was always like we might have pretended to be the government but we did not have like any finance to pull off this kind of street transformation so we did start off printing money as artworks to raise money and we raised quite a bit through that to keep going but we needed a bigger capital injection to move forward with this promise of this first wave of solar. So we decided that we needed to do something drastic, and we decided that you know we would camp out or sleep on our rooftop and attach that kind of action or performative action to a crowdfunder and stay up on the roof until we reached our target amount of £100,000. And we did that in late November-December, in what we later found was the one of the coldest winters on record. But it was beautiful really because it was a way of like, we were kind of a beacon up on the rooftop. We set it up with, you know, like Bedknobs and Broomsticks kind of bed and patchwork, and astandard lamp, and people waved us from the train and from the street below. Our local community became even wider nationally because people were putting into the crowdfunder and sending messages of support. And so it really helped build the community. 

Currently all the grants that are available are so complicated in terms of means testing and EPC ratings and all these barriers to actually getting things done we’re like we just want this done across the board, you know we need to raise the money for everyone regardless of income, but in reality people who could afford to contribute wanted to contribute something. 

We were learning as we went along because we knew nothing about community energy or what was possible or not on streets when we started. So we’ve actually got a resource from  our power.film website where we have a membership site where people can access all of our learnings, and we have a like DIY guide that we’re sharing through a QR code on our film screenings that’s, that is exactly that like how to organise on your street. Not everyone wants to sleep on rooftops and make films but there are basic steps to take of, you know, what do you need to do to organise that first step, really the biggest barrier though is finance and we haven’t solved that, but I think just the act of getting together to even come together to start doing smaller steps towards an infrastructure project and just gain that confidence and knowledge really helps. You might not get the whole street first of all but like us we got the first 16, then people can see that evidence base of “Oh, yes they are saving on their bills” there are there is, you know, a benefit to this and there’s more confidence for then , a next wave to take action so I think it, it moves in waves really. 

Brad:  

I love that, and it definitely speaks to what we’re all about here at Carbon Copy. It only takes a few inspiring folk to lead the way, and then others will want to follow and to copy and get involved.  

Izzy: Yes, definitely. But, we mustn’t forget that a properly sustainable future needs to include and support everyone – not just those who have the means and capacity to take action for themselves. Gareth spoke more about this: 

Gareth: There are national government and local government expectations and aspirations for this energy transition to be just for everybody in the community. And that means geographically just as well as socially just in terms of inclusive within the communities. I think it’s fair to say that at the moment, we as communities have to fight really hard to get a place at the right table for our voices to be heard. 

And, you know, Orkney, Shetland and the West Isles as examples of island communities are very persistent and vocal at that and have been for a number of decades, which is in a way why we’ve been able to make the progress that we have and the supply chains that we have within the islands are so far ahead of other places. 

And we think the islanders in particular are even further ahead than Scotland in general in terms of the range of services we’ve got. One of the key decisions when it comes to the title of your programme is about making use of decentralised power is that our whole power system today has been predicated on connecting different parts of the country with big grid lines. And those grids are very expensive and they have a cost and they have an environmental implication. There is a future where certainly in the rural areas, a more dispersed household or sub-community level system can be foreseen, where inbuilt storage within smaller units is a part of that. And instead of pulling on the grid, you’re pulling on local batteries and things like that. So I think when we look at the costs that are happening and associated with some of the grid upgrades, we need to challenge ourselves to think about is it better to invest that billion pounds in storage rather than transmission connection and would we get a better service from it. 

Izzy:  Ultimately, the energy transition is powered by people, by communities and individuals who take action to make change happen. Kayla spoke about this and highlighted the important role that community energy organisations can play. 

Kayla: I think that really it’s about creating that mindset that we can change. We can make this change. We can make a change that is best for people and for the environment to improve society, to improve our quality of life. We just have to make that leap and do it. Community energy is social enterprise. Social enterprise means that we are not looking to maximise profits for the benefits of our shareholders and to continue the enrichment of already wealthy people. What we’re looking to do is flatten the curve a bit and give benefit back to people in the communities that make these important decisions to proceed with generating their own energy locally. 

And so what I would say is if you really understand what capitalism has done to people’s lives, and the chasm that has grown between the rich and the poor, and you want to do something about changing society, bringing society better together for the benefit of not only our health and well-being, your own health and well-being, and to create a future that your children can be really proud of and your grandchildren, and the one that your children and grandchildren want to participate in, then support community energy because we have your best interests in mind. We’re not trying to pull the wool over your eyes. We’re doing what it says on the tin. We are experts.  

My background is finance and economics. I’m a qualified accountant. I started my career in Deloitte and Touche in Ernst & Young. We’re not a bunch of hippies that are trying to talk about change without having the substance behind it. We have the technical and economic acumen in order to be able to make this change.  

And BHESCo is just one of 300 groups around the country of highly competent people who are saying we’re not going to tolerate energy suppliers and capitalism because the energy industry was privatised, unfortunately. Electricity should be a benefit that we all have access to. But 35,000 people at least die every year because they don’t have access to heat to keep warm enough in winter. So they get ill and they die. They’re mostly people over 60. We deal with a lot of people who have serious problems with their energy supplier, and some people sit in the dark. A lot of people are not aware of this, but I would say what is it, like 13% of the UK population are in energy poverty and have debts to their energy suppliers, so they can’t even switch. 

So why not take a chance and make a change and see what happens as a result of that? You’ve actually got nothing to lose at all. And only to gain and also to get a bit of faith again in humanity. I think that is also really important because capitalism has created a lack of community cohesion, I would say, and a bit of suspicion. And let’s put some more faith back in humanity.  

Izzy: That seems like a beautiful note to end on, and I have to say twenty four episodes into this year, I certainly have a lot more faith in humanity than I did in January! 

Brad: Yeah, same, it’s been a very uplifting, energising series so far! 

Izzy: So what have we learned today? Well, decentralised energy isn’t just about rooftop solar panels or community wind turbines, it’s about reimagining the whole system. One where power doesn’t just flow one way, and neither does the money. 

Brad: Exactly. All the projects we’ve looked at today show what’s possible when communities take control. Local generation, local storage and local benefit. 

Izzy: And it’s not just a climate issue, but a fairness issue. Because when energy is generated and owned locally it lower bills, builds resilience, and strengthens the places that we live. 

Brad: Exactly, if we want to reach net zero and keep the lights on, it’s clear that power needs to be shared both literally and figuratively! The future isn’t centralised, it’s connected, creative and centred in communities.  

Izzy: That’s it for today’s episode, Use Decentralised Energy. If you’re feeling inspired to start a community energy project where you live, head to carboncopy.eco, where you’ll find guides, case studies, and stories from across the UK. And as always, get in touch or leave us a review at carboncopy.eco that’s E C O, we’d love to hear from you. 

Brad: You’ve been listening to Do Something Bigger from the Carbon Copy Podcast. It was written and presented by me, Bradley Ingham. 

Izzy: And me, Isabelle Sparrow. Huge thanks to our guests today – Hilary Powell from Power Station, Kayla Ente from BHESCo, and Gareth Davies from REFLEX Orkney. 

Our next and final episode in this series is Be More Inclusive, where we’ll be exploring how opening up environmental action to everyone can make the movement stronger, fairer, and more creative. We’ll see you then and until next time, keep sharing the power!