A conference on community energy and academia, 5th April 2016

This conference jointly designed by Pure Leapfrog and Community Energy England brought together academics from around the United Kingdom to foster a much-needed conversation surrounding higher education and research conducted around community energy.

There is an urgent need to build a larger, more unified and better-organised evidence base for community owned energy. This will support the advancement of locally owned and managed clean energy, energy efficiency and demand reduction. The event began to highlight the existing excellent research that is taking place across the UK that may be useful to practitioners.
It is envisaged that a more coordinated approach will support community energy  by channeling activities, research and funding and in turn result in R&D that becomes materially useful to the sector. As hubs of environmental sustainability research and development, higher education institutions are ideally placed to come together and coordinate such an effort and drive innovation.