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CEE comment on GBE Community Fund and Partnerships Grant
Matt Vickers, Chief Executive of Community Energy England, said in response to the announcement of the GB Energy Community Fund and Partnerships Grant,
“Community Energy England welcomes the GBE Community Fund as the first step in the £1bn investment in community energy and local energy in the Local Power Plan. This will enable community enterprises across the country to deliver projects which will reduce bills, create a more resilient and cleaner energy system and most importantly keep the benefits of energy in the communities where it’s generated. We’ve long advocated for the new Partnerships Grant so councils and community enterprises can work together to transform places.”
The Community Fund is worth £20 million, an increase on previous rounds (although this time it includes Wales and Northern Ireland and only funds generation projects). The application deadline on 12 November is tight. CEE has asked when, and how much, the next round of grant funding will be and urged the government to ensure consistency so that the sector can plan.
This announcement is a first step – a “down payment on a £1bn Great British Energy programme” as the Prime Minister called it. CEE is engaging strategically with GB Energy which is working hard on investment, loan and capacity building schemes designed to support community ownership.
The grants offer community organisations feasibility (£40k) and development grants (£100k). We welcome the new offer of an element of capital funding (up to £3 million or 50% of capex) but we have made clear to the government that this cannot be at the expense of development funding to enable all the viable projects proposed to move forward. The development grants are the best use of seed funding: they will kickstart hundreds of projects and organisations and will multiply the money many times.
CEE has campaigned to government from the beginning that collaboration between local authorities and community energy must be built in so we welcome the GBE Partnerships Grants to support this. The grants offer Local Authorities (partnering with communities) similar feasibility (£40k) and development grants (£100k) to the Community Fund. However £5 million shared between 400 local authorities is only £12,500 each. This will constrain the ability of “People’s Power” to be felt in “every postcode” and is another product of the constraint on grant funding imposed by the Treasury.
Whilst support for projects is welcome and will unleash extraordinary activity, we have emphasised to GBE that support for people and organisations will be vital to meet the challenges of growing at pace.
The GBE CF only supports generation projects, excluding energy efficiency, retrofit and heat projects – which we fought hard to get included in the 2023 CEF. Measures to save energy and retrofit homes deliver more bill and carbon savings and health and well-being benefits.
Community energy is brilliant at devising Smart Local Energy Systems which include many elements, such as generation, retrofit, storage, and heat, working together as more than the sum of their parts to deliver community-led flexibility and other system transformation benefits alongside multiple community benefits. We have campaigned to government that these complex ‘more than generation’ Smart Local Energy Systems need to be supported by joined-up working across the Local Power Plan and the Warm Homes Plan. These are both now the responsibility of Martin McCluskey, Minister for Local Energy and Jobs, and we are assured that this coordination is a government priority. We have requested a meeting.
The community energy sector wants to grow exponentially, as it did between 2014 and 2017, to meet the government’s ambitious targets of 8GWs of community and local power in the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan and 1000 projects in the Local Power Plan. CEE is working hard with GBE and government to ensure this happens.