Kate Gilmartin’s keynote speech at the Community Energy Awards 2025
The next chapter for community energy
At our Community Energy Awards in November 2025, Kate Gilmartin, CEE co-founder and director, GB Energy director, director of Rossendale Valley Energy, leading on Net Zero Terrace Streets, delivered the following keynote speech. It sets the campaigning agenda for CEE to ensure community energy is central and indispensable to the radical energy system transformation over the coming years.
“Good evening and thank you for inviting me here today. It’s a real pleasure to be with you all – and as a founder member of Community Energy England eleven years ago and now serving as a Director, moments like this always make me reflect on where we started, where we are now, and where we’re heading.
Because community energy isn’t just a sector. It isn’t just a movement. It’s a statement – and a vision – of the future of energy. A vision where communities own assets, where revenue returns to people and places, where communities have agency, a stake, a voice, and an anchor from which to mobilise wider local action.
And those attributes matter more than ever.
We are living through febrile, polarised times. Cost-of-living pressures are biting. Too many households can’t heat their homes. And this is the inevitable result of living with the consequences of a system designed for another era.
At the same time we are accelerating further into the digital revolution which is accelerating the energy evolution.
We are in a profound system shift: from centralised, fossil-based, infrastructure towards a world built on local power, digital visibility, and collective intelligence.
Electrification of everything is happening at pace across the world.
Not because of climate politics – but because electrons are simply more efficient than burning fuels. Electrification exposes the inefficiency of the combustion system we’ve relied on for 100 years and highlights the stark inefficiencies of the red herrings that are Hydrogen and Carbon Capture Usage and Storage (CCUS).
This isn’t ideology. This is physics. This is economics. This is inevitability.
So where does that leave community energy?
Front and centre.
For more than a decade, the UK policy has been to deploy volumes of electrons, without thinking where or when they were needed. We built generation faster than networks could absorb it. We didn’t invest enough in storage. We treated people as passive consumers rather than active participants.
And the result is exactly what we see today:
curtailment, constraints, higher bills, and communities locked out of the value they help create.
But the next decade will look completely different.
The future system will be local-first, flexible, smart, visible and digitally integrated.
Behind-the-transformer trading. Real-time balancing. 24/7 matching. Domestic storage. Flexible tariffs. Neighbourhood aggregation and coordination of heat pumps and EVs.
In that world, community energy isn’t a niche actor – it becomes the operating system.
It is the model that delivers what the future needs most: local balance, local flexibility, local ownership, and local trust.
And trust matters. Because trust is one of the rarest commodities in the energy sector today. Community energy is one of the very few places where people feel genuine integrity, genuine connection, and genuine confidence that value will flow back into the community rather than away from it.
If we want to decarbonise homes and streets… If we want to electrify heat and transport… If we want people to participate in flexibility… Then we need a fairer-share logic. We need community ownership.
We need a positive-sum model where people see real benefits – not just rhetoric – from the energy transition.
Communities need to know the transition won’t leave them colder or poorer. And community energy is one of the few mechanisms that can deliver that guarantee.
And this brings me to what I call the missing middle – the space between national wholesale markets and household-level action where huge amounts of local value currently leak out of the system.
For decades, we’ve priced energy as if all electrons are equal – and as if all networks are the same. We’ve treated community-generated electrons as identical to power shipped hundreds of miles across a transmission line. PPA prices are set off national wholesale markets that tell us nothing about local need, local constraints, or local system benefits.
And in that gap – that missing middle – community energy has been structurally undervalued.
Local generation reduces losses. Local balancing reduces constraints. Local flexibility reduces system costs. Local ownership reduces bills and increases trust.
But none of that value returns to the people or places that create it. Not yet.
To unlock that missing middle, we need local matching, local markets, local price signals, local visibility – and a framework that rewards communities for making the entire system cheaper, cleaner and more resilient*.
P441 is a vital step in this direction.
It finally recognises that an electron generated and consumed locally is worth more than one shipped across the transmission grid (with 7-12% losses) . And unlocking that value is how we take community energy from the margins to the mainstream.
So what’s next….
China is electrifying at breathtaking speed. The global south is leapfrogging fossil systems entirely. The US talks “drill baby drill”, but deployment on the ground is all about electrification.
Technology revolutions don’t reverse. They accelerate.
We must keep pushing towards the future we know we need to see.
Our sector has been buffeted by politicians and policy swings. We rode the FIT wave and then slammed into the FIT buffer. We’ve had to scrape projects over the line through behind-the-meter models and private wire. But we know – absolutely know – that local generation is worth far more than the £70/MWh PPAs offered today.
To access that full value and unchain ourselves from the political headwinds we must unlock the missing middle, through creating visibility, through digitisation, aggregation and coordination*.
Community Energy England was built for this moment – to ensure that as the energy system transforms, communities remain not recipients but leaders. Not passengers, but owners. Not afterthoughts, but co-designers of the future.
Over the last eleven years, I’ve had the privilege of working with people who are equal parts pragmatists and idealists – innovators, problem-solvers, social justice stalwarts. People who know this isn’t just an engineering challenge; it is a democratic one.
If we want a fair, resilient, efficient, low-carbon energy system, community energy cannot sit at the edges. It must sit at the centre.
So thank you all and especially Emma and the team, for your work, your persistence, your creativity and your commitment. Here’s to the next decade, in which CEE will help define a smarter, more flexible, more democratic and more equitable UK energy system.”
