Policy priorities
Funding and growth
- Secure government funding for the transition from the Community Energy Fund (CEF), now known as the GBE Community Fund (GBECF), to the Local Power Plan (LPP), sufficient to enable Community Energy to grow without hindrance, e.g., £30m for this financial year. The sector needs to return to doubling in size every year to reach the government’s 8GW local and community energy target. See our news piece on the allocation of £5m for this year to the GBECF.
- Get clarity around LPP objectives and mechanisms and ensure the LPP is about “more than generation.”
- Ensure community energy is included in relevant policy and funding provisions across government.
- Ensure the Warm Homes Plan (and future rounds of other funding such as the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme (PSDS)) references the importance of community energy, enables community energy to access funding and recommends that funded projects collaborate with community energy.
- Ensure Community Energy collaboration is retrospectively built into current capital funding including the £180m allocated to rooftop solar and £630m to PSDS.
- Open up the Energy Redress ’Main Fund’ to community businesses and introduce financial support to enable smaller businesses to access it.
- Tax relief: reinstate eligibility of ‘community energy generation’ for the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS).
- Open up ISAs to community shares and bonds.
Supportive policies
Policy recommendations are gathered under the following policy areas
- Routes to Market:
- Ofgem to sign off modification P441 to enable local supply behind the substation.
- A price stability mechanism is introduced (e.g., Community CfD, Community Export Guarantee or floor price).
- Shared Ownership: (see CEE/CES/CEW briefing)
- Mandatory offer of 20% ownership share to communities.
- Incentives (benefits) to developers (e.g., CfD uplift, planning, grid connection).
- Financial mechanisms to enable communities to participate.
- Grid connections:
- NESO includes community energy as a “designation” for prioritizing grid access in recognition of the ‘significant additional consumer, net zero and/or wider economic and/or societal benefits’ it offers (see NESO’s recommended Project Designation Methodology – p45).
- Capacity Building:
- Ensure the Energy Learning Network receives long-term support.
- Long-term core funding is provided for Community Energy Networks (CEE, CES, CEW) to support capacity building and facilitate growth of the sector.
- A hub and spoke model for knowledge sharing is developed where hubs of specialist knowledge are resourced to share through local spokes (within other CE organisations or NZ Hubs).
- Planning:
- Add net zero test to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) as promised in Labour’s Clean Energy Mission p8.
- Include community ownership as a ‘material consideration’ in the planning process.
- Under specific circumstances, enable community energy development on the green belt.
- Local Authority Collaboration:
- DESNZ/GBE to encourage, incentivise, mandate, and create conditionality for local authority collaboration in LPP funding.
- MHCLG to encourage local authorities to collaborate with and procure from Community Energy.
- MHCLG to clarify public sector procurement rules and enable social value to be factored in.
- Fix the issue with PPAs on schools
- Urgently find a long-term solution to the accounting rules problem which caused the DfE’s ‘pause’ on solar with PPAs on schools over the summer and continues to damage growth in the sector.
Other policy
- Ethical sourcing: Enable community energy to continue its lead “ensuring that slavery and human trafficking is not taking place in its business or supply chains” (recent amendment to the GBE Act).
- Benefits of Community Energy: Ensure that social value is well captured and built into policy, regulation, and funding.
- Law Commission coop consultation: Ensure that Law Commission reform and FCA regulation supports the growth of Community Energy.
CEE has updated its Policy Recommendations in relation to heat, energy efficiency and advice. These were created in consultation with CEE’s Energy Efficiency and Community Heat Working Groups and will be the subject of ongoing policy discussion with Energy Ministers.
For more detail on CEE’s policy programme, see our policy responses page.
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Joint letter with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on onshore wind [February 2023]
We signed this letter coordinated by Possible, along with at least 15 community energy colleagues, urging the government to open up onshore wind.
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CEE and others’ response to the onshore wind planning consultation [March 2023]
The government’s ‘Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill: reforms to national planning policy consultation’ claimed to relax planning constraint that have effectively banned onshore wind in England since 2015. Our response was co-signed by Power to Change, Plymouth Energy Community, en10ergy, Communities for Renewables CIC, Atlantic Energy Ltd, Bishop’s Castle Climate Action Group and the Othona Community.
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Letter to the DESNZ Secretary of State urging him to ‘turbo-charge’ community energy [March 2023]
We wrote to Grant Shapps on 8 March urging he take the advice in Chris Skidmore’s Net Zero Review and turbo-charge community energy in his revised Net Zero Strategy due at the end of March.