Towards community ownership of energy

We should be moving away from centralised energy generation to the kind of co-owned infrastructure used in Scandinavia.

The debate about energy, rather like the recent debate about water shortages during the recent downpour, is still frustratingly dominated by old-fashioned centralised thinking.

The water falls everywhere and lies about in great flood pools on the fields, while the centralised water infrastructure struggles with a drought. In the same way, the wind and sun play on every roof in the country, but we are still bogged down in the debate about capital-intensive plant.

Don?t get me wrong. We will still need a grid, and need power stations. The point is that the idea of a massive decentralisation of energy generation, to every home, every roof, every street light, still seems to be beyond the imagination of the energy planners.

In the same way, the debate is about huge wind farms off the coast, the acceptability of wind infrastructure on our hills, and how to construct a guaranteed price subsidy system that can suit both micro-generation and the old-fashioned nuclear mammoths ? with the danger that it will suit neither.

Some of us certainly yearn for the certainties of the great semi-Soviet monoliths that used to plan our energy ? and actually failed to plan effectively ? like the little-lamented Central Electricity Generating Board. Ah yes, come back Walter Marshall, all is forgiven...

But the problem with this obsession with centralised plants is that it misses the great opportunity, currently being used so effectively in Scandinavia, for us to be able to co-own the infrastructure that generates our energy.

Luckily, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have produced a report that begins to redress the balance.

Their argument also introduces a proposal that goes beyond the Scandinavian model of mutual ownership, so that a proportion of the earnings from energy infrastructure goes to benefit the local community in other ways.

This means wind farms or solar farms like energy-based development trusts, part profit-making, but using those profits to run community centres and time banks.? It is hardly new ? but it is also hardly ever done.

That is the way forward for energy infrastructure. Individual ownership on our roofs and chimneys, yes.? Grids and back up energy generation at scale, certainly. But also the model that ought to be mainstream: mutual and community ownership of the means of energy production.

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