Green power to the people

Stuart Phelps opens the door to Cafe Conscious, a busy coffee shop in the middle of Barton Hill estate in Bristol. As he steps in, staff and customers alike turn around to greet him. He’s come to talk about the struggles facing people living here, their distrust of the council, and a community vision to build a huge vertical solar farm on the tower blocks.

The cafe is a hub of activity for other reasons, too. On Tuesday evenings, another residential campaign – East Bristol Open Roads – meets here to oppose the council’s low-traffic neighbourhood plans. Right-wing politicians are ramping up rhetoric criticising policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions, with Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accused of starting a “culture war on climate”. In this light, it might seem that the two community groups in Barton Hill would slot into opposing sides: one in opposition to change and one in favour. Instead, the relationship between them is quite different, offering a potentially important lesson for decision-makers when paving the road to net zero.

Barton Hill is among the most deprived areas in the country. Most residents identify as Muslim and non-white, and more than half of the children there are growing up in poverty. The estate area has a history of mobilising over energy projects. Back in 2017, a resident-led campaign chased off planning applications for two gas power plants, one of which was to be built just 100 metres from a nursery school. This battle helped set the estate on a new path towards community-owned energy.

Community energy describes groups of people who come together to buy, manage and/or generate renewable energy, or to reduce energy use. Projects can vary in size and structure, from solar panels on the roof of a community centre to an onshore wind turbine or, in the case of Barton Hill, a battery storage project co-owned by Bristol Energy Cooperative. With a strong emphasis on community benefit and participation, the sector has huge potential to raise public support for renewable energy generation. Successful projects can replicate this model by allocating revenues to help other community energy groups grow, which is what happened in Barton Hill.

A grant generated via the battery helped Stuart and others set up Barton Heat, a community organisation which set out to find a way to create renewable energy to serve the residents’ needs. Through partnerships with several universities, feasibility studies have been conducted to assess what shape the projects could take. One idea is to set up a local energy cooperative, with residents co-designing and managing a renewable energy project for the eight tower blocks.

Inequality and distrust

One of the tower blocks on the estate is Barton House. In 2023, concerns over structural integrity prompted the council to evacuate 400 of its residents overnight, leaving people traumatised. “I was there that night. It was sort of like a dream,” Fadumo Farah, community activist and resident representative of Barton House told me on the phone. “I grew up in a war zone in Somalia. We used to run out in the middle of the night all the time. It was very triggering for me.”

After months in temporary accommodation, highlighted in one report as unclean and overcrowded, families were eventually told to return to their homes. “We have a real feeling of segregation,” Fadumo continued. “Most people in the high rises are Global Majority,” a collective term for people who are black, brown, mixed heritage or indigenous to the global south. “There is mould and damp. The children are going through respiratory issues, anxiety, all those things. The East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood trial added another layer,” she said. “Right now it is being forced on us … There is all this inequality being created.”

Fadumo was talking about a trial scheme run by Bristol City Council, which aims to stop drivers cutting through residential areas, including Barton Hill. “Liveable Neighbourhoods can make communities quieter, safer, healthier and improve air quality for everyone,” the council say on their website. “We are working with people who live, work, study and travel through east Bristol to design people-friendly streets.” But not everyone is happy. “Some residents felt boxed in, not listened to. Trust in change has worn thin,” Fadumo said. Among some of the concerns raised over the road closures were that businesses would not be able to receive deliveries, and disabled people could not use their cars. Protests early this year put a brief pause on the plan, which has since resumed its roll-out.

Back at Cafe Conscious, Stuart sips his coffee. “It is the feeling of being powerless rather than any sense of being ‘anti-net zero’ which lies at the heart of this anger,” he says. The government is committed to reaching net zero by 2050, which means building more renewable energy generation. Central to this is Labour’s GB Energy Bill, which sets up an investment body to fund such projects. But as energy bills continue to soar, it is becoming increasingly important for people to see the material benefits of the
energy transition.

“GB Energy was such a popular policy going into the election,” said Sarah Nankivell, director of research and strategy at think tank Common Wealth. “The trust was there. The public supported it and it had backing. Now there is an increasingly dwindling window: if people don’t see any concrete benefit from GB Energy (and net zero by extension), instead they just see their energy bills going up and up over months and years, the perception is going to be that it was at best something that was a waste of money and didn’t happen, and at worst something harmful to household living standards.”

The rise of community energy

Improving living standards is the theme that unites Barton Heat and East Bristol Open Roads. In fact, both groups are evolving to become different arms – one on campaigning and one on sustainable energy – of the same organisation, the Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Forum. “People want a better neighbourhood with less pollution, better services and better chances for their kids, and are tired of imposed ‘solutions’ that actually benefit everyone but them,” Stuart added.

Barton Heat is all about facilitating ways for locals to design their own energy supply, brainstorming ideas together. One requirement, for example, is that residents are able to stay in their homes while the project is being constructed. This might affect which ideas are feasible. “What we need is imagination,” Stuart said. “People say change is difficult but change is never difficult if you’re giving people what they want.”

Research suggests that, generally speaking, community energy is indeed what most people want. A poll of nearly 5,000 people in Britain, published in January by Common Wealth, showed that 60 per cent of people would support a community-owned renewable energy project in their area, compared to 40 per cent for a privately owned one.
Currently, community-owned energy is a small sector, with plenty of room to grow. In 2023, there were around 580 organisations across Britain, according to data from Community Energy England. These contributed £12.9 million to local economies from organisational spending and grants, with a capacity to generate 400 megawatts of energy.

After years of obstructive policies, there was a lot of hope that the Labour Party’s new vision of home-grown renewable energy to replace expensive imported gas would herald a new era for the sector. By tapping funding streams that were outlined in the GB Energy Bill, the Local Power Plan promises to support local authorities and community groups to vastly expand community-owned projects as a key part of the road to net zero. Its aim is to ramp up community energy to 8 gigawatts – enough to power up to 4.35 million homes – over the next five years.

Participation for positive change

But funding is only part of the challenge. For community-owned energy projects to succeed, consent has to be granted for construction, and trust needs to be built, so that residents feel their voice matters. That means opening up the sector to people who might not normally get involved and encouraging open discussion in both rural and urban areas. Most community energy groups follow the co-operative structure and raise money through share offers. But if the main route to membership is limited to financial investment, that puts obvious limitations on the demographic.

“We knew generally the sector was skewed old, male and white, but we didn’t know why beyond guesses,” said Nick Stromberg from the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE), which conducted a research project with community energy group Repowering London last year. The project started after Repowering experimented with a share offer. To encourage more people to join, they asked for a minimum investment of £1. Despite this, uptake was low. “We found the idea of investment was a big barrier at the beginning but there were other factors, too, like lack of integration into … different communities in terms of culture and activism,” Nick said. One conclusion was to find ways to participate that weren’t financial. These included taking part in training sessions on cooperative business models and how to spot good roof space for solar panels.

The findings were very locally rooted, he added. For the sector to expand, there’s a need for more accurate and representative data. Repowering London has published a toolkit for building more inclusive community energy cooperatives, for other groups to use. Applying a participatory research approach, the project recruited two well-known and trusted community members from North Kensington and Newham. These women conducted engagement activities using co-design techniques, which aimed to encourage participants to shape solutions around their desires and needs. Findings from the research were integrated into the launch of Community Energy Newham’s first share offer in March.

Another project, also organised through CSE and run in partnership with community energy co-ops across south-west England, targets a different demographic.

Future Energy Landscapes focuses on semi-rural populations where larger renewable energy projects could be built. At workshops, participants are divided into groups and asked to decide where they would like to see different projects built. CSE then calculate how much of the local area’s energy needs these would meet and how much could be sold to the grid. The process is designed to give participants as much agency as possible and give them the chance to imagine what a local energy project could do for them.

The workshops work best when there are different opinions in the room so that the organisers are not simply “preaching to the converted”, as Neil Best, a senior planner at CSE said. “One of the reasons that FEL [Future Energy Landscapes] was created in the first place was because there had been, in the mid-2010s, a rising amount of conflict between communities and the development of renewables, especially wind turbines,” he continued. So far, no projects have been built as a direct result of the workshops, but with more taking place this year, that could change soon.

Income for the community

On the other side of Bristol, another community is reaping the rewards from a project that was over a decade in the making. Last year, the resident-led energy project Ambition Lawrence Weston made history when construction finished on their community-owned onshore wind turbine – the largest in England. Lawrence Weston is a post-war housing estate on the north-west outskirts of the city. Mark Pepper is one of the co-founders of the project. I met him at an impressive new community building that opened last autumn, paid for, in part, through community-owned energy.

The story started in around 2010, when a group of residents got fed up of seeing services dry up in their local area, and started to feel that they had become “the forgotten estate in Bristol”. Through door-knocking and holding workshops, they compiled a community plan, which gained legal clout via the Localism Act.

Unlike other consultations and surveys that residents had come across in the past – where people “parachuted in with their own agenda”, Mark says – this time it was neighbours asking neighbours. “That’s the beauty of training up our local residents; we all have a vested interest in doing what we were doing,” he adds. People are also more likely to respond when they’re approached by their neighbours, he adds.

These efforts led them to get involved with the construction of a community-owned solar farm, which in turn inspired them to explore the possibility of wind energy. It took four more years of hard work to build support to get around the highly prohibitive planning restrictions, but in 2023, the turbine was completed. The first annual payment of around £100,000 came through in February, from the energy company Ovo. The residents decide where the money goes, through regular consultations.

Mark says he has seen a change in the way people in Lawrence Weston feel about how their voices are heard. “People are not only engaged with us more now, they’re engaged with the political system,” he says. “We’ve seen the figures for election turnouts increase. I think that’s a combination of them feeling more empowered and having a better understanding of their rights. For example, the Neighbourhood Development Plan needed to go through a local referendum. We had more people turn out for that than for the local by-elections or national elections. They relate to it a lot more.” He adds: “We can’t even afford to turn our gas boilers on, let alone rip them out and put in an air source heat pump,” which the government is promoting. “Climate action and community development are exactly the same thing. It took us a long time to realise this. So for example, climate action groups want to see a reduction in carbon to save the planet. We want to see a reduction in carbon to save money in our pocket. A really well insulated home is going to save on the bills. It’s the same goal.”

A lot of people on the estate don’t even know about the wind turbine, which is located some distance away, he says. What matters most is that they’re seeing positive change in their area, whether it’s through the new community hub and playgrounds being built or the work being done to improve the energy efficiency of homes.

It’s a lesson that the government would do well to listen to as it tries to keep public opinion on side. As the cost-of-living crisis bites ever harder, the window of trust to deliver on GB Energy and the net zero goal is closing.

Back in Barton Hill, Fadumo is feeling positive about how the community engagement work for Barton Heat has been going. She describes one workshop, where university students discussed innovative ways of positioning solar panels. “But what really stood out was how beautiful it looked,” she said. “It was clear they weren’t just thinking about technology, but about pride, place and people.”

This article is from New Humanist’s Summer 2025 issue. Subscribe now.