Community Energy Schemes
Debate between Alan Brown and Ben Lake(2 years, 11 months ago)
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Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. Like other hon. Members, I commend the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) for bringing forward the debate. She set out clearly the benefits of community energy and how it would help on the path to net zero and to empower local communities. She also, importantly, set out the current barriers to setting up community energy companies. That was further illustrated by examples in the contributions of the hon. Members for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), for Waveney (Peter Aldous) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon), and the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn).
One barrier seems to be that it could cost upwards of £1 million to get set up for a generation licence. We have heard that the Licence Lite option under Ofgem simply is not working, so we need alternatives, and the Government must update rules that date back to the electricity network privatisation back at the end of the ’80s and the early ’90s. The hon. Member for Bath made important comments about bringing people on board. We need everybody to buy into the actions that we need to take to tackle climate change. If people get additional community benefits along the way, that is clearly a bonus.
Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)
On that point, as my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) has alluded to, not only do we need that community buy-in to allow for measures but, for too long, the energy system’s centralised nature has led to a disconnect between the consumer and the generation. By bringing them closer together, we may find that the typical consumer gains an appreciation of what is entailed in energy generation, which may bring beneficial behavioural changes on top of everything else.
Alan Brown
I completely agree. Actually, that touches on the point made by the hon. Member for Leeds Central that we have a grid system and a grid charging system still fundamentally based on where coal-fired power stations or nuclear power stations are sited. That needs a complete overhaul. I may touch on that a wee bit later.