Enabling Community Energy

Duncan Baker Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Duncan Baker (North Norfolk) (Con) [V]]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I thank the hon. Members for bringing this debate. My nearby colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous), has been a real champion for this cause.

There is no doubt that we are world leaders in decarbonising. Our target to go further and faster by cutting carbon emissions by 78% by 2035 is now enshrined in law. To get to that target, we all have to play a part. That is why I support enabling community energy. Giving powers to local communities to play their role is vital for many reasons—we have already heard some of them.

At the top level, we want total buy-in from the community, not just in contributing to decarbonising with innovative and imaginative schemes such as those we have heard about, but also so local communities can create their own income streams by selling green power to the grid. The role is even bigger than that, because I wonder what part they can play in helping to fill the energy gap. Local sourcing and generation can play a significant role—its potential is vast.

I sit on the Environmental Audit Select Committee. Our technological innovations and climate change inquiry has examined the subject, and our report clearly suggests that, with greater public engagement on net zero, more financing, local authority engagement and a reduction of regulatory barriers, community energy has enormous potential for real growth. That enormous potential gives us the opportunity to fill the energy gap.

If we think about the amount of power we will need for the grid to charge electric vehicles in future, for instance, it will be phenomenal. That is why we are already aiming to produce 40 GW of wind power by 2030. The more community energy projects there are, the more we can meet that demand and help stabilise peaks in demand.

My constituents in North Norfolk have local supply constraints: we are rural, fuel poverty is a serious issue, and there are significant problems with a lack of connection to mains gas. On top of that, my community also bears the serious issue that it has the largest concentration of offshore windfarms, whose cable corridors are being chased through the countryside, and from which we have little economic benefit.

If Germany can get community energy schemes to work and the complexity of market obstacles can be overcome, why can we not do that here? The benefits of local employment, greater awareness and a drive to give licensing power to local authorities so that local communities can play their role will all add to the notion that we can continue to drive the cost of production of power down and continue to hit our net zero targets. It is really heartening to see cross-party support for this. I hope the Government can really begin to embrace the situation and bring community energy to the fore.