University of Exeter, Geography, December 2012 Environment & Sustainability Research Group

OVERVIEW This research project studied 9 UK urban decentralised energy projects led by actors from the public, private, third and community sectors. Findings include: Drivers behind the projects were

highly diverse and shaped by the sector of the lead actor in the project. Whereas the most common drivers in community and third sector projects were Helping the poor and Helping the environment, the most common driver of private sector led projects was Financial benefits.

Projects were affected by a dependence on grant funding and varying levels of trust in the project stakeholders.

Publics were commonly presumed to lack knowledge and awareness of energy issues, leading to engagement based on financial arguments.

Unlike commonly assumed, the projects were not uniformly ‘local’.

Decentralised energy is not just about saving carbon but also has important social and financial dimensions and should be evaluated as such.

The four sectors play very different roles in the development of decentralised energy.

DECENTRALISED ENERGY (DE) is the supply of electricity and heat generated on or near the site where it is used. This includes a range of technologies (e.g. solar panels, heat pumps) as well as demand-side measures (e.g. insulation or behavioural change).

CLUES Project Summary Report: UK Case Studies Bouke Wiersma & Patrick Devine-Wright

1. Background

CLUES (Challenging Lock-in through Urban Energy

Systems) is an academic research project funded

by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research

Council which studied the role of decentralised

energy (DE) in contributing to UK carbon

emissions reduction targets. As part of this project,

the University of Exeter studied the drivers,

influencers and local embeddedness of DE through

9 UK case studies, comparing the sectors involved

(public, private, third and community). This report

presents the key findings from this research.

2. The UK case studies

9 case studies were chosen from a database of 182

initiatives across the UK (the entire database can

be found on www.ucl.ac.uk/clues), on the basis of

their diversity in terms of technology, governance

structure, financial model, social aspects, and the

sector of the leading organisation(s). Data analysis

was undertaken on secondary data and in-depth

interviews with 33 stakeholders across the 9

cases, which are summarised in the table at the

top of page 2.

This research addressed a number of gaps in

previous research, which to date has focused

mainly on single case study analyses of rural,

community-led initiatives, neglecting urban DE led

by actors from a diversity of sectors.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/clues

University of Exeter, Geography, December 2012 Environment & Sustainability Research Group

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3. Key findings

Our analyses revealed that the DE sector is highly diverse in terms of the actors involved,

underlying drivers and degrees of local embeddedness. It is a space for activities by actors

from private, public, community and third sectors, each driven by contrasting values and

goals, where stakeholders interpreted and applied DE as much more than merely a means of

generating electricity or heat.

3.1 Uncovering the drivers of DE projects

The table on the next page illustrates the diversity of drivers expressed by stakeholders

across our case study projects. It demonstrates how the sector of the instigating actor has a

strong influence upon the driver of each project. Helping the poor and Helping the

environment were dominant discourses across third and community sector projects, while

private sector stakeholders mainly talked about Benefitting financially.

Only public sector stakeholders indicated that they were motivated by policy (e.g. carbon

targets, or the Decent Homes Standard), while compliance with regulations played a similar

role for only the private sector. Community and third sector DE projects did not seem to be

greatly driven by either policy or regulations.

OUR CASE STUDIES

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Riverside Dene (RD),

Newcastle

Refurbishment of five 1960s council-owned tower blocks, with the installation

of a biomass district heating system to replace electric storage heaters.

Wandle Valley Low Carbon

Zone (WV), London

This project (2010-2012) aimed for a 20.12% carbon saving through

engagement with schools, Green Doctor visits, and housing retrofits.

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led

Newport (Ne), Wales Two 2.5 MW wind turbines, installed by Wind Prospect on the site of chemical

company Solutia, funded by a pension fund and the Renewables Obligation.

Zero Carbon Homes (ZC),

Slough

Construction of 10 Zero Carbon Homes, to test renewable energy technologies

and to study the impact of zero carbon homes on energy company SSE.

Th

ird

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led

Energy Neighbourhoods

(EN), Gloucestershire

European project in which groups of households competed to save energy

through behaviour changes during the 2008-09 winter (UK part led by SWEA).

Renewable Heritage (RH),

Edinburgh

The installation of solar hot water systems in ‘hard-to-treat’, listed tenements,

aiming to demonstrate its feasibility, in cooperation with conservation bodies.

Shimmer (Sh), London Fuel poor households were provided with solar pv panels and a laptop with

access to a personalised interactive energy management platform.

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Glencraig (Gl), Belfast Biomass district heating scheme at a Camphill Community, using low-grade,

locally sourced biomass. Funded by the Low Carbon Communities Challenge.

Sustainable Moseley (SM),

Birmingham

Community group aiming to support residents and save carbon through

resident engagement and installing solar pv on a church, mosque and school.

Shimmer project stakeholder: “We wanted to find poor people. I think I, and the others, have been shocked by what we’ve found, because when you go into a house that’s freezing, you’ve got four kids and they’re all hungry, and the rest of it, you really want to do what you can. I would say it’s driven us on”

University of Exeter, Geography, December 2012 Environment & Sustainability Research Group

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Wandle Valley stakeholder: “So I think if you look at things from that

approach of “if we can install this in your bathroom it’s going to save you

money” then that’s the way (...). if he’s going there talking about we really

want to help you reduce the amount of CO2 you’re producing through

your electric and gas usage, they’re not going to understand anything.”

3.2 Project influencers

7 out of 9 projects depended on grand funding; by contrast in both private sector-led projects,

actors regarded attempting to obtain grant funding as too time consuming or irrelevant.

However, even these 7 projects that were successful in obtaining one-off grants - despite a

challenging funding environment – were continually affected by this dependence, due to grant

stipulations (such as strict deadlines or funders favouring a certain technology), but also due

to a potential lack of ongoing commitment to the project on the funder’s part, which was

observed to detract from the project’s achievements.

Furthermore, stakeholders widely presumed publics to lack understanding of energy issues,

which they explained by a lack of education, and which led to engagement based on financial

rather than environmental arguments. This, along with many projects being predominantly

concerned with the installation of technologies, suggests DE does not always lead to increased

participation and higher awareness of environmental issues.

A further difference between sectors was that local, not-for-profit organisations were seen by

stakeholders as benefitting from greater trust held by local people, in contrast to some private

sector and Local Authority actors, which were said to be distrusted on some occasions.

3.3 Local embeddedness

Community and third sector actors emphasised the local uniqueness of their projects and

context, suggesting that for these actors, DE projects take place in spatial settings that are

highly distinctive. These beliefs suggest that the notion of ‘lifting’ or ‘replicating’ a successful

project elsewhere is problematic.

Sector of leading stakeholder(s) Public Private Third Comm.

RD WV Ne ZC EN RH Sh Gl SM

Helping the poor

Helping the environment

Benefitting financially

Improving reputation

Researching and demonstrating

Meeting carbon targets

Improving housing stock

Gaining a competitive advantage

Indicates a certain driver was perceived to play an important role

Indicates a certain driver was not perceived to play an important role

University of Exeter, Geography, December 2012 Environment & Sustainability Research Group

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Our analysis suggests that DE is not uniformly ‘local’ - community and public sector-led DE

projects were more locally embedded (i.e. having a higher number of locally based actors

based in the same urban area taking part) compared to projects led by the private sector. The

research also showed that DE is never purely local – there are often organisations involved

based outside of the urban area of the project - and it is rarely international – our cases had

few international partners. The three ‘maps’ below illustrate these findings using examples of

community (Sustainable Moseley), public (Wandle Valley) and private sector-led (Newport)

projects, classified according to where the participating stakeholders were based.

4. Implications

The findings highlight the plurality of DE, which is characterised by diverse drivers,

influencing factors and degrees of local embeddedness, which are all highly variable across

projects led by public, private, third and community sector organisations. The relative lack of

emphasis on meeting carbon targets or stimulating energy-savings behaviours implies that

DE initiatives should not be evaluated purely on their carbon saving achievements but by

looking across environmental, social and financial dimensions.

Furthermore, the current focus on communities of locality as embodied in discourses such as

the Big Society and Localism does not fit very well with the diversity of sectors involved in DE,

and the variability in the degree to which these projects are embedded in their locality.

More research is needed to build on these findings with larger samples from each sector, and

to compare UK cases with those internationally.

MORE INFO See www.ucl.ac.uk/clues for:

A tool for strategic planners, which also contains further details of these 9 case studies and 4 innovative non-UK cases.

A policy briefing on the use of energy scenarios.

The database of UK cases. Presentations given at the CLUES

launch event in October 2012.

CONTACT Bouke Wiersma bw282@exeter.ac.uk Patrick Devine-Wright p.g.devine-wright@exeter.ac.uk

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/clues