Power to the People

Today Esther was telling me about an island community in Denmark which generates almost all of it's own electricity, and it made me think about the different approaches of governments to building renewable energy generating capacity.

Here in the UK I've noticed an emphasis on big "top down" schemes. Large scale wind farms that create a backlash from local communities who don't want the "ugly" wind generators on their landscape. The logic is that this is the only way to create the scale of capacity that's needed.

It's an interesting aside that so many landmarks of the industrial revolution (viaducts, canals, railway lines) are now thought of as beautiful national treasures, yet many inspired the same distaste and backlash in their day.

The Danes have a different approach which is to enable and encourage communities to build their own renewable energy generating capacity. This means that people have a sense of ownership over the energy and adopt them rather than resist them. I hate to belie my hippy Luddite leanings, but local is always the best solution.

In the UK we also have a scheme that subsidises individual homes' renewable energy, but this again doesn't have the same impact as a community sharing the scheme. Wind generators and PV arrays have a physical presence which is felt within a community, even if it's on an individuals property, so it makes sense to encourage communal ownership, and share the communal benefits (and costs).

In practice "community groups" that are empowered enough to actually implement a renewable energy scheme are pretty thin on the ground, and I struggle to imagine the residents on our street deciding to club together to put up a wind generator. However, given the right incentives I'm sure it could happen, and if you can create a rollout-able model (like Neighbourhood Watch) then it could be a great way of producing significant renewable energy capacity.