Community Energy has been a part of the UK’s energy strategy since 2014 when the coalition government published the Community Energy Strategy. According to energy consultancy Regen, the more recent Net Zero Strategy published in 2021 mentions community energy 17 times and yet there has been no subsequent energy policy document supporting its widespread adoption despite the myriad good reasons to embracing it into the country’s energy mix. Is this perchance the definition of ‘lip service’. Things have improved some recently but we’ll come back to that.

What does Community Energy even mean? Essentially it allows communities to create their own power (a community-owned windmill, for example) and to feed that power into the grid and to share out the resulting profits (a few actually provide power directly to their communities but these are extraordinarily difficult to implement). One of the main impediments to these projects is that they must be capable of producing at least 1MW before they will be considered for approval. Many are unable to meet that threshold. The administrative barriers to permission to feed into the grid remains too daunting for many community groups to take on and can take years of time-consuming paperwork to achieve.

Another barrier is the effective ban on onshore wind generation put in place by the Conservative government in the 2015 National Planning Policy Framework. This was a political nod to large rural landowners who seem to consider all windmills as a blot on the landscape (this limitation was finally reversed in 2023, but not recently enough to have made any practical effect.).

And, of course, it’s expensive. Some funding (such as Northern Powergrid’s Net Zero Community Energy Fund) has been found, but very little else is available to assist communities wishing to move forward with small scale power generation. The current government did recently announce £20m of funding in the next financial year to support community energy projects, but this includes rooftop solar which seems likely to hoover up much of the funding.

The long-term lack of investment by National Grid into our power backbone has left us in a bit of a pickle. If you’ve ever seen a windmill not moving even though it is windy it is usually because it has been switched off because it is generating ‘too much power’. Too much power means that the grid is saturated and unable to move this power to where it is needed – a lot of our wind power comes from Scotland and most of our power is consumed in the south of England. The grid cannot cope. That National Grid was ever privatised to become a for-profit company seems scandalous in my opinion. At least the current government has taken some steps to reverse this and seem to be leaning towards return our power infrastructure to public ownership where it firmly belongs.

10 years ago art.earth convened the international symposium Feeding the Insatiable: creative explorations of real and imaginary futures. This has become the catalyst for our new publication On a day like today we just need to look forward… which will be released in late 2026. During the symposium we heard about some fantastic community energy projects, but since then (in part as a result of some of the political barriers put in place in defiance of the rhetoric) things have stalled, it seems. If you’d like to read more about the state of community energy in 2026 an excellent starting point is the ‘State of the Sector’ report from Community Energy England which you can find at https://communityenergyengland.org/state-of-the-sector/

We have an active open call for the new book with a deadline of May 7. We’d love to hear your stories about community energy and attempts to subvert or just live alongside the dominant energy supply model in this country.

You can read more at https://artearthbooks.com/a-day-like-today/  We’d love to hear from you.