The Government recently set out its Local Power Plan, marking a genuine step-change in the ambition around our energy resilience and the local benefits that could flow from it. Its aim that, by 2030, every community in the UK will have the opportunity to own a local energy project is a welcome energy policy shift, bringing a focus on local benefit. It is also a test of whether we can meaningfully share power and agency – and build resilience - with UK communities.
Ambition alone will not deliver this promise. If the Local Power Plan is to succeed, it must embed best practice in how communities can be involved: where participation sits in decision-making, what models of ownership are used, and how power is genuinely shared over long and uncertain project lifecycles.
We need to structure fair compensation, remuneration and wider value-add for communities that host or co-own energy infrastructure. This is an area crying out for innovation - and one that will determine whether the Local Power Plan ends up feeling extractive, or genuinely empowering.
Several principles should guide the next phase.
First, the truth that no single model of community participation works everywhere. Different energy challenges - and different places - require different approaches to co-design, participation and ownership. Local infrastructure and natural landscape create opportunities and pose limitations, as do the composition of community assets; and capacity to sustain the investment and make it work – inclusively - for local people. We already know a great deal about what works, where, and why. Learning from this evidence is essential - and will support the Local Power Plan to scale successfully, rather than repeat avoidable mistakes.
Second, ethical governance is important. Community participation in energy is not a short-term consultation exercise; it must withstand long and tricky planning horizons, regulatory uncertainty, and shifting finance models. How do you manage expectations with a community, when your investment business case may take two years to fully develop and your planning pipeline even longer? How do you maintain momentum when your local government is liable to change? Clear, resilient community governance structures are essential - both to protect communities and to maintain trust over time.
Third, equity must be actively designed in. Working with communities in ‘cold spot' areas where organisational capacity, time or confidence to engage is limited will be critical if the ambition of every community is to be realised. Building investible propositions in places that have been seriously impacted by austerity is hard. Doing it in ways that deliver for the most disadvantaged households is even harder – but can create significant social value Without targeted support for the UK's more vulnerable, disconnected and disadvantaged neighbourhoods to participate - the risk is that the places with privilege already will benefit most.
Furthermore, it's important to consider how value flows to communities. We need to structure fair compensation, remuneration and wider value-add for communities that host or co-own energy infrastructure. This is an area crying out for innovation - and one that will determine whether the Local Power Plan ends up feeling extractive, or genuinely empowering. Done well, community participation can deliver tangible benefits - from new skills and jobs to improved health, greater uptake of ‘green' home improvements, and greater preparedness for future risks. These projects can therefore renew trust in a significant scale – if government reaches the 1,000-plus communities it hopes to.
The final principle is that scaling community energy requires imagination. While individual projects can quickly and rightly hit their limits, spreading success by working together with investors may prove more effective than forcing growth where it does not fit.
None of this transformation is happening in a stable world, so every Local Power Plan must be introduced with measures and resilience planning, co-designed with communities, for how to weather and withstand climate shocks to the local energy system – acknowledging that this will likely be an emergency ‘meanwhile strategy' to tide us over until a fully resilient energy system is in place.
Through decades of work at The Young Foundation, including current collaboration with The University of Manchester and others on the national, sustainability-focused JUST Centre, and with the We're Right Here campaign for community power, to name a few programmes, we see why some models of community co-design and co-ownership thrive - and why others falter. This learning can be systematically built into delivery of the government's Local Power Plan.
Let's not miss the opportunity the Local Power Plan presents. A key test in the coming months will be how Great British Energy works alongside the existing ecosystem of community-facing organisations – as well as alongside local authorities - that already support communities to participate ethically and effectively in local change.
Done right, the Local Power Plan could do more than decarbonise our energy system. It could help build local resilience for decades ahead.
Emily Morrison is director of sustainability and just transition at The Young Foundation
