Energy, Environment and Sustainability Group
The IMechE has recently published a report entitled “Exploring the Evolution of Low-Carbon Local Energy” (led by the Renewable Power Committee and supported by EESG, including members Nick Bristow and André Pinho), covering energy systems close to human population, with and without community participation. Rupert Blackstone (Chair of EESG) followed this up with an article on what the IMechE could do to support community energy in the UK.
This newsletter article explores community energy from an EESG perspective. EESG is concerned with the optimisation of sustainability of systems engineering. In the context of community energy this includes minimising energy use before implementing sustainable energy generation (following the Energy Hierarchy), recognising the interrelationships between sectors (electricity, heat, transport and waste) and also consideration of societal benefits.
Even in the UK where there is an abundance of renewable energy resource (mostly wind) as compared to other countries, aside from matters of resource intermittency there are significant spatial constraints in matching supply with demand, even taking into account suitable offshore sites. It is therefore important, and in large part more cost-effective, to avoid using energy in the first place. The Energy Hierarchy communicates this approach, but the current regulatory and economic structures in place do not always support it. EESG is working on an update to the Energy Hierarchy position paper published by the IMechE, led by Ian Arbon (EESG), who co-authored the original paper, and it is expected that this will give further guidance on how the Energy Hierarchy might be applied. The constraints on energy at a national level also apply at a local level with community energy, but there is much more implementation of renewable energy generation by community groups than energy saving measures. There are economic factors that contribute to this outcome, but social factors also have a significant part to play.
Renewable energy generation, such as solar photovoltaics (PV), aside from being more interesting to people in general than energy saving measures such as insulation, may be viewed as having less undesirable impact on people’s lives. For example, external insulation can have a greater impact on the look of a building than a PV array and internal insulation typically requires movement of furniture or stored objects, which many people resist because of the hassle of it. Insulation is an example of an energy efficiency measure, but the highest priority of the energy hierarchy is energy conservation (reducing demand). Energy conservation generally requires behaviour change and this in turn generally refers to stopping doing something rather than doing something new. Human beings can often be enthused by doing something new, such as getting together with others to install a wind turbine, but tend to find it harder to break established behaviour, such as keeping their whole dwelling heated in the winter to the extent that they can range around in a T-shirt rather than selectively heating rooms in use, setting the thermostat lower and wearing a jumper.
Community energy groups, as well as engaging people through the implementation of technical solutions, also have a great opportunity to raise awareness and influence people’s behaviour in reducing energy consumption through their interpersonal connections, in a way that central Government is not able to. The global human population comprises a multitude of communities, so if we can address our environmental impact at a community level, not only with meeting our local energy demands in a sustainable way, but also through taking responsibility for the embodied energy in the products we buy, then considerable headway can be made in mitigating our collective global impact.