The Post: Why community power could be the climate change revolution we need

Read the original article in the Post

One of the biggest problems with the climate change agenda is that it presents itself to the public so often as a negative. Ask ordinary people what the fight against global warming involves and they’ll probably say: taxes, levies, curbs, restrictions. Paying more, being able to do less. No wonder it’s not a political winner.

Conversely, though, one can’t just paint the public a picture of the glorious, sunlit uplands of a climate-friendly world. People don’t believe it, climate activists tell me; it seems too abstract, too far away.

Much promise, then, lies in “mid-range change”: green shifts that feel neither negligible nor implausible. All the better, too, if this shift happens locally, creating change that people can reach out and touch.

Enter community energy: renewable power projects that are partly or wholly controlled by small groups of locals. Community groups can get their neighbours onside with wind and solar installations, build them alongside expert developers, run those facilities democratically, slash emissions, and redistribute energy revenues. It is, potentially, a win-win-win-win-win.

Such models are common in other countries. Over half of Denmark’s 7000 wind turbines are community-owned.

Hundreds of such schemes operate in the UK. And across the ditch, a 2023 report found tens of thousands of Australians supporting community power schemes, and tens of thousands of megawatt-hours of clean energy being produced.

Claudia Hodge from the Community Power Agency, an Australian NGO, tells me that when people can have a renewable energy project on their doorstep, “and they fairly benefit from it … they see that climate change can be a positive thing for average people … It really turns the intangible into something tangible in their eyes.” The “co-benefits” – the strengthened social ties that come from running schemes together – are also substantial.

Schemes with quintessentially Aussie names like Totally Renewable Yackandandah have installed community-owned solar panels and batteries, cutting locals’ power bills by two-thirds, boosting disaster resilience, and saving enough funds to pay for critically important local health services.

In inner-city Melbourne, community batteries – covered in street art, and situated right where people can see them – store solar power generated during the day and redistribute it during evening peaks. These batteries share energy even with renters and others who can’t install their own solar panels; they also make better use of the existing distribution network. Equity and efficiency: again, a win-win.

Back at home, Gareth Cartwright of the Community Energy Network says New Zealand has more schemes than people realise – 30-40 “good” ones – but they’re typically quite small. And faced with a hostile regulatory set-up, most plans fail. “You have to be remarkably stubborn to get a community energy scheme through in New Zealand,” he says.

One success is Energise Ōtaki, which in 2020 built Rau Kūmara, the country’s first-ever community-owned solar farm, generating clean power for the local high school and wastewater treatment plant.

Energy revenues, Cartwright says, have been used to fund school scholarships, bike repair workshops and community gardens. Local clean energy “is one of the pillars that you build a community on”.

It can also be good business. Rewiring Aotearoa’s Josh Ellison says that although big commercial projects can be cheaper upfront, around 11% of the power generated is lost in transmission. Then there’s the corporate profit margins, and the cut taken by the lines companies and others.

Grid-scale projects will remain important, as will individual household installations of solar panels, as part of what Ellison calls a technological revolution happening behind the scenes.

But community schemes are extremely powerful, he says. “People can trust their community and their neighbours about what to do. It’s no longer someone [from outside] trying to sell them something.”

Energy regulation, though, keeps getting in the way. Physics-wise, it’s clearly cheaper and more efficient to store power at the community rather than household level, Ellison says.

In practice, though, New Zealand makes it expensive to do so: someone in Kaikohe would get charged the same price for drawing from a neighbourhood battery as they would for taking power from a South Island hydro station. And anyone storing their household-generated solar power in a community battery would get charged for taking it back out.

Regulation, Ellison says, “hasn’t kept pace with technology”. And initiatives like Ara Ake, the national energy innovation centre, had their funding abruptly cancelled in this year’s Budget.

So much needs to change, from power pricing and regulation on down. Every country with a thriving community power system has built it with (temporary) state subsidies.

Government underwriting could help give communities security of returns, while the co-benefits of community schemes could also become a criterion for state investment. And despite all the barriers, people like Cartwright are cautiously optimistic.

Enthusiasm for community schemes is growing, he says, with iwi and hapū often in the lead. “It’s slow, and it needs a lot more leadership than it’s getting at the moment. But it’s definitely starting to shift.”