A £1m fund set up to power community-run energy

Low Carbon Hub joined forces with an expert consortium of partners to deliver Next Generation, a fund to develop new decentralised, decarbonised, and democratised energy business models. 

The Next Generation fund has provided grants of up to £100,000 to ten community energy groups to work on new business models for community energy in their area.

About the consortium

The consortium included the Centre for Sustainable Energy (the lead partner), Low Carbon Hub, Everoze Partners, Cooperatives UK, Community Shares Unit, Cooperative Futures, Social and Sustainable Capital, and SFW Communications.

Community-owned renewables  

A further element of the project was to transfer renewable energy assets from the private sector to the community sector so that communities can generate their own energy and reinvest the projects back to benefit local people. 

Power to Change has partnered with Big Society Capital to create CORE LLP partners, to provide additional capital to fund the purchase of existing solar farms, currently in private ownership. CORE will then hold the solar farms in trust while the local community develop the capacity to buy them back. Through the Next Generation programme, these communities will be skilled up and supported to make this transfer happen as smoothly as possible and will also receive support with further business planning to develop other more innovative local energy business models, once they have an anchor asset of their own.