CovCAN member and Coventry Green Party Coordinator, Anne Patterson, is asking other CovCAN members to support  Power for People’s  campaign to obtain cross-party support for an amendment to the Great British Energy Bill by including community energy.

She asks you to email your MP asking them to, ‘Please sign the cross-party amendment that will include supporting community energy in the Great British Energy Bill, sponsored by MPs Sarah Champion, Carla Denyer, Simon Opher, Adrian Ramsay and Cat Smith and led by Wera Hobhouse MP.’

You can find your MP’s contact details at https://members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP

The Power for People’s page says:

The Bill lists four objectives for Great British Energy, but nowhere is there mention of supporting the growth of ‘community energy’ – the term for groups of people organising to build, own and run local renewable energy generation schemes.

We have been campaigning for the remarkable potential for growth in community energy to be realised, so that local communities across the UK can enjoy the social and economic benefits their schemes bring, whilst transitioning to a clean energy system.

A key change need for this would be enabling community energy schemes to sell their power directly to local people. The Local Electricity Bill, which we authored, would do this, if made law. Before the election, we brought 326 MPs on board in support of it. The Labour leadership gave it their support too: Ed Miliband, then the Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, put down two amendments (numbered New Clauses 53 and 58) to the Conservative’s Energy Bill last year that were almost identical to the Local Electricity Bill. You can read them on pages 42 and 44 of the official Parliamentary amendment paper here.

Labour also pledged in their pre-election 5 Missions for Great British Energy to “make available up to £600m in funding for local authorities and up to £400m low-interest loans each year for communities” and writing this on page 54 of their election manifesto,

“Local power generation is an essential part of the energy mix and reduces pressures on the transmission grid. Labour will deploy more distributed production capacity through our Local Power Plan. Great British Energy will partner with energy companies, local authorities, and co-operatives to install thousands of clean power projects, through a combination of onshore wind, solar, and hydropower projects. We will invite communities to come forward with projects, and work with local leaders and devolved governments to ensure local people benefit directly from this energy production.”

Given all these fantastic words you might think the Government’s new Bill would do all these things, yet it does none of them. Ed Miliband is now the Secretary of State, the most powerful position on energy within the Government. Yet there has been no mention of the promised community energy funding and no mention of enabling community energy groups to supply their power locally. At the very least this new Government Bill, introduced by Ed Miliband himself, should simply include community energy as an objective of Great British Energy.

Read more here.