This month marks the beginning of my collaborative research project with Lancaster University and Green Alliance.

How often have you heard the lament amongst environmentalists, “what’s lacking is political will”? If only politicians understood enough, and cared enough, to confront and act on environmental issues like climate change, the argument goes, they could implement the solutions (green the economy, fine the polluters) and lead the transition to a sustainable society.

But is it as simple as that? What is this elusive quality, ‘political will’? Put another way, what is it that motivates politicians to take action on climate change, and » Continue Reading.

I’ve written before about the fantastic Energy Mentoring Project that I’ve been working on with Co-operatives UK.

One of the things we built into the project from the start was a report-back function, whereby we help the community energy pioneers talk to government about how policy could help the sector achieve its potential. (Imagine if all projects supporting social entrepreneurs had a properly resourced talk-to-government-about-your-experience element to them. It would be a brilliant antidote to corporate lobbying.)

So to help with this, over the past couple of months I’ve talked to our brave energy pioneers about » Continue Reading.

I blogged a little while ago about the Peer Mentoring Scheme for community energy projects that I helped to design, and which has been run brilliantly by Petra Morris at Co-operatives UK. Over the past few months, I’ve spoken in detail to the projects who have received support from the scheme, as well as the mentors who’ve offered their support, both moral and technical. The results of these conversations, and other outcomes from the scheme, are now summarised in this pretty (and mercifully short) publication that Petra put together. Let me know what you think.

I’m really pleased to have been appointed to the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Research Councils UK Energy Programme, as a representative of Green Alliance.

The Energy Programme  invested £625 million in research and skills to pioneer a low carbon future. It’s a joint initiative, led by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and bringing together the work of five Research Councils, including the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), for whom I’ve served as a Council Member over the past four years.

With massive changes in energy technology, systems and businesses afoot, and ambitious carbon targets to meet, it’s » Continue Reading.

I had a great time last week at the Powering Up North conference, a Manchester gathering of community energy projects and enthusiasts. It was lovely to see so many people that have been colleagues and allies in my past few years’ worth of work on such an interesting issue.

But what I  really appreciated was seeing the results of something that had been long in the planning. When I started working with Co-operatives UK to support community energy, back in 2010, it was clear that changes to policy and regulation were needed if community energy was to » Continue Reading.

October 1991. Bryan Adams tops the charts (Everything I Do…) closely followed by The Scorpions with Winds of Change. I’m excited but nervous, in my flowery corduroy trousers (yes really). It’s Freshers week.

Roll on a few years, and here I am again. And while I may not be approaching the extracurricular side of Freshers week with quite such brio this time round, I’m just as excited to be heading back to university.

I’ve spent my working life trying to crack a series of knotty environmental issues, from climate change to chemicals regulation. What I’ve learned, above all, is that » Continue Reading.

Perched on a fell above the Lakeland town of Ulverston, just down the road from me, are four wind turbines. They’ve been turning steadily since 1997. The turbines all look the same. But one of the four is very different. It was the first in the UK to be owned by local people, who established a co-operative to buy shares in the turbine. The other three are owned by a commercial renewables developer.

More than a decade on, government has realised that it’s really quite a good idea to let local communities buy into local renewable energy schemes. I’ve » Continue Reading.

Community energy is, I hope, an idea whose time has come. I’ve worked on it for a long time: a scary seven years ago, I published this report, Grid 2.0, which argued that the energy system needed to be reshaped to put people at the centre, rather than placing them as consumers at the end of a long chain that starts from distant power stations.

At the time, we didn’t have much of an audience. But of late, it’s become politically fashionable to call for radical reform of the energy market. There are all sorts of reasons why it » Continue Reading.

I’ve just spent a fascinating couple of days at the Tyndall Centre’s conference on ‘Radical Emissions Reduction’, put together by the redoubtable Kevin Anderson and colleagues.

The idea behind the event was simple: to amass evidence and share ideas on how to achieve a radical cut in carbon emissions, defined as eight per cent reductions per year for the UK. It was resolutely interdisciplinary, with contributions from psychologists, economists, politicians, philosophers, activists and even a firefighter. The range of perspectives was a little bewildering: flitting between light bulb technology and constructivist philosophy induced a peculiar type of brain-ache. But » Continue Reading.