Carbon Co-op Commences
Article published: Tuesday, May 31st 2011
Carbon Co-op is a community-based initiative with an aim of bringing people and communities together to reduce Manchester’s household carbon emissions. With the co-op about to launch they’re looking for members and wider support for their participation in a nationwide energy competition. Jonathan Atkinson introduces the co-op…
The Carbon Co-op is based on the idea that working together as streets, neighbourhoods and communities, people are better able to equip themselves with the kit necessary to significantly reduce household energy bills and carbon emissions. If one person wants to fit solar panels on their roof they might be paying £10,000-£15,000, but if the whole street fits them costs can come down by as much as 50%. We’re looking at all helping communities buy all kinds of equipment from energy monitors to external insulation, as well as fitting them in our own.
The project started a few years ago when a small group of us came together with similar ideas. I was living in Hulme and thinking about the transition from a fossil fuel economy to a de-centralised, renewable energy system. It stuck me that unless we were careful we would simply replicate the existing system with private sector, corporate interests owning and gaining benefit from our energy supply. Could there be a way that communities such as Hulme could collectively own and generate income from the energy produced in their area?
I teamed up with Nick Dodd and Charlie Baker of local firm URBED Co-op. Nick had been looking at ways to decarbonise urban and city areas, Charlie was in the process of retro-fitting his house and keen on creating a co-operative mechanism for encouraging more people to follow suit. We were all inspired by the co-operative model which allows members to own and control resources. It offers a democratic means of control and a way of ensuring profit and assets aren’t privatised and lost to the community. Co-operatives came about in the nineteenth century as a way of dealing with food security issues, in the twenty first century they are an ideal model for tackling energy security issues.
In the three years the project’s been active, we’ve secured a bit of funding and run some pilot projects to test our ideas and find out what works and what doesn’t. With the help of Kindling Trust we ran a series of workshops around Manchester where we brought people together who lived in the same street and looked at how they use energy now and how they might reduce it. It was amazing to see people start working together, sharing knowledge and information, showing each other how to hook up an energy monitor for example. People also start to look at their collective resources, they might identify a patch of waste ground that could be used to grow vegetables or start thinking about how they use transport, there’s all sorts of spin offs beyond energy and bills.
During that time we’ve also been able to distribute free energy monitors that allow people to view their emissions via the web, we’ve also run a Community Renewables Finance School where community organisations interested in establishing small scale hydro or wind turbines could get to grips with funding and finance issues.
We’re now at the stage of establishing the co-operative and we’ve devised a way of investing in renewables that will allow us to also retro-fit some homes. We feel renewables are sometimes seen as THE way to become more green but actually whole house insulation, double glazing and boilers are far more effective. We’re going to use a community share scheme to finance renewable installations such as solar but instead of amassing the profits from the energy generated we’ll use it to fund these, more boring retro-fit work.
We’re currently looking for founder members of the co-op, for people to host solar panels and ‘early adopters’ who want to retro fit their homes. If you want to find out more sign up here. We’re also bidding for a share of £500,000 as part of the EnergyShare competition and you can help us out with that here.
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