Community Renewable Energy in the UK: A Short History

The clean-tech transition has come hand in hand with market and resource differentiation patterns that have created opportunities for heightened engagement of citizens in heat and power generation, potentially emancipating them from their roles as captive consumers (van Vliet, 2005). New opportunities for diverse and civic ownership models are made possible by distributed renewable generation technologies and their ability to be widely integrated into the power network as a result of advances in network management and control (Catney et al., 2014; Johnson & Hall, 2014; Lehtonen & Nye, 2009; Morris, 2013; Walker & Cass, 2007). This chapter maps out the development of ‘community energy’ in the United Kingdom, defined as collective and citizen- led heat and power generation projects that are owned and managed by for- or non-profit organisations operating across a geographically defined population (Doci, Vasileiadou, & Petersen, 2015; Ruggiero, Onkila, & Kuittinen, 2014; Scottish Government, 2014; Walker & Cass, 2007; Walker & Devine-Wright, 2008).