Energy Saving Week: how Ashden winners tackle energy saving in communities

This week is Energy Saving Week, so it's a good time to ask the question: how do you stimulate change across communities and businesses to make real reductions in energy use?

Ashden winners have been grappling with this issue and producing innovative results. Take the 2010 winner Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust, an impressive example of community-led change. The Trust was bought out by the community in 1997, and its efforts have led to a staggering 47% reduction in energy use.

They’ve achieved this by producing about 90% of their own electricity through renewables, offering incentives to install insulation and other energy-saving measures in the home, and, crucially, getting the community to monitor and keep their energy use below 5kW in homes and 10kW in businesses.

Communities also play a big role in the work of 2009 winner Marches Energy Agency (pic). They followed the Low Carbon Communities programme which helps communities to understand the issues (through fairs and presentations), and then to pursue, with access to grants and technical assistance, clear carbon-reduction targets. This has led to 1,400 technical installations in homes, businesses and community buildings across six local areas saving around 1,715 tonnes of CO2 (about 5% of the overall community use).

Tomorrow we profile two Ashden winners who work to reduce the energy use of businesses. Over the rest of this week, we’ll be writing more about the experiences of members of the Ashden awards team who are retrofitting their homes.

See also: A trip to the Isle of Eigg

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Climate hawks

"Planetarians", "decarbonists", "sustainablists", "transitionists", "green patriots" ... David Roberts at Grist wants a new name to describe a significant group of people who support clean energy and action on climate change, but don't want to be labelled as environmentalists. As he sees it,

there are plenty of people who understand climate change and support clean energy but do not share the rest of the ideological and sociocultural commitments that define environmentalism as historically understood in the U.S.

He's come up with another term: "climate hawks".

See seven pages of comments that follow.

[Crosspost.]

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Richard Davies, Director of the Marches Energy Agency.

This year I celebrate 10 years as director of Marches Energy Agency, a charity that encourages communities to adopt low carbon lifestyles. We believe that acting locally can help shrink the global carbon footprint.

We support and sustain energy-saving practices in all sectors of the community – parish, schools, businesses and households through five radical carbon-cutting projects. We can only say ‘job done’ when all the cavities have been filled, when all the community leaders have been trained, when the whole community has been engaged in this process.

Our daily work involves getting microgeneration installations on community buildings, giving advice to small businesses on how to obtain energy-saving grants, talking to low income families about how to get free insulation and working with schools on climate change education.

This work has achieved massive energy savings in 10 communities in Staffordshire, Herefordshire & Shropshire. In just one year, through local renewable energy, energy efficiency and other measures we helped over 60,000 individuals including the insulation of 4,500 homes saving 16 million kWh of energy a year.

For MEA there will never be a ‘declaration of peace’ moment in the war against climate change. We cannot afford to be complacent. Every day I meet brilliant individuals and witness inspiring projects giving their all to fight climate change. But I also see complacency, tired excuses and indifference. So there is still much more to be done.

Over the next 10 years we will continue this work, Copenhagen or not, helping communities recognise that they can play a significant part in achieving a low carbon future.

Read more Voices on Copenhagen

The Marches Energy Agency in Shropshire runs five environmental projects working together to reduce the carbon footprint of local communities.


View the Ashden Awards video of Marches Energy Agency:

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