A small, slender middle aged woman walks demurely onto a small stage in front of a well-filled auditorium at Birmingham NEC Solar and Storage Live. She starts to speak rapidly and with a calm control that demands attention. My first impression is that twenty minutes is not long enough to scratch the surface of all that she needs to purvey. The crowd is rapt. She is here to tell us how the Labour government is allowing real and meaningful change in her constituency of Bath, how the people of Bath are collaborating in support of, and how every community needs to be at the heart of the race to Net Zero.
Community involvement and personal motivation
The keynote speaker is Wera Wobhouse, Member of Parliament for Bath at the House of Commons. She has clearly understood the importance of net zero goals and been working on how to achieve them for years. She is grasping a change in government and moving forward to effect changes in her constituency with clarity and speed. The wonderful thing is, where there has been reticence about the changes necessary to meet targets among the general populace, Wera is putting community at the very heart of her objectives.
She points out that it is vital for Britain’s energy security to drive up clean energy production in our own country, so that we are not pushed into purchasing energy from elsewhere in the future. She talked about the misconception about clean energy carrying a larger price tag for the consumer, noting that people need to understand how prices are currently driven up by the fuel and the politics of the past. There is a need for a CDF (Climate Diplomacy Fund) programme.
Wera Wobhouse speaks on the CDF for net zero, September 2024
This will help to de risk investment in clean energy for smaller companies and individuals on a local scale.
The government is looking at improving ways of sharing energy from large scale farms to smaller communities, so that these large scale investments become a benefit to local people, providing jobs and reduced bills rather than resentment. They are also looking at all the barriers to clean energy provision that communities and individuals experience. Local investment and local planning will be used to provide jobs, local training, effective use of land and buildings for clean energy production. There will also be a move to ensure that homeowners get a higher rate for energy they sell back to the grid, with large companies not able to control this and take an unfair cut; a real incentive for individuals and communities to invest. Local authorities will have greater powers to grant planning permission going forward. This will lift barriers such as listed building regulations.
In Bath, Beckford’s Tower has been refurbished including ‘Solar panels and air source heat pumps installed to convert a Grade I listed building to renewable energy sources’. The tower is sustainable into the future as a public resource. It’s worth a visit.
We have the power to make real changes in our local community, generating local wealth for everyone and providing energy stability for the future whilst protecting our planet. The quest for net zero has become the quest for a better future for all of us, not a road of sacrifice. Our local council has funding to spend on improving our clean energy production. Let’s ensure that our Malvern community is meaningfully involved in generating clean energy as well as local training opportunities, jobs, and reduced energy bills. Why not write to your local council now, to ensure that we are part of finding the right solutions for our locality, on the road to net zero.