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As UK’s nuclear energy gets billions of pounds subsidy, Europe’s citizen energy movement is growing

Citizens’ energy movement calls for support as nuclear gets billions of pounds subsidy http://www.foe.co.uk/blog/citizens-energy-movement-calls-support-nuclear-gets-billions-pounds-subsidy Susi Scherbarth 15 October 2014 Last week the European Commission gave the UK the green light to billions of pounds of subsidies for Hinkley nuclear power plant, and the European Parliament approved a Spanish oil baron, Miguel Arias Cañete, as the EU’s next climate and energy chief.

This hardly bodes well when EU leaders are due to agree climate and energy targets for the year 2030 at a summit next week.

But against this, Europe’s citizens energy movement is providing reasons for optimism.

Community-owned wind turbines, sustainable biomass plants, small hydro-electric schemes and roof-top solar panels are providing more and more secure, renewable energy at a time when Europe is facing precarious energy dependency and the threat of climate change.

At a conference on community energy in Brussels last week representatives of Europe’s burgeoning movement of communities and cooperatives who own and are actively involved in running renewable energy resources, said that, regardless of legislative and financial obstacles, they were on the move.

“The citizens energy movement has stepped so far forward that it won’t be stoppable,” said Tanja Gaudian of EWS Schoenau, a German energy cooperative set up in the aftermath of Chernobyl to ensure its members don’t rely on nuclear-generated electricity, and that now has 150,000 customers.

Latest figures suggest there are now around 2500 renewable energy co-operatives across 16 European countries. In Germany alone 1.5 million citizens generate electricity on their roofs.

One example of the citizen energy revolution is Som Energia cooperative in Spain. When the cooperative started supplying electricity from renewable sources in October 2011 it had 750 members. Now, it is managing 18,000 electricity contracts. The cooperative is independent of bank loans having raised finance at the grassroots level and it employs 12 paid staff.

Having realised that Scotland’s renewable energy resource was “masquerading as bad weather” the Scottish government set a community energy target which is well on the way to being met. “We are powering our way towards this target with nearly 300MW now which is a 40% increase on last year,” said minister for energy, enterprise and tourism, Fergus Ewing.

Yet as European leaders hammer out the 2030 deal this month there is no dedicated European legal framework for community energy. Instead we have piecemeal support for this burgeoning sector.

On one hand Scotland has a national community energy target that it is well on the way to achieving, on the other hand the Spanish government recently removed its renewable energy subsidies.

It is time for European decision makers to listen to the people who are leading the energy revolution.

Friends of the Earth is calling for community energy to be explicitly recognisedas part of the EU’s long-term climate and energy plans. In particular regional and local renewable energy targets should be expanded to include national community energy targets.

With such a framework and the right support at national level communities’ control in, and ownership of, clean energy can increase and flourish.

Susann Scherbarth is a Climate Justice & Energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe.

October 18, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | EUROPE, renewable