I’ve heard the term ‘community energy’ pop up a few times as a possible way to rethink our energy systems and reduce my our ever-increasing energy bills. So I was delighted when the Climate Curious team went on a site visit to an actual wind and solar farm, Westmill Energy, to discover what community energy on the ground really looks like. In this blog, you’ll get a little taste of what community energy is all about – and surprisingly it’s much less about the kilowatts of electricity being created and much more about the investment in local people and places.
What is community energy?
Community energy allows people and local communities to understand, generate, use, own and save (renewable) energy in their local areas and communities. It is a democratic movement across the UK that wants to empower everyone to have a say in the clean energy transition.
Community Energy England, the network for community energy organisations across the UK, say that community energy “ensures that a fair proportion of our collective energy spend stays in local areas through the democratic ownership of renewable energy assets.” According to Community Energy England’s State of the Sector Report, in 2024, 614 community energy organisations helped save an estimated £1.86 million from people’s bills and 120,000 tonnes of carbon.
In practical terms, community energy can be about owning renewable energy infrastructure like windmills and solar panels, providing low carbon transport infrastructure like bikes and e-charging points, giving advice on energy saving, creating energy storage and more. Any profits from community energy are then invested back into the local community, meaning local residents enjoy the financial benefits of energy generation, rather than lining the pockets of private companies.
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Westmill Energy
In one of our latest episodes of Climate Curious, How a community built its own renewable energy farm, we learnt how Westmill Energy in Oxfordshire hit a landmark in 2025, when they distributed just over £1 million back to their community in good causes and local initiatives. When our team visited the site, they wanted to learn more about this success story and discover what community energy looks like on the ground.
“I think that the story of Westmill about the community ownership, and the fact that they’ve given million pounds to local groups to fund various projects, I think people started to realise it’s a win-win…People are seeing the benefits of communities contributing to getting things to happen, but also then seeing the benefits and that’s a really, really great outcome.”
Nick Bolter, Retired engineer and Westmill Volunteer
Speaking to Nick, a volunteer at Westmill, he shares what it’s like to take people around the site and all the different groups that visit including local school students, university staff and local people. He believes it’s not only about the fact that Westmill is bringing renewable energy and profits back to the community – the site creates enough to power around 4,200 homes – but it’s also about the community becoming more engaged in the overall project. As Nick said the “feeling of ownership, I think means you are much more likely to feel involved.”
Community engagement was mentioned multiple times by Mark Luntly, the Chair of the Co-op that owns Westmill. Fun fact: Westmill is the UK’s first cooperatively and locally owned renewable energy hub. This means it’s a hundred percent owned by and for the community. Mark shared how the wind farm site is also a farm and open to the public:
“The farm is a centre of biodiversity. It is one of the most biodiverse spots in Oxford. The landowner, who’s really part of the community, always wanted it to be an open space. So this is a space where people will walk their dogs. It’s not a closed off farm. So people do genuinely come in here and you’ll see people all day, every day coming around.”
Mark Luntly, Co-op Chair at Westmill
Mark also mentions how local school students named all the wind turbines (Wind Warrior, Gusty Gizmo, Spinner X, Huff’n’Puff, Zeus), that there are art installations on the site and even a time capsule buried in the grounds. Overall, there is a real sense of community pride in the site and it seems clear that this community energy project has become about so much more than just generating kilowatts of electricity.
International projects
As part of the trip to Westmill, international community energy project representatives from the wider ReNew2030 initiative joined from China, Brazil, and Ethiopia, all of whom we managed to speak to to compare and contrast the realities of equivalent clean energy projects in their regions.
Turns out a solar panel in Shanghai and a wind turbine in Brasília aren’t that different after all… people from all over the world want the same things: cheaper bills, cleaner energy, and better jobs!
Take Brazil. A country with a population of 200 million. Which in the past 15-20 years, has gone from nothing to having 80% of its power capacity based on renewables (hydro, solar, and wind). “Brazil is a land of opportunities in terms of energy transition,” Victoria Santos from Brazil’s Institute for Climate and Society, tells Climate Curious.
Over in Ethiopia, Sahele Fakede from Africa Climate Foundation tied energy independence tightly to gender emancipation. “As it stands about half of Africans still do not have access to energy of any sort,” Sahele says. And that’s not because of infrastructure. It’s because of finance: “The capital cost in Africa is anywhere between two to five times the capital cost of finance elsewhere in the world.”
Investing in community-owned, clean energy is also hitting above its weight in terms of benefits for women and girls, too. The burden to collect firewood from the forest, prepare ‘dung cakes’, and get up early to stoke the fires before meals are needed before work/school, all lies with the women. Sahele explains how investing in women is good for society in general in Ethiopia, because women are more likely to reinvest it back into their household. So energy independence = gender equality = more household income = better off communities. Plus, less household air pollution from dirty jiko charcoal fires.
“When women have access to more income, actually the whole society benefits. For example, solar based agriculture systems now in a farming village that used to have only one crop per year, now can have two or three times more crops.”
Sahele Fakede, Africa Climate Foundation.
Sahele is incredibly optimistic and excited about this moment. He says we are faced with a “once in a century opportunity to actually make the whole system fair, more affordable, and cleaner and greener too.” And that right now, that opportunity is setting up communities with their own, renewable energy sources that they run, own and repair, themselves.
What can these examples tell us about community energy?
This isn’t the first time that the team has focused on the potential power of community energy to empower communities. In 2022, we featured Felix Wight from a community energy project in London on the TEDxLondon stage. In his talk, Our energy system is broken – and this is how we fix it, his key message wasn’t just about the importance of transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable, clean energy. It was actually about giving communities more power and agency in the face of an unfair energy system. As Felix put it:
‘The solution to the energy crisis, and even the climate crisis, isn’t just more renewable power, it isn’t more nuclear power, it is more people power. It’s about you. It’s about changing who controls the infrastructure, whose voices are heard, and prioritising our collective wisdom over the short-term profits of a minority.”
This sentiment is echoed by the landowner of Windmill Farm and farmer, Adam Twine, who kicked off the project in WindMill 17 years ago. He shared with the team that he was, of course, concerned about the climate and environmental crisis, but also because he felt that there had to be a ‘better way of doing business’ and a community owned windfarm would be just that. Like so many of our climate and environment stories on the podcast, solutions like community energy end up intersecting with some many other important issues and changes needed to create a thriving society. Adam put it well when he said:
“You only have so much agency in your own individual life, and this is something about doing something at a larger scale… If we think something’s important enough, we get involved. And that’s what [we] had to do. It wasn’t gonna happen without people getting involved. And so you either lean in or you don’t. And people chose to lean in.’
Adam Twin, Farmer at Westmill
At TEDxLondon and Climate Curious, the foundation of what we do is essentially what Adam says: coming together as a community to do much more than as individuals. It’s a hopeful message about the power of community organising.
Of course, many people might point out that not everywhere or every community has the time, energy, or expertise on hand to create and run these often long-term projects. This is where it’s worth turning to Felix’s talk again. Felix’s story is about Repowering London, and a specific project in Brixton that is an entirely different set up to Windmill farm: a local community of Londoners putting solar panels on the roofs of their flat blocks. Felix goes on to share how there are community energy organisations and projects all over the UK that folks can get involved with. Community Energy England in fact has a list here of projects and organisations all over the UK. The diversity of this movement is really striking and gives me hope that its focus on democratising energy can benefit all types of communities.
As ever at Climate Curious, we’ll be sure to keep you up to date with the latest developments in renewable energy, local solutions and the power of community movements.
