The energy and housing transitions are being led by communities

Across three continents, citizens are working with their local communities to build more sustainable futures for themselves in housing and energy.

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New housing in Solapur, India.

In Solapur, India, housing cooperatives have come together to build more than 15,000 affordable homes since 2001, relocating thousands of workers from slums.

The Solapur Housing Initiative, led by the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, began construction of another 30,000 homes in January 2018, and recently took out the housing category of the Transformative City award.

Many of these homes – typically around 50 square metres in size – are for beedi workers, poorly paid cigarette-rolling women who are often the sole breadwinners for their families. These women previously rented tiny shanties in slums.

The land purchase cost was shared equally by the worker, the central government and the state government, but the workers struggled for a long time to win their demand and have previous debts cancelled.

The award proves that the sheer strength of workers’ sustained efforts, with the cooperation of governments, can deliver results.

On the other side of the world, in Bolivia, the residents of San Pedro Magisterio village used to have to fetch water from springs near their polluted river daily.

Then the San Pedro Magisterio grassroots community organisation founded a water cooperative. They drilled wells and built the basic infrastructure to bring water to their homes. The funding to solve all these problems came from contributions made by community members, who did all the work themselves.

They followed this with a long campaign to build a wastewater treatment plant to clean up the highly polluted river. The community set up a reed bed ecological sewage treatment system serving 4000 people.

Resident Doña Magui says they are now trying to replace the reeds with arum lilies because they perform the same function and will help keep the treatment plant going in the long-term, because residents will sell the lilies and put the profits back into maintenance.

“As far as the state is concerned, we don’t exist,” Magui says, adding that it was the residents themselves who built the first school, the church and the first roads. This community was awarded the water category of the Transformative City award.

The third and final energy category was given to the Spanish city of Cadiz for its action plan against energy poverty.

The campaign featured active cooperation between local government leaders and ordinary citizens. A group of unemployed citizens were trained as energy advisers and given an eight-month contract by the city council to tackle unemployment, energy poverty and climate change simultaneously.

The team gives families in Cádiz advice on how to optimise their energy contracts so they pay as little as possible. In just three months, the team ran 60 workshops, gave 640 people training on energy issues, and advised 70 families in their homes, reducing their electricity bills by 20-50 per cent.

There have been 224 households that have changed their contracts to a time-of-day tariff, another sign of the knowledge gained by workshop participants.

The energy transition and energy poverty

While in the South, communities face more severe problems in transforming themselves to achieve sustainability, in the North it is energy poverty which is frequently the hidden but powerful motivator for change. Energy poverty is where building design and energy supply meet.

EU energy regulation still lacks a commonly agreed legal definition of energy poverty and this prevents the setting of mandatory targets and roadmaps.

Some national governments give low income households the chance to access social tariffs:

• In Flanders, Belgium, for example, each household can obtain an annual discount on bills based on its size.
• In Italy, low-income households and large families are offered discounts on gas and electricity bills, – a national plan supported by all municipalities.
• In France social tariffs have been replaced by 'energy cheques', which people can use not only to pay their utility bills but also to finance energy-saving works in their homes.
• In Germany, Berlin’s electricity grid is up for sale approximately every 15 years. When selecting the supplier in 2016, the citizens pushed for fuel poverty to be one of the criteria of buyer selection to be factored in by the local government.

In the absence of this, community energy groups are tackling the issue:

• In England, Plymouth City Council identified community energy as a potential solution to energy poverty and facilitated the creation of Plymouth Energy Community in 2013, which now includes 1200 individuals and organisations who are transitioning to an affordable and low carbon energy system by offering access to grants to cancel energy debt, free and assisted insulation and advice on the best tariff options.
• And a Low Carbon Hub Community Energy Fund is tackling the looming end of the British Feed-in Tariff subsidy for locally-generated solar electricity in March 2019, by fundraising frantically to install as many solar panels as possible on schools and businesses before the deadline. It has already successfully installed a new array at a primary school and is working with Oxfordshire County Council to encourage more schools to follow their example. It is campaigning to raise £1 million by 31st of July 2018, to bring in long term equity from positive investors.
• In Scotland, non-profit social company OurPower, which is owned by social housing providers, community organisations and local authorities, produces and sells its own energy. Profits are reinvested to benefit customers and their community and every member can access locally produced renewable energy at a fair price and is able to control their energy supply and distribution.
• In Wales, a similar approach is achieved by Awel Aman Tawe, which owns a wind farm and has installed photovoltaic rooves on community buildings.
• In the Netherlands, a new Climate Agreement was reached at the beginning of this month which includes a community energy target that requires all new wind and solar projects to be at least half owned by the local community. All 33 Dutch regions have regional energy strategies under development.

Siward Zomer, representative of ‘Energie Samen’, the Dutch sector association of sustainable energy initiatives of citizens and farmers, said that "We expect a great acceleration of the development of new renewable energy projects where communities can become owners".

The control over revenues from renewable energy projects means that citizens, farmers and local entrepreneurs can directly benefit the local community.

Zomer says that strong collaboration between the market and the community will accelerate the energy transition. "The transition to a carbon free electricity system needs to be a democratic transition, giving all citizens the opportunity to participate. As part of the overall agreement, five hundred districts off the gas pipeline will have a transition plan within three years, agreed between housing collectives and community groups, local municipalities and other parties."

In Mouscron, Belgium (58,000 inhabitants), the first community energy cooperative COOPEM was launched this year by the municipality itself, following a feasibility study and several public meetings, strong involvement of citizens and a partnership with two companies, Energiris (a Brussels citizens’ cooperative) and Aralia (a third-party investor in PV projects).

COOPEM’s equity is owned 55 per cent by citizens, 15 per cent by the municipality and 30 per cent by the two private partners.

Thanks to bulk purchasing and the government’s Qualiwatt subsidy (a feed-in tariff that runs out at the end of July) citizens benefit from a reduction on the cost of the installation. When residents use energy from the grid, their meter runs normally but when their PV panels generate electricity, the meter runs backwards.

Many such organisations are members of the European Federation of Renewable Energy Cooperatives (REScoops), a network of 1,250 European energy cooperatives and their 1.000.000 citizens who are active in the energy transition.

Villages in Transition

Luzy in France is part of another network, the Village in Transition movement. It boasts a farmers’ corner, associative café, the Horizon, the donation shed, all run by citizens, with municipality support.

Luzy is a member of POTEs (Ordinary Energy Transition Pioneers), fostered by pan-European initiative Energy Cities, whose Carine Dartiguepeyrou says "are every-day-life innovators and visionaries working in areas related to the energy transition that Energy Cities, the Bourgogne Franche-Comté Region and ADEME, the French national energy conservation and environment agency, are forming into a network.

"POTEs are efficient and innovative… they collaborate and take care of others by helping them make progress in their project and overcome difficulties."

She explains that "A good example of this is the 'hold-up' method, a collective intelligence tool used for the third place the Horizon and the farmers’ corner at Luzy. Starting with an issue faced by each project, the participants put forward solutions to help the Horizon find a new business model and the farmers’ corner perpetuate its activity.

"In order to solve concrete challenges faced by project leaders (social entrepreneurs, researchers, engineers, government, NGOs ...), the actors who participate in a Hold-Up discuss and exchange ideas."
Energy communities

The European Council and the European Committee of the Regions (CoR) are drafting models of local energy ownership and the role of local energy communities in energy transition in Europe.

Energy Cities has prepared a joint contribution together with ResCoop.EU, the European federation for renewable energy cooperatives for the European Parliament to move forward on this issue. They are arguing that "only by distributing control among local actors will we be able to get to a fair energy transition and effectively fight climate change. Furthermore, this would contribute to local development and the reduction of (energy) poverty."

They perceive an enormous interest among local authorities to take control of the energy infrastructure, but also a lot of uncertainty on the 'hows and whats', and fear of failure.

Energy communities represent a distinct market actor in the energy system. They can play many roles at the local level such as provision of clean renewable energy and technical expertise. They can also as a partner to support local economic and social objectives.

For REScoop.eu, renewable energy cooperatives are ideal partners to lead the energy transition to energy democracy.

Sharing best practices and organising exchanges between cities can fill in the current knowledge and confidence gap.

So the EU Energy Poverty Observatory has published a new Guidance on designing effective energy poverty policies in municipalities about how to implement realistic and appropriate local energy poverty policies.

The EU Energy Poverty Observatory is now inviting municipalities to apply for technical assistance with the implementation of this guidance, including insights from best practices and recommendations based on the local circumstances.

 Power to the people!

David Thorpe’s two new books are Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference and Solar Energy Pocket Reference. He’s also the author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

Barcelona: The world’s most radical city?

Spain’s Barcelona is spawning a new era of citizen-led activities that rely on co-operatives organising a range of activities, often based on barter markets and including a network of common stores, an alternative currency called the “eco”, a cooperative social fund for financing community projects and a “basic income program” for paying members for their work – all while heading down the smart city/low energy route. What does it mean to be a self-proclaimed “fearless city”?

[First published on The Fifth Estate on 27 February 2018]

Barcelona has a long and radical tradition going back to the anarchist collectives documented by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, his book about his experiences fighting alongside anarchists against the fascist forces of General Franco. It is unsurprising, then, that, following the particularly severe effect upon Spain of the banking crisis of 10 years ago, creative grassroots responses to austerity have emerged.

Grassroots mayor

Barcelona's mayor Ada Colau

Barcelona is home to a radical grassroots and citizen-led movement that coalesced in June 2014 under the “Yes we can” (Podemos) slogan into the platform Barcelona en Comú, an organisational structure for individuals, activist groups and political parties. This linked networks of local assemblies allowing people to engage in policy decisions.

Ada Colau, a former housing activist, astonished everyone when in June 2015, as part of Barcelona en Comú, she was elected mayor – the first woman to hold the office.

“Democracy was born at local level, and that’s where we can win it back,” she declared.

She had been a founder of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) that was set up in 2009 in response to the rise in evictions caused by unpaid mortgage loans and the collapse of the Spanish property market (she co-wrote a book, Mortgaged Lives, based on her experiences).

In one of her first speeches Colau called for “an end of the political class removed from the people”.

She was not alone: the same year saw radical mayors elected in Madrid, Valencia, Zaragoza and La Coruña and together they announced the Rebel Cities network – a group of cities confronting central government, devising their own policies, and making a worldwide plea for other cities to join. A handbook is available for other cities to follow.

The Catalan Integral Cooperative

From the same movement that gave birth to Colau came the Catalan Integral Co-operative (Integral is perhaps best translated as holistic). Its goal is to build an anti-capitalist co-operative structure not just for the benefit of its own fee-paying members but for the commons as a whole.

“The main objective of the CIC is nothing less than to build an alternative economy capable of satisfying the needs of the local community more effectively than the existing system, thereby creating the conditions for the transition to a post-capitalist mode of organisation of social and economic life,” writes George Dafermos, author of a new report on the co-operative.

The AureaSocial building

Since its formation seven years ago, headquartered in the AureaSocial building, it has been actively involved in developing infrastructures as diverse as barter markets, a network of common stores, an alternative currency called the “eco”, a cooperative social fund for financing community projects and a “basic income program” for paying members for their work.

Its activities are not confined to Barcelona, but extend across Catalonia.

The CIC is a collection of about 10 committees with responsibilities for different topics. For example, the economic management committee, the legal committee, the IT committee and so on. Each works largely autonomously but to coordinate their activities, the co-op holds “permanent assemblies” once a month where members make collective decisions based on consensus.

It has about 600 “self-employed members”. There are also 20 self-managed pantries run by local consumer groups wishing to purchase products made locally or by producers associated in other parts of Catalonia, chosen through an online list of over 1000 items supplied by currently 70 producers and distributed by vans.

According to Dafermos, the co-op is “based on direct exchange and the use of alternative community currencies”.

“The way this ecosystem operates represents the model of the autonomous public market envisioned as a means of satisfying the needs of the local community… a model for the transition to a post-capitalist economy.”

A minimum income scheme

This radicalism extends to the official level. The city is one of several places in the world that are trialling a minimum income scheme – B-MINCOME – in two of the city’s poorest barrios. Here, citizens receive a guaranteed minimum level of income. Receipt for some of them is conditional upon agreeing to some level of community work, by volunteering. Others have other conditions, or none at all, and the results of the trial will be evaluated to determine the most successful model.

The designers of the scheme – which is supported by a grant from Urban Innovative Actions, a European Commission initiative that supports projects investigating “innovative and creative solutions” in urban areas – took experience from the governments of Finland, the Canadian province of Ontario and the Dutch municipality of Utrecht, all of whom have designed guaranteed income experiments in their own areas.

Barcelona is going smart city as well

Barcelona is also smart in the digital and eco senses of the word. As one of the leading smart cities worldwide, 50 per cent of street lighting are LEDs fitted with sensors to switch on when they detect motion and dim when streets are empty, saving 30 per cent of previous energy.

Around 19,500 smart meters monitoring and optimising energy consumption have been installed across the city, including a sensor system helping drivers to locate available parking spaces, reducing congestion and emissions.
There is a Bicing app, providing updated information on the location of public bike stations and bike availability, and the city has one of the biggest free public WiFi networks in Europe.

Smart technology is also used to improve the speed and efficiency of the city’s new orthogonal bus network, and digital bus shelters are also in place. The proposed new bus network is based on an orthogonal grid scheme, which has emerged as the most efficient in urban systems. This network ensures the isotropy of the territory – equally covering all parts of the municipality. This improves connectivity between the lines and accessibility for all users.

The new scheme is not only functional but also more “readable”, and is structured similarly to the metro and a network becomes easily understandable. Furthermore, the great majority of targets are achieved with a single transfer, simplifying use of the bus network and avoiding the current need to know each line individually.

Superblocks road de-trafficking scheme in Barcelona

Superblocks cutting traffic

All of this is helping with the superblock project, to be piloted in four areas in the city.

This will remove traffic from city streets to create pedestrian-centric neighbourhoods that improve health and sustainability, and reduce pollution. It was adopted as a centrepiece of the city’s mobility plan in 2015 to remove cars from within the superblocks, “liberating” 70 per cent of the city’s land for public use, according to Salvador Rueda, director of the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona.

Focus for change

Now calling itself a “fearless city”, Barcelona is positioning itself as a focus for a movement, hosting a Fearless Cities summit in June and a Smart City Expo in November, on defining cities as radical, citizen-empowering places.
According to Dr Bertie Russell, research fellow at the Urban Institute in the University of Sheffield in the UK, Barcelona and Madrid’s decidim process of citizen involvement in decision-making is good because it allows citizens to set the policy agenda, not just react to it.

He supports the trend to “establish non-market, non-public sector initiatives – urban commons – and recognises their right to self-determination”, citing as another example, “Naples’ decision to create a Department of the Commons and provide a legal status for previously squatted social centres.”

A mayor who has reduced her salary and invites other mayors to visit

Local activist Edu Salvador also thinks this is a good approach: “Through her leadership in international conferences of cities, Colau has been active in bringing to Barcelona mayors from main progressive cities of the world. She is a responsible mayor, and has reduced her salary – the salary of the previous mayor was outrageously high.”

Barcelona – home of Antoni Gaudí – is continuing to be every bit as revolutionary as that unique man’s architectural style, pioneering 21st century solutions that address the kind of citizen disillusionment with power that has fuelled reactionary movements elsewhere in the world in the past few years. But by positioning itself within an alternative movement, it is determined that its ideas can be replicated and supported elsewhere.

Read David Thorpe’s surprisingly uplifting post apocalyptic short fiction work set in Barcelona here: For The Greater Good.

David Thorpe’s two new books are Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference and Solar Energy Pocket Reference. He’s also the author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

Are we witnessing a new social revolution?

A fascinating and potentially powerful trend is emerging that, if allowed to develop its potential, could transform society for the better by increasing democracy and individual responsibility.

It has its roots in two things: anger with the banks and corporate greed (last month, vitriol was directed at water companies and the month before, energy companies; this week it's pharmaceuticals) and a desire to create practical alternatives at grassroots level.

Here are some recent examples of positive expressions of this trend, which, at first glance, may not seem to have much in common:

• A report released a week ago recommending that the Labour Party adopt as policy the re-nationalisation of the rail network and its incorporation as a mutual rather like the Co-op
• Tory MP Tim Yeo pursuing a call for personal carbon trading, saying he will trial it in his own constituency
• Vince Cable calling for more banks to be ethical and mutual like the Co-op bank and old-fashioned building societies
• the growth in community renewable energy co-ops.

Deep within the British psyche is a fundamental belief in fairness. We don't like to see other people getting away with things that we can't get away with, whether they are MPs fiddling expenses, or bankers, energy and water chiefs receiving unwarranted bonuses or manipulating the system.

Fairness is at the heart of all of the above proposals and ideas. They all do away with the idea of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, where a minority own and grow rich on a collectively-used resource, and replace it with collective ownership, i.e. just 'us'.

British society does not believe in revolution but in gradual reform. Rioters may express spontaneous anger to particular events, but it is the middle class in this country which has led such reforms, and it is they who are leading the above reforms.

Taking the railways back

The Rebuilding Rail report, produced by think tank Transport for Quality of Life, argues that to get the best value for money out of the rail system, which has not been achieved by privatisation, it should be re-acquired for the public, which can be done gradually without significant public expenditure, and reconstituted in a form similar to that “found in mutuals, cooperatives and not-for-profit organisations".

Its users would become members and have a vital say in the running of the network.

The report is now being considered by the Labour Party as part of its policy review. My feeling is that it is sure to be a vote winner.

Taking the air back

The idea of personal carbon allowances is to share responsibility for carbon emissions around everyone in the population. Individuals who are less profligate in their emissions are able to sell their allotted permits to those who, say, travel many air miles or otherwise emit more greenhouse gases as a result of their lifestyle.

Coca-Cola and the Carbon Trust are also investigating their feasibility.

Tim Yeo, who leads the select committee on energy and climate change, says he "wants to see personal carbon trading and I’d like Britain to be a pioneer in this. I have volunteered my own constituency as an area for a pilot scheme. I believe it could be funded entirely by the private sector so there would be no taxpayers money involved.”

Personal carbon trading has been advocated before, and rejected on a couple of grounds. I myself was part of a group advocating what I believe to be one of the most interesting of several types of PCT, called Cap and Share. When we were pushing it to ministers it was clear they didn't understand its principles and how it differed from the type of scheme being advocated by Tim Yeo.

This type of cap and share is outlined in the book Sharing for Survival, edited by Brian Davey who, like Ed Davey, hails from Nottinghamshire.

I will be suspicious of a scheme which was financed by corporations. But you never know...

Feasta is the organisation most aggressively promoting personal carbon trading in this form, along with many ideas to do with the philosophy of everyone having ownership of the commons and a new, fairer, type of capitalism.

Taking back the banks

Many individuals are choosing to move away from the high street banks following the Libor scandal and NatWest-RBS meltdown.

The Co-operative Bank has reported a 25% increase from last week in online applications to switch accounts and the Ecology Building Society and local credit unions are also benefiting from the general disillusionment with the big banks.

The ongoing banking scandals are behind Business Secretary Vince Cable's call last week for banks to adopt “different business models", and his praise for the expansion of the Co-op Bank by taking over part of the Lloyds network.

Such a thing would have been unheard of a couple of years ago.

Taking back power

What we have seen over the last few years, from one global summit to another, or from one UK government to another, is governments, corporations and their economists failing to learn from mistakes, failing to listen to public opinion and failing to come to meaningful solutions to the problems of worsening biodiversity, increasing climate change and economic chaos.

Many people are asking: what is the point in continuing with a one way dialogue and expecting change from these people?

This disillusionment is leading many individuals and civil society organisations to develop their own different agendas.

It’s not nationalisation, it’s not rampant capitalism, it’s something in between; a nineteenth century notion, in fact, being reinvented for the twenty-first century.

You can even choose to see, ironically, the real expression of localism in this trend. It is a million miles away from the fantasy localism agenda espoused by David Cameron, which has proved to be a smokescreen for cuts in funding to community-level schemes operated by local authorities and charities.

There have been such trends before. Some of them have fizzled out and some of them have led to social revolutions. It's too early yet to say what will happen with this trend. But it's an encouraging sign.