Scaling community energy in the UK: what national policy must address to enable local delivery

Luke Gooding; Sarah West

doi:10.51414/sei2026.037

This SEI brief aims to inform how the UK’s ambition to expand the number of community-owned, renewable energy sources can translate into practical delivery. It outlines key hurdles that community energy efforts face and makes recommendations to overcome them. Its insights are drawn from discussion groups convened for this purpose, bringing together community energy practitioners, support organizations’ representatives, and experts from the sector.

Luke Gooding, Sarah West / Published on 21 September 2026

Download Scaling community energy in the UK / PDF / 121 KB

Citation

Gooding, L., & West, S. (2026) Scaling community energy in the UK: what national policy must address to enable local delivery. SEI brief. Stockholm Environment Institute. https://doi.org/10.51414/sei2026.037

DOI

https://doi.org/10.51414/sei2026.037

Key messages

The UK has signalled renewed ambition to invest in efforts to accelerate the growth of community-owned energy to help communities “reap the benefits of clean, secure, home-grown energy” (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, 2024). Such ambition requires the right enabling conditions, which have yet to be realized.

Key barriers identified include development-stage risk, weak organizational capacity, limited access to infrastructure and markets, and uneven conditions for participation.

Many of the systems shaping delivery, from grid access to procurement, still work better for larger commercial actors than for community-scale organizations and for communities that have more organizational capacity and more financial wherewithal.

Policy and implementation must move beyond solely funding individual projects to creating the conditions for sustained local delivery. This must address regulations, the market, access to infrastructure, and organizational capacities of communities themselves.

These issues are essential to the aim of expanding community energy, which directly supports wider policy goals such as energy affordability, local economic resilience, and public participation in low-carbon transitions.

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Key messages

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