By Daniel Gear, Voar In February 2026, the UK Government and Great British Energy launched the Local Power Plan (LPP), committing “up to £1 billion” to support community-owned clean energy, with a vision that by 2030 every community would have the opportunity to own a local energy project.  I’

Community and local energy is still too often framed as a small-scale consent-building exercise, a sideshow to the main event of industrial decarbonisation, rather than a legitimate and scalable route to transitioning the UK energy system. As the 2024 Labour manifesto recognised, community and public ownership of the energy sector is the norm in other countries: 52 percent of Denmark’s wind capacity is community-owned, and at least 50 percent of Germany’s onshore wind capacity is citizen-owned. Meanwhile less than 1 percent of Scotland’s onshore wind capacity is in genuine community, public or third sector ownership