Building industry urges councils to lead community-scale energy projects

Local authorities should step up efforts to promote community heating, water and waste disposal projects, according to a new report from the Green Building Council (GBC), which warns that without greater backing from councils, community-scale low-carbon initiatives will continue to struggle to get started.

Speaking to BusinessGreen.com, the GBC's John Alker said that local authorities could play a key role in driving the rollout of energy efficient shared heating and water networks, by centring such projects on public buildings.

"A key recommendation of the report is creating a secure anchor load with public sector buildings," he explained. "That provides security and a long-term framework for the private sector to get the projects up and running."

The report recommends that local authorities undertake a review of their area to identify where shared infrastructure can be deployed, and act as a project co-ordinator bringing together the utilities, building firms and households that will be affected by community-scale projects.

For example, if a datacentre or power plant is being built, it should ensure the capacity to distribute the resulting waste heat to local homes is built at the same time.

The GBC said that such schemes could lead to reduced heating and water bills and a more secure energy supply, while curbing carbon emissions and making it easier for construction firms to meet the government target to ensure all new homes built from 2016 meet zero-carbon standards.

The report also recommended that local councils should establish "community energy funds" to encourage uptake of integrated infrastructure.

The barriers to adoption of community-scale energy projects cannot be overcome in isolation, according to E.ON's Marco Marijewycz, who contributed to the report.

"Radical new ways of partnering need to be established, bringing together energy companies and local authorities at the master planning stage along with house builders and developers," he said. "The shared goal must be to look for opportunities to deliver sustainable, low-carbon energy solutions at a scale that can serve multiple new domestic and non-domestic developments as well as existing buildings."

A survey from the GBC revealed that there is widespread support for community energy projects, with 71 per cent of people signalling that they were in favour of district heating systems and almost 90 per cent claiming they would like to see more sustainable water networks that use filtered rainwater to flush toilets and water gardens.