Regulating energy security through the diffusion of innovation – a community perspective

At the ‘community’ scale, energy security has fairly recently gained political importance in the UK. Huge interest in the incentives provided by the Feed-in Tariff, and to a lesser extent by the Renewables Obligation, reflects both the potential for unlocking local investment potential in energy supplies and the desire to reduce the dependency on increasingly volatile prices and complex energy supply chains. However, the decentralisation not only of generation capacity but also of benefits associated with energy generation requires a more strategic framework to enable the public to tap into the development of local supply security and the localisation of energy related income streams. This paper analyses the consequences of risk and uncertainty relating to energy policy and regulation and the consequences of having a planning system that is rather unfavourable towards certain scales of onshore renewables. At the same time, the UK is running the risk of retaining a comparatively small amount of its expenditure on the diffusion of renewable energy technologies both nationally and locally. In order to appreciate the potential and possibilities, comparisons are drawn to other European countries, particularly to Germany, in light European energy market integration