Local authorities key to unlocking engagement with energy transition

Councils and local organisations will be key to helping the most vulnerable with the energy transition, an industry expert has insisted.

At the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool on Monday (26 September) Adam Scorer, chief executive of National Energy Action (NEA), spoke during a fringe event titled Putting People at the Heart of the Energy Transition.

The charity boss said that he hoped that the next iteration of policy development from Labour recognises where individuals are in the transition.

He explained: “Because the many are not the same. Human beings are notoriously heterogeneous, they live in a lot of different circumstances and if the depth of your policy investigation does not engage with that, and recognize that and address all the differences and challenges that people have, you will just have a target and you will not have that depth of policy that’s required.”

Asked by Utility Week about whether the energy sector needs a single advice body to aid consumers during the shift to net zero, Scorer said the sector “should not waste a crisis” and that it should regain traction with local communities.

He added: “The duration of this energy price crisis has to slingshot us into a better sense of community engagement and community leadership around the energy transition…it’s been really troublesome for those advice organisations like mine on the frontline to be able to do that.

“The only way you do that is working with local authorities and local groups and local communities of interest to make sure we solidify that.

“The advice challenge is a really serious one, I think because people present themselves and benefit from advice in lots of different circumstances and ways, I don’t really think a single body is the answer.”

Councillor Lisa Trickett, co-chair of Labour’s environment campaign, Socialist Environment and Resources Association (SERA), was also on the panel and agreed that a single advice body was not the answer.

She said: “There’s a tendency to try and think ‘we need to have a new national agency, a new national process’. When your daily dilemma is whether to actually feed your kid or heat your home, you don’t actually think ‘I’m going to pop off down to this advice centre’…your first thought is ‘what am I going to do with my children today?’”

“There are programs that can be developed, but you go to the point where people are accessing the help,” she added.

Scorer also said that accelerating the smart meter rollout “is absolutely fundamental” and that the devices are key to consumer behaviour change.  

He continued: “One of the things a smart meter does is it enables you to understand changes, it legitimises them and you get the benefit of repetition and revaluation in order that people have data driven personal advice, as well as just the generic ‘don’t fill your kettle up’.”

Dan Brooke, chief executive of Smart Energy GB, the official campaign for the smart meter rollout, also sat on the panel and was asked how his organisation was targeting the remaining 48% of the UK population currently without a smart meter.

He said the campaign recognises that different people will respond to different benefits of the devices.

“And so we now have a much more sophisticated campaign that pushes out a variety of different benefits. Some of them are these national benefits related to net zero and energy security, many of them are personal benefits of saving energy and saving money,” said Brooke.

Brooke added that the impact of this resulted in a “record” reduction of those customers who were resistant to getting a smart meter last year.

These issues will be discussed further at Utility Week Forum in London this November. For more information and to book your place, click here.