Clause 9 - Promotion of community energy
Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill
4:45 pm
Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith, Labour)
The amendments are designed to clarify the provisions for community energy under the Bill. I am delighted that the Government have no objections to clause 9 as it stands, so I shall be inviting members of the Committee to support it at the appropriate time. I am grateful to the Department of Trade and Industry for working with me to draft the amendments, which will strengthen the provisions.
Some amendments are essentially drafting proposals, but I draw particular attention to amendment No. 26. It would make clear that support for a community energy project can include advice and assistance
“to persons establishing and operating, or proposing to establish and operate, community energy projects”.
In other words, support is not necessarily only for the physical infrastructure, but the development of the schemes.
Amendment No. 32 would make it clear that qualifying premises that would benefit from the community energy projects can include premises that
“are used wholly or mainly for purposes other than carrying on a trade, business or profession”
and
“in the case of premises which consist wholly or mainly of a dwelling or dwellings, contain at least five dwellings”.
The provision would allow support for community energy projects, and not only for buildings such as community halls. It would include dwellings and flats, as long as there were a minimum of five dwellings involved, constituting a genuine community of some sort. It could be a community of five dwellings or a much larger one—an entire village or block of flats, or half a town or city—subject, of course, to its being of such a size that it could be regarded as a community.
In that respect, I draw the attention of the Committee to amendment No. 27, which specifies the maximum size of the plant covered by the provision. The upper limit for an electricity generating plant would be 20 MW, and that for a heat generating plant would be 100 MW. Those limits were suggested to me by the Department on the basis that they are twice the size of the largest existing district scheme supported by DEFRA. The view is that the maximums would not impose undue restrictions of size on the development of community energy projects, and would prevent them from being so large that they covered an entire city, or the entire country.