Oldham Energy Futures
Citizen-led Local Energy Planning, Participatory Futuring, Pilot local energy project development
Role: Facilitation, Process design, Community programme and pilot programme management, Methodology development.
A project led by Carbon Coop in collaboration with URBED Design, CLES - the national organisation for local economies, Oldham Council and University College London (UCL).
Funded by ICLEI Action Fund.
Oldham Energy Futures worked with two Oldham neighbourhoods in a participatory energy planning process to explore how transforming power, heat, and transport can benefit people locally. In a process of capacity-building, future imagining, co-design and prototyping, the groups discovered, shaped, and tested plans & projects designed to transform their neighbourhood and energy system.
From this process, the project team developed the methodology ‘Community-led energy planning’ (CLEP), which Carbon Coop uses to support Local Authorities in Energy Planning processes.
CLEP is a place-based, community-centred approach to building knowledge, understanding and confidence in lower-income communities to enable them to shape and benefit from the energy transition. It allows local people to engage in energy transition planning and action, generates valuable neighbourhood-level data, and enables the activation of community-led and -owned initiatives that can build community wealth as part of the energy transition.