If I had asked for a better visual analogy of the transition to a low carbon economy I wouldn’t have got one. Standing in a blustery field in Oxfordshire I was presented with a sight that highlighted the juxtaposition of old and new, pessimism and optimism, dirty and clean, the past and future of our energy economy.

On the horizon sat the mothballed ‘Didcot A’ coal and oil power station, a great beast of a building; foreboding, grey and eerily still. A huge grimy blot on the beautiful rolling landscape. No steam puffing from its giant cooling towers, no carbon emitted into the atmosphere from its chimney, a relic of the past. And right in front of me, quietly swooshing around in proud defiance of the past and the dead power station in the distance behind it, the blades of the country’s first fully cooperatively owned windfarm, operating at full capacity and pumping carbon-free electricity into the grid.

The Westmill Wind Farm Co-operative is a testament to the art of perseverance. What started as a local farmer’s idea back in the early 1990s has taken 15 years, millions of pounds and a determination to overcome hurdles from difficult planning laws to last minute buyouts of wind turbine manufacturers to make this community energy project happen.

The project comprises five 1.6MW wind turbines, enough to power a few thousand houses, and after 18 months of operation has generated enough carbon free electricity to offset all the energy used to build and install them.

Liz Rothschild, involved with the Westmill Co-operative from the beginning, gave our group a tour of the site. She expressed a combination of happiness, excitement and sheer relief that this project is finally in motion. Over 2000 people have invested in this project with amounts ranging from £250 up to hundreds of thousands. They are already making a return on their investment and will continue to do so for at least 25 years, the lifetime of the current turbines.  
She told me that setting up a clean energy cooperative is something anyone can do but most people don’t realise this is even a possibility. This struck a chord with the work we do at ClientEarth, where a key goal in many of our programmes is achieving transparency and providing people with access to information. Knowledge is empowering, but when it comes to projects like these, very few people have it.

In Denmark and Germany cooperative ownership is the norm for renewable energy projects but in the UK, where renewables make up a much smaller proportion of overall energy provision, private ownership by the big energy companies is typically the case. With the coalition government’s talk of “Big Society” communities should grab the opportunity to plug the rapidly approaching energy gap with their own energy projects.
 
To learn more about setting up your own community energy project, go here.  To read about our climate and energy programme, go here.