63: Introducing... Dr Fraser Stuart (pending a viva)

Fraser has finally completed his PhD ... but what was it about? This episode is dedicated to the themes of Fraser's thesis, exploring social inequalities in uptake of low carbon technologies like solar pv and heat pumps, and uncovers ways to rectify those inequalities at local and community levels. Congratulations Fraser!

Some elements of Fraser's PhD work are already publicly available - here:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421521003827

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152200057X

Episode Transcript:

[Music flourish]

Matt:  Hello and welcome to Local Zero with Matt, Becky and Fraser. 

Fraser:  We’re back to fortnightly episodes now, following our four-part PFER special (Prospering From the Energy Revolution). If you missed those, feel free to go back and have a listen wherever you get your pods.

Matt:  And as much as we love you all, dear listeners, it was nice to have a week off. This week’s episode is a bit of a special one though.

Rebecca:  A very special one because any longtime listener of Local Zero will know that the submission of a certain PhD thesis has been an ongoing saga from pretty much day one [laughter].

Matt:  But as we revealed a few episodes ago, as a spoiler, the PhD has been submitted and I’m sure celebratory pints, drinks, champagne and fizz have all been consumed and Fraser is ready to dive back into the content.

Rebecca:  So for that reason, our guest this week (also our host) and soon-to-be – actually, shall we really say this? – soon-to-be Dr Fraser [laughter].

Fraser:  Please don’t jinx it [laughter].

Matt:  That’s the plan [laughter].

Rebecca:  Dr Fraser. So no pressure, Fraser.

[Music flourish]

Matt:  Yeah, looking forward to it. We don’t normally interrogate our guests too harshly but strangely, I feel absolutely fine about doing that this week. If you’re a fan of Local Zero, do take a couple of quick seconds to subscribe and follow us on Twitter @LocalZeroPod or if you’ve made the move to Mastodon, then you can reach us there at #LocalZeroPod. You can also find us on our website LocalZeroPod.com or send questions to our email at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com. You get the gist.

[Music flourish]

On to the topic today, you must be glad it’s behind you. I mean we’ll get into the questions but how does it feel to have that weight off your shoulders?

Fraser:  It’s good. It’s really, really good. It’s something that had been sitting for a little while. Some listeners will know but when I started the job at Regen about this time last year, it was about six weeks out from being finished and submitted and until about Christmas last year, it was still six weeks out from being finished and submitted. So it’s nice to have finally put a stop to it and get it submitted. Lots of it is already published.

Matt:  It is.

Fraser:  But yeah, definitely a good feeling.

Matt:  Becky, as Fraser’s supervisor, you must also be thrilled [laughter]. For those listening, who have been through the process themselves, it is a shared joy.

Rebecca:  Yeah, absolutely. I was trying to be silently frustrated for the past year [laughter] because, as Fraser was saying, it was so close and yet so far. I’m incredibly pleased that it’s finally in.

Fraser:  There was an ongoing or almost a really dull running joke with Becky and a few others where every now and then, they’d check in and be like, ‘So, Fraser, how is the PhD going?’ I would just instantly change the subject and say, ‘Yeah, fine. So that weather has been just wild recently, hasn’t it?’ [Laughter]

Matt:  For listeners, you can’t see this but Fraser has been a bit of a teacher’s pet in that Becky is [laughter] donning the only and unique item which is the Local Zero pod mug complete with the tagline ‘Climate Action on Your Doorstop’ which Fraser organised for Becky’s birthday [laughter]. This is a one-of-a-kind. We’re going to get a picture out of this because I now absolutely want one, Fraser, and so you know what to get me for my birthday [laughter].

Rebecca:  I absolutely love my mug and I need one in one of those reusable plastic coffee cups. They’re not plastic, are they? They’re bamboo or whatever. I nearly dropped my mug this morning and it so nearly smashed and I was very upset.

Matt:  No, not okay.

Rebecca:  No, I know but it didn’t. It survived to tell the tale and it holds just the right amount of coffee.

Matt:  Good. A bounceable mug? Incredible [laughter].

Rebecca:  I think it’s probably more like the bounceable floor. Yeah, I love my mug and so thank you.

Matt:  Good. Now you two have been on your travels, right? You’ve been at a big Innovate UK conference which is very much on theme and all about the Prospering From the Energy Revolution programme and, for listeners, you’re probably up to your eyeballs in that. I’m hoping you heard some good things about the pod but also you heard some good things about the programme. What did we learn? What’s happening out in the world of all things smart and local?

Rebecca:  Oh, Matt, it was amazing. I mean the energy in the room was phenomenal. It was a two-day event in Manchester and it was really phenomenal. I think there were about 300 people in the room and then another 600 online. There’s a huge amounts of interest in this space and huge amounts of energy and, of course, it was a major celebration because the PFER programme has been running since the end of 2018. This has been celebrating the culmination of almost five years of work in this space. I think a lot was learnt and that’s really what the day was all about. This was almost a first-of-its-kind programme in the way it brought together research and actual demonstration projects, design projects and academics with industry, policymakers, local government, the third sector and community groups. It was just such a diverse audience. Actually, I have to say that with some of the stuff that came up during the conference around the ability to deploy certain solutions and tap into flexibility and leverage some of the market mechanisms, it couldn’t be better timing for Ofgem’s call around distributed flex and, as we’re recording this, it was launched yesterday and so still live as we release it. Yeah, lots of stuff going on in this space.

Matt:  Glad to hear it. I keep saying I’m potentially a guinea pig in this world of smart and local energy.

Fraser:  Matt Hannon, famous guinea pig [laughter].

Matt:  I got an email in my inbox yesterday and I have to say I’d completely forgotten that I’d signed up for a heat pump trial. I won’t name the company just yet because we’ll see whether it moves on but it’s part of the Heat Pump Ready Programme which BEIS (Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy) or now DESNZ (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero) is funding. It sounds like a character from Coronation Street [laughter]. So I’m going through the steps on that but watch this space. I could be with a heat pump in the next few months.

Rebecca:  I’m going to up you one. I’m in the process of installing a heat pump.

Matt:  Oh my goodness. You’re always one-upping me, Becky.

Rebecca:  Sorry, Matt [laughter].

Matt:  Go on, tell me more [laughter].

Rebecca:  Oh, it was a disaster. We finally moved into our home and the boiler gave up [laughter] and so we are now in a very cold home. We decided to go for a heat pump and despite the wait, despite some of the additional costs and despite the extra challenges around the install, we are heat pumping it.

Matt:  Is your husband going to install it, Becky, because this is one of the questions we’ve been asking [laughter] or at least will learn?

Rebecca:  Well, I’m sure he will learn. We found a great company that has all the accreditation. They specialise in renewable projects and they are Cornwall-based. In fact, they’re Newquay-based. So we’re really excited.

Fraser:  Did you find it quite easy to find people, information and stuff like that around it? How has the process been in organising it?

Rebecca:  Well, I messaged Richard Lowes, who for folk that don’t know Richard...

Matt:  Your heat pump dealer, yeah [laughter].

Rebecca:  Yeah, heat pump guru [laughter] or just a heat guru in general. I had emailed him quite a few times. He’s been on the pod before speaking about this as well. I have to say, from that perspective, it was a little bit easier because I’d already done a bit of my research by the phoning-a-friend option. Actually, we’re pretty lucky in Cornwall as there are two companies that specialise in renewable projects like that all around Cornwall. We ended up going with the one that was more local just because they could get to us faster. As you can imagine, it’s very cold and so we want to get stuff in. I would say there were a lot of potential challenges for us and amazingly, we’ve been able to overcome all of them or at least on paper. We’ll see what happens when they come to install it. It does take a long time. You’ve got to wait to get your grant approved and then they’ve got to schedule you in which can take three or four weeks. It takes six days to do the install.

Matt:  Six days? Blimey. You wouldn’t want to do that in winter, would you?

Rebecca:  No. You don’t want to do what we’ve done which is wait for your boiler system to break before you do it. That’s been a bit of a challenge.

Matt:  But as you’ve said many times before, that’s the natural time to do it, right?

Rebecca:  Absolutely.

Matt:  You’ve heard it here first, listeners. If you want a heat pump, contact your local heat guru which I think, Becky, is what you said there [laughter].

Fraser:  We’ll make sure and post Rich Lowe’s phone number on the website [laughter].

Matt:  Well, I’ve also got some news. I’ll be heading down to London in the next few weeks to take part in the Royal Society’s Pairing Scheme which is where they connect ivory tower academics like myself – I nearly said ourselves but you two have flown the nest – with senior MPs, parliamentarians and also civil servants to learn a little bit about how each other’s worlds work...

Rebecca:  Wow!

Matt:  ...which I’m thrilled to be involved with. We get to go down to Westminster, hear from some of the top brass down there and actually learn how policy is made. I’m hoping, either in the next episode or the episode after, I can report back on what I found.

Rebecca:  Wow! That’s exciting, Matt. That’s really exciting. So you’re going to try and get some influencing in?

Matt:  Well, I’m actually paired up with the MP for Central Glasgow, Alison Thewliss, and so we’ll have a local relationship on that basis but we’ll go down and understand a little bit more and peak behind the curtain of how this country is actually run.

Fraser:  That’s really exciting.

Rebecca:  Amazing. I mean we’ve got some exciting stuff and whilst you’re off doing that, Fraser and I are actually going to be running a Local Zero Live in London.

Fraser:  Whoop! Whoop!

Matt:  Yeah, this is the big event.

Rebecca:  It is. It is happening next – is it next week? No, two weeks’ time. Goodness me! It feels like it’s next week with the amount of stuff going on. It’s in two weeks’ time and when this pod is launched, it will be next week. From March 14th to 15th, we’re having an EnergyREV Summit in London and as part of that, we’ll be hosting a Local Zero Live which will, of course, be released through our pod channel.

Matt:  Brilliant. I look forward to listening to that. Sadly, I won’t be there but I’m sure you’ll have a lively audience for that as we did in previous times.

[Music flourish]

Well, without further ado, Fraser, it would seem unfair to not give the floor over to you and to give due time, care and attention to your pre-examination PhD [laughter]. This is a dry run. Are you ready?

Fraser:  I am, yes. Should I do a self-ID like all guests have to do? Hello, I’m Fraser Stuart and I’m the guy that Grant Shapps sees in his nightmares [laughter].

Matt:  Welcome, Fraser, to the pod. It’s fantastic to have you finally on as a guest [laughter]. This is subject matter we’ve been really keen to chew through. Now, I’m not going to let Becky ask the first question about what the PhD is about because, as your supervisor, I would really hope she knows [laughter] but for the avoidance of doubt for our listeners, Fraser, your PhD, what is it all about? How did it come into being and really, what motivated you to undertake it?

Fraser:  So the PhD explores inequalities in the uptake of low-carbon technologies like solar PV, heat pumps and to a lesser extent, energy efficiency. It unpacks those inequalities and how they’ve emerged and evolved over time beyond just income alone and looks at the social and community factors that have influenced that as well. It then bridges into local and community energy-led approaches to addressing those inequalities to secure a fairer transition so that people in lower-income households and communities – typically excluded marginalised groups – can also benefit directly, and as a priority, from those technologies as we transition to a net-zero energy system. It’s very much about inequalities. Nobody will be surprised by that just transition theme. It’s about trying to understand those inequalities and how we can feasibly rectify them with more locally and community-led approaches.

Rebecca:  I’m sure anybody that’s heard you talk probably ever realises that this topic is very close to your heart. Tell us a little bit less about the topic and more about you. Why is this so important to you and what motivated you to get into this space?

Fraser:  Talk about myself? I don’t know about that. I hate that. It’s a topic that I care about. I’ve said before in various presentations and discussions that I’m not really an energy guy first and foremost. I come from a good, proud, working-class community up in the Northeast of Scotland and so the social justice, poverty and inequality side of it has always been the driving motivation for that. With the opportunity that we have just now with the transition in the energy system with these new technologies, the potential for more affordable energy, healthier homes and cleaner, greener communities and spaces, those all have big social justice implications. The motivating factor for the PhD and the rest of the work is about trying to marry those two big issues together: the things we need to do to address the climate crisis with those longer-term issues of poverty, inequality and injustice to realise the bigger social and economic opportunity that we have with that transition at this big formative moment that we find ourselves in. It’s very much driven by the social justice and just transition approach first with energy, climate and the transition as an opportunity to do a hell of a lot of good in that process.

Matt:  It’s always tempting to situate a piece of work and the rationale for that piece of work in today’s context but actually, when a PhD is formulated, you have to go back a few years. Did you commence yours in 2016/17?

Fraser:  2017, yeah.

Matt:  Okay, so we have to wind back the clock and think about what the world was like then. Obviously, it was quite different from today. I’m going to hazard a guess here that a lot of the motivation around the inequalities was that many homes were taking advantage of microgeneration at that point, particularly through the Feed-In Tariff and RHI (Renewable Heat Incentive) for these decentralised microgeneration technologies, whether it was electricity or renewable heat. That’s my hypothesis. Was that part of the rationale that you were seeing middle-class, owner-occupied homes taking advantage of these subsidies to draw down these technologies or actually, was it still grounded in many of the same issues that we’re seeing today that are just more acute in terms of people simply being unable to afford energy full stop and not having access to that same quality of life? I’m trying to get into Fraser’s brain.

Rebecca:  That’s a scary place to be [laughter].

Fraser:  We don’t want to go there. It’s a good question, Matt, and to be honest, it’s a little bit of both. For me, it started with the opportunity, which maybe isn’t the truest and most academic way to go about things, of what was happening at the time, as you rightly say, with the Feed-In Tariff. Solar PV, in particular, was the main thought first and that solar PV was delivering a huge amount of benefit under the Feed-In Tariff to people who could afford to install in the first place, had the connections, owned their homes or the time and the capacity to install panels in their houses to then generate a lot of money and all the knock-on social and economic benefit that brings. For me, the motivation wasn’t me thinking, ‘The middle classes are running away with this. We need to rein that in.’ The motivation was me thinking, ‘How do we open that up and share that out into communities that maybe struggle a little bit more to adopt those technologies, whether that’s because they don’t know where to go to access grants and subsidies or they don’t have the time or the resources?’ If you’re a single mum of four living in poverty, it’s unlikely that you have the time or the bandwidth to navigate, as Becky was saying there, what can be quite drawn-out, complex processes for grants, subsidies and things like that. That’s on the proviso that you actually know someone who can help to demystify the process and stuff like that as well. So it very much came from how we understand who gets to benefit from these types of grants and subsidies and how we make sure that the people on the poverty line and marginalised communities across the country can also access those to reap those benefits and improve social, economic and environmental outcomes at the same time. It was a little bit motivated by the inequality but much more about me thinking, ‘I think there’s a big opportunity here. Let’s try and unpack that.’

Rebecca:  Give us some of your headlines. What do you think some of the most important things that you’ve found in your work have been?

Fraser:  There are a few. The first is that in terms of those inequalities and who can install heat pumps or solar panels versus who doesn’t get to, we’ve always assumed that it’s a matter of income and occasionally, we think, ‘Okay, people live in the private rented sector and so that means that you can’t just install new technologies.’ We assume really, really strongly that it’s about income but actually, there are massive social and informational factors that underpin those inequalities as well. Becky, as you were saying about your heat pump, you knew people who worked in the space and so you could pick a phone and say, ‘What do I do? How do I navigate this process?’ Within communities, whether that’s a street, a neighbourhood or a local area, what my PhD shows is that where people have already navigated those processes or they know people who have navigated those processes, it makes it far easier for those people to then navigate them themselves. If you live in a lower-income area, however, you are less likely to have people around you who have navigated those processes because they can be unaffordable to a lot of people or they require a lot of upfront time and financial resources which means you never get the chance to have a network of people around you to help demystify that process, providing you can overcome those other barriers. So it’s not just about income. There are social and informational things here as well that need to be overcome or incentivised to help redress those inequalities.

Rebecca:  There is a lot of literature. We’ll also talk about these peer diffusion effects and so looking at it from the positive side. Once you do it, you see things proliferating in a neighbourhood and your neighbours might get it. You see it out there. I think what’s fascinating here is you’re not flipping that but you’re really looking at the other side of that which is that actually, it’s not just that the money is the barrier. The fact that there are just fewer people that have done it or fewer people you know is another barrier holding you back. What we’re seeing is for those that have done it, it’s making it easier and easier and for those that haven’t, it’s almost like it’s getting harder and harder and so you’re seeing that even widening over time.

Fraser:  That’s actually it. It widens over time and, not to get too academic, in the thesis and in the published paper, this is what we call the Feed-In-Tarrif Trap where those social and informational factors, that kind of peer diffusion effectively locks in the inequality over time and widens and accelerates that inequality over time. An important caveat and qualifier here is that this isn’t an argument to stop middle or high-income households from accessing grants and subsidies to do these things but rather it’s a reason to say that we actually know there’s this other mechanism here, this peer diffusion thing, as well as income that can be leveraged to some degree to try and close those inequalities and to try and stimulate uptake among people who otherwise haven’t been able to. That’s the first chunk of the research.

Matt:  It may be a different term for the same thing but what I’m hearing is there’s positive feedback and these virtuous cycles where you have a community that has the capacity – I don’t like the term wherewithal but you know what I mean here – the knowledge and the networks to take advantage of a funding stream. They take that funding stream and a big chunk of that will be fed back into the community which then supports their capacity building further. They’re then in a better position, again, to capture funding. So we have this positive feedback cycle and you can imagine, as Becky and yourself have just alluded to, there’s the reverse of this where you can be locked out of that. It comes back to capacity building time and time again. The question here is how you break that vicious cycle for these marginalised communities.

Fraser:  This speaks directly to the second and third research bits of the thesis. The second part of the thesis and the theory behind it, and this is where the local and community side of it comes in, is you have this issue where lower income, marginalised communities have less time and resources to access these things which means they have less people that get to access and benefit from solar and heat pumps which mean there’s less scope for that peer diffusion or that proliferation. What we’ve seen and what we’ve seen in Scotland, which contradicts a lot of popular thinking around this, is that community energy projects – that’s community-owned renewable energy projects like wind turbines up on a local green space of solar panels on a school or a community building – under the Feed-In Tariff, where they’ve delivered lots of benefits to the local community, in Scotland, community energy projects have located predominantly in lower-income areas, particularly community solar because there’s the less upfront financial cost and there are less physical barriers to installation on buildings. So community energy groups, obviously motivated by a drive to reduce emissions from the energy system and to democratise the energy system, have also been very, very justice-minded and brought a lot of the benefits from community energy into lower-income areas. Where the restrictions on that are is that the benefits from those community energy projects have tended to be more holistic and rather than installing solar or heat pumps in people’s homes, it’s delivered through community benefit funds. So it supports capacity building, local development and addresses fuel poverty, upskilling and all that kind of stuff but it’s less material for people in their houses. What this does tell us is that community energy groups and other community organisations working in fuel poverty or different social justice and equalities organisations at the local level are very, very well-placed to reduce or alleviate what I’ve called ‘procedural burden’ (the need for someone to access a grant or a subsidy themselves and go through all that legal bumpf) for low-carbon technologies and to support the benefit of those technologies to then be delivered into local places that typically might be excluded otherwise. Community energy is one way in which this happens. The other local energy approaches, such as those led by local authorities (which we’ve heard tons about in the PFER episodes) are able, again, to alleviate that burden and help even directly with the installation of low-carbon tech in people’s houses to deliver those benefits leveraging other funds and processes, etcetera. So community and local have had success and I would argue this is the space that we want to work in to address those inequalities going forward.

Matt:  I don’t disagree that community and local offers us a pathway through this to a more equitable way of accessing, paying for or benefiting from energy but as we’ve had discussions about before, it isn’t necessarily going to lead you to a more equitable outcome. I wonder, through your PhD and also possibly work through Regen as well, is there a sense of where local and community may lead you into a less equitable future?

Fraser:  Yeah, absolutely and I think that’s a key point, Matt, is that energy isn’t fairer simply by virtue of being more local. While there are advantages to doing it that way, it doesn’t necessitate equity, fairness or justice. In terms of where it could work against that is if you’re working on, for instance, local energy projects that only address the owner-occupier sector, which is an important sector to address and you need uptake everywhere, that’s unlikely, again, to reach lower-income communities that typically, or to a lesser extent, live in the owner-occupier sector. In terms of innovations in the local energy space where you’re installing assets in people’s houses and things like that, you always run the risk of excluding people in the private rented sector but crucially, because local and community energy is very, very innovative at this moment in time, in particular, as we’re getting smarter and getting more digitalised as new technologies come down the line with new services and things like flexibility and demand side response, as you innovate within those processes, it’s really, really important to build ideas of fairness and justice into that innovation space. It would be very, very easy to innovate just among those first movers, early adopters and the people like us on this pod who are already interested, who want to participate in innovations and want to get involved while not including people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum to also participate in those innovations and benefit from those innovations. In the innovation space, it can be very inequitable unless you’re innovating specifically with justice in mind and you always, again, fundamentally materially run the risk, in local and community projects, of only involving people who can afford to get involved like a community energy project that needs financial buy-in for a share offer or something and that’s going to be exclusive or projects that, again, just don’t build those principles in from the get go.

Rebecca:  I think some of those innovations, when it comes to the local space and when you see those local authorities, for example, taking leadership and getting involved, oftentimes, we see that that’s about innovative business models to support the deployment of these low-carbon techs in homes, often social housing, because you have generally a single decision maker. So it still requires engagement. I mean having a heat pump requires all sorts of different forms of operation to having other forms of heating. There are certain things like you just need to know about it and you need to understand it. It doesn’t mean people are disengaged but the financial barrier has been removed through the business models. The resource or capacity barrier of having to basically become an expert in this topic to be able to make the decision and invest all the time and resources to do that has been removed through having a different decision maker who is making a decision for a whole group of homes. That’s a different model to the community energy model that you talked about which is where you see, say, a larger asset where members of the community might have a stake in that asset. They might be a shareholder in the cooperative that owns, installs and governs that asset. That’s really fascinating too because you’re removing the financial barrier but you’re doing it differently because usually, people still are investing. There still often is an amount of investment, albeit a smaller amount of investment, and again, you’re changing the decision. You’re making the conversation about something other than what I need to do in my home. Let me become an expert on my personal energy consumption. It feels like you’re flipping the discussion and the engagement to something that’s more civic or community-minded. What do we want for the future of our community? How do we want our community to be involved? I think it’s really fascinating that both of these are addressing some of those inherent socioeconomic challenges that you mentioned at the beginning. Do you think that they’re leading to quite different outcomes in terms of where it takes people and where people’s minds are then at? I know a PhD is three years or, in your case a bit longer, [laughter] but it’s a short period of time and actually, people are on this journey for the long run. Whilst both are addressing that main barrier that you mentioned, do you think that these different models are going to potentially lead to different outcomes in terms of where they’re taking people next and people’s mindset?

Fraser:  Absolutely. Yeah, they do and I think if you split out local and community in that way, the opportunity with local, if you run it with a local authority, is that you can more directly install assets in people’s homes. For community energy, the opportunity for that, at present, is limited and so that benefit is realised much more holistically. What we know within community energy, and here is where it starts to layer in complexities, is that benefit is delivered in local schemes, projects and initiatives and often, they’re minded towards addressing fuel poverty, etcetera, but often, as we’ve joked about on this pod before but it’s from a place of truth, it’s used for repairing the church roof or it’s for football kits for the local football team. The idea of community energy is that it very much is innovative, it is radical and it almost always sets out to be inclusive and to socially bring people into the mix and stimulate a new way of working with and doing energy. But the way that it’s been realised so far, that holistic benefit, can be a little bit more hit and miss, especially for those typically excluded communities, like we say, that don’t necessarily have the time or the resource to get involved with that type of project. What I would push back on a little bit there, Becky... or maybe it’s not even pushing back but local and community, as we separate those out, don’t need to be separated out. If you think about a local area energy plan by a local authority that says, ‘We’re going to do heat inefficiency in this building stock. We’re going to put some generation up here and EV charging here,’ there is absolutely no reason why that can’t inject points of community ownership and governance within that. There’s no reason that that can’t also support typically excluded communities into a more meaningful, civic engagement process within that design and support the designing the principles and the shape tailored to local needs and with justice in mind. These things can absolutely work together. So I think, Becky, you’re quite right to say they have been separated out and they take people down different paths. What I think needs to happen and what I think is increasingly in the frame is that these two perspectives come together so that you can leverage that bigger scale finance that local authorities have access to and the planning, the capabilities, the stock and the connections that they have with interested and have to be well-resourced community energy and other civic organisations to create something that is arguably the best of both worlds.

Matt:  I’d agree, Fraser. Now, I think you are uniquely positioned in that you have one foot in the urban world and one foot in the rural I think is fair to say and that you sort of flit between the city and [laughter], shall we say, the leafier and greener parts of Scotland. There’s something that kind of sits in the back of my mind a lot. I’m reading a fantastic book called Soil and Soul by Alistair McIntosh who was heavily involved in the buy-out of the Isle of Eigg and a commentator on democratic landownership and lots of issues that I think run through some of the themes that we’re talking about. This book is very much from a rural perspective and talks about that sense of community and the traditions, which were very centred around the environment and the circular economy that has started to degrade in recent decades... very much post-mid-20th century. I can see from this rural perspective, there’s one narrative that’s playing out. From an urban perspective, when it comes to energy and other environmental initiatives, they’re often dealing with a very different back story. If you look at Glasgow’s post-industrial landscape, there have been boom and bust cycles. You’ve got a very different kind of population density and a different kind of economy. I wanted to get a sense from you about the inequalities of energy and where you see the differences and similarities that lie between rural and urban. We’ve got this just transition plan out from Scottish Government, Energy Strategy 2, and so do we need to be thinking about these inequality issues for energy differently in these two areas or actually, are they really one and the same thing?

Fraser:  I think they do look different in terms of the material challenges; not just to uptake or transition but also to launching your own local or community energy project. If we’re talking about inequalities rurally, you’re thinking about off-gas grids and you’re thinking about people who are on oil boilers as their main source of heating who are going to struggle to instantly transition over to a heat pump for one reason or another and who might also struggle to be part of a more connected local energy system. It’s a different inequality to an urban area where you’re thinking about, as we talked about, the private-rented sector but somewhere like Glasgow has tenement building stock, multi-occupancy, multi-tenure and a combination of people who own their flats or rent their flats within the same block and also different structural issues there as well. So the inequalities do look different but I would argue that the solutions are broadly the same. We chatted about this in the separate work that we’ve been doing on local and community energy as well. What you really need is an equitable floor of support, resources, skills and expertise across all communities that facilitates the leadership at the local level and the community level and I would argue more predominantly shaped by communities themselves or at least in response to community need and demand. What you need is that equitable floor so that every community is able to develop its own local or community energy project that is responding to that need directly. That’s not to say that every community will or needs to but in terms of addressing those inequalities, you don’t have to be prescriptive and say, ‘This is the one to fix all of these things.’

Matt:  You touch upon a real livewire issue there and the extent to which a community wants to engage. They may be able but they may not be willing. I think there’s an interesting question mark. Of course, when you say a community is willing, you’re talking about the majority and minority. I think that’s a really interesting point there is what we do in terms of net zero and just transition where we’re trying to iron out some of these inequalities by saying we need some local community ownership, shared ownership, governance and distribution of power, costs and benefits in a much fairer sense but actually, we’ve tried to engage with this community and we’ve offered them the support, as you mentioned, and that foundation but they’re not engaging. I’m not sure we’re at that stage in terms of this just transition. I think there’s a quiet assumption that if we do the engagement correctly – obviously, there’s a big question mark about the different forms of engagement – that they will engage en masse. Is this a concern you share? Becky, too. How do we cut that?

Rebecca:  I want to add to that because I think it’s a really good point and I was actually on the edge of my seat. During the PFER conference, I was on a panel with Polly Billington who is an absolute force of nature and who has been on the show before as well. We were talking about Smart Local Energy Systems. We were talking about this notion of local and community and particularly about the people at the end of the wires and how engaged people actually need to be for this to work. Polly made what I think is a really good point which is that, at the moment, so many people are just in responsive mode and fire-fighting mode. They are dealing with challenges around not having enough money and the cost of living crisis has been savage. We’re going to see prices continue to increase. A lot of folks are just being pushed to the very edge of where they are. She was saying that something like this really needs to support those people and not require them to engage further, do more and be pushed even further. Matt, you’re kind of framing this as going into a community and they’re not interested in wanting to engage. Do people need to engage? Community groups are hugely driven by voluntary time commitment for the most part. Does a fairer future that leverages community and local energy actually require people to engage or are there different ways around that?

Fraser:  It requires us to be responding to people’s needs fundamentally, whether that involves ongoing in-depth engagement or whether that means leaving people alone, broadly speaking, and assuming we know what it requires. If you want to do it right, if you want to do it sustainably and if you want to unlock those social and economic benefits, you have to do in a way that recognises people’s needs and the different needs that they have and the different capabilities that they have. I’m going to slip out of my academic rigour for a second and go purely anecdotal here. I do a lot of speaking at community centres, predominantly, in lower-income areas. I facilitate sessions and chat with people and I have never once been to a community where the idea of locally-owned or community-owned energy wasn’t received with anything but them saying, ‘Where do we start? How do we get this done in our area?’ It’s always positive. The idea of it is very, very easy to pitch and sell. The challenges lie elsewhere. So I think if a community doesn’t want to do it, that’s absolutely and completely fine. That’s on that community. But I think what needs to be in place are the resources and expertise across the country. Now whether that’s at the local authority level, community level or baked into existing third-sector organisations or community energy organisations, the opportunity has to be there for those that want to mobilise that. Again, we talked earlier in this interview about diffusion. When one community starts to do it, it makes it easier for another community close by to start to do it. You share those learnings and those processes. What’s missing, as Becky rightly picks up on, is the resource. Community energy organisations and the third sector are so often voluntary and so often stretched to the bare bones. This is one of the big requests that we would make or big recommendations in policy is that those organisations need to be supported to professionalise at scale to help link people to existing support and resources to get projects underway. On engagement, I don’t think we can do it without engaging. Meaningful engagement is going to look different for different people. I think what’s important is that it’s done with justice in mind, that we do it on a case-by-case approach, that it recognises people’s needs and circumstances, that it rewards people for their time in appropriate ways and that it’s not overdone. Engagement fatigue is a very, very real thing.

Matt:  I completely agree. Before you mobilise a community to do something, engagement is absolutely necessary. For me, the entry point should be that a sustainability-oriented project is a means to an end. So the question mark should really be – I think Becky and Fraser, you alluded to this at the beginning – is almost going to the community and the engagement stance is to say, ‘What matters to you? How are your lives? What’s going well and what isn’t going well? What needs to change?’ At that point, instead of saying, ‘This is a town hall meeting about solar PV on a school roof,’ or in a more rural setting, a run-of-the-river hydro PV on a plantation somewhere... this is starting from the first principles of saying, ‘What do we need to do to improve your welfare?’ I defy anybody in any community to not get a very, very strong response, particularly in this day and age, about what they require to improve their livelihoods. You then move through those options and say, ‘We’ve identified from this engagement that these are the key live issues. What would be the best use of our time, capacity and money to meet those needs?’ That’s a very different type of engagement to saying, ‘How big should the solar PV array be on the town hall?’

Fraser:  Yeah, absolutely and this is something that we’ve been wrestling with, Becky and I, in particular, recently is that you can’t go in prescribing one way of doing things which is why when we say community energy or local energy approaches, we’re not talking about one model or one way that things can work. You might be talking about solar PV on the school roof. You might be talking about battery storage in people’s houses or energy efficiency. You might be talking about energy advice, advocacy and fuel poverty support in other forms or bringing all those things together. The key thing is that you’re not going in and saying, ‘I’ve got this thing. How do we make it work for you?’ but rather we’re going in and saying, ‘There’s a range of different things in this space that are happening. What is your situation? What’s happening and how do we build from there up?’ When we think about the goals of any project or the beneficiaries of any project, if you bake in a power imbalance right at the very beginning and say, ‘We’ve got this thing. How do we make it work for you?’ or even worse, ‘We’re doing this thing. How do we get you to say yes to it?’ then you’ve automatically blown any chance of real equity out of the water with that. It has to be that way led.

Matt:  That comes down, does it not, to who is responsible for leading the engagement? Is it fair to say that you need somebody to go in there who is objective and unbiased and that is also trusted and crucially, knows what they’re doing? They are informed about participatory methods for community engagement and they’re being led by the community rather than leading the community. If you agree with those principles, who should be doing this? It doesn’t feel like I’ve ever been engaged on these issues in my local neighbourhood.

Fraser:  I think increasingly, as we do more thinking and more work in this, I feel more and more that this is where the role for community energy organisations (not necessarily projects) but also civic third-sector organisations have a role to play. I want to qualify that by saying nobody is expecting them to play this additional role or hold this additional expertise. At this moment in time, with the cost of living, energy crisis and year-to-year hand-to-mouth funding, these organisations are stretched beyond belief as it is. The resource just isn’t there just now but with adequately resourced third-sector organisations working in their local communities minded towards it, whether that’s a fuel-poverty charity... Matt, something like South Seeds. Imagine what South Seeds could do in that local area if they weren’t relying on year-to-year competitive, patchwork funding to get things done. So consistent core funding for third-sector civic organisations that know their communities well, I would argue is a really, really good starting point.

[Music flourish]

Rebecca:  So, Fraser, the most important question of all is how important was Local Zero in helping you whilst you were doing your PhD?

Fraser:  It was essential. It was basically my whole PhD [laughter]. I never actually read an article [laughter].

Matt:  Collected zero data [laughter].

Fraser:  All of my references are just the back catalogue of Local Zero. There’s just a link to the episode page.

Rebecca:  Can you do one more thing for me? Can you sum your PhD up in 30 seconds?

Fraser:  My PhD explores inequalities in the uptake of low-carbon technologies like solar PV and heat pumps and unpacks ways to rectify those inequalities at the local level through locally-owned, led and delivered and community-owned led and delivered energy projects.

Rebecca:  Fantastic.

Matt:  Brilliant. Fraser, congratulations on getting it in and good luck with the viva.

Fraser:  Thank you.

Matt:  I don’t know when it’s scheduled for but I’m hoping, if it’s in Glasgow, we’ll see you after, hopefully, for some celebrations.

Fraser:  Absolutely.

Matt:  I thoroughly enjoyed that. Good luck with it.

Fraser:  Thanks for having me, guys. Don’t you guys normally do a game at the end of every episode? Am I not getting to play that this week? [Laughter]

Matt:  Yeah, you just can’t get the hosts these days [laughter]. Our co-host hasn’t written a Future or Fiction?, sadly [laughter] but we’ll have words.

[Music flourish]

Fraser:  You’ve been listening to Local Zero. If you’d like to read a little more about my PhD, if that interests you for whatever reason I can’t imagine, links to already published sections will be in the show notes of this episode and the full thing will be available in due course.

Matt:  Absolutely. I thoroughly recommend a couple of the papers there, so do that. A polite reminder then once more that if you haven’t already, please, please subscribe to the pod wherever you get your podcasts from. Find and follow us @LocalZeroPod on Twitter or email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you want to share some longer thoughts.

Rebecca:  If you have a spare minute, please do leave us a review if you can. It really helps us reach new audiences and if you know anyone who might enjoy Local Zero, we’d love it if you could send us their way but for now, thanks for listening and goodbye.

Matt:  Goodbye.

Fraser:  Bye, bye, bye, bye.

[Music flourish]

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