Community energy co-ops fund launched

In a bit of hurry this afternoon, so you'll have to put up with a cut-and-pasted press release about the new fund (Energy Catalyst Fund) that the Council has launched to help community groups to set up cooperatives to generate renewable energy. This is something that I proposed and helped to come to fruition, so very happy to report it here:

Council’s £50,000 fund to help communities generate their own energy

Bristol City Council is launching a new £50,000 fund to help communities get their renewable energy projects off the ground.

The Bristol Community Energy Catalyst Fund will provide up to £15,000 per project to enable community projects to go from just a great idea to a successful working enterprise.

Assistant cabinet member for sustainability, Councillor Neil Harrison, said: “We are committed to improving the carbon efficiency of the city, and have set ambitious targets to cut emissions by 40% by 2020. We are investing in renewable energy as a key part of this.

“We know that communities across the city want to reduce their energy costs and develop their own renewable energy, but they need help to get their projects off the ground. Whether it’s solar panels, biomass boilers or an energy saving programme, the Catalyst Fund can help them get through the key business development hurdles such as feasibility and legal documentation. The Council hopes that with small amounts of early funding it can enable communities to secure the capital investment they need to realise their projects.”

Projects supported by the Catalyst Fund will be treated as ‘open source’, meaning that any developed ‘products’ – such as market research or feasibility studies – will be made available to help other community organisations. The funding awards will be treated as an investment in the project which they should aim to repay over the course of their project, allowing the fund to be steadily replenished to help fund more community projects in the future.

The Catalyst Fund is just one of the ways in which the Council can help community energy projects. The Council wants to hear from community groups about what they are doing and ways in which the council can help them.

Two workshops to find more about the fund are being held on Wednesday 2nd March, 8.30-9.30pm, at Hamilton House, Stokes Croft and Thursday 10th March, 6-8pm at the Create Centre.

Bristol-based charity, the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) will be administering the fund and running the workshops.

The Catalyst Fund will be open to applications from mid-February, with the selection process and awards of funding being decided mid-March – so groups won’t have to wait long to find out if their application has been successful. Interested applicants can register their interest now by emailing bridget.newbery@cse.org.uk.

To find out more about the Catalyst Fund or book a place on the workshops, go to www.cse.org.uk/bristolcommunityenergy.

Public meeting - changes to Cotham Hill

A quick note to announce that there will be public meeting on Thursday 24th February at 7pm in Tyndale Baptist Church Hall (to the right of the church, abutting Imperial Road) to discuss possible radical changes to the Cotham Hill junction.

The plans are part of the scheme to improve the bus route along Whiteladies Road, as well as making improvements, where possible, for pedestrians and cyclists - and maybe even for drivers too!

The consultation that took place late last year threw up lost of objection to the proposals that were originally made, so the traffic engineers have been beavering away to come up with a different approach. I think, at first look, that the new ideas work much better, but the purpose of the public meeting is to give residents a chance to have another look and see what they think. I don't have a map yet, but I'll post it here when I do.

All residents are welcome. The only caveat is that we will be restricting discussions to the Cotham Hill remodelling only - there are likely to be separate meetings about other parts of the Whiteladies GBBN scheme.

Pyhrric victory for biofuel plant?

Yesterday started off with what seemed to be very bad news. Tory Secretary of State for Communities, Eric Pickles MP, had accepted the appeal from W4B to allow them to build a 50MW power plant at Avonmouth, fuelled by tropical biofuels like palm oil. However, as the day wore on, I came to realise that the full detail of the decision letter wasn't all bad news - and, in fact, there is some quite good news in there for Bristol and also the rest of the UK.

The headline bad news first: W4B were given permission to build their plant, which, it is estimated, will need a plantation about six times the size of Bristol to feed, probably on former rainforest in Indonesia. This will produce renewable energy and therefore attract very lucrative government subsidies in the form of Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROCs). I and other campaigners have argued that while undoubtedly renewable, it is not sustainable or ethical.

The good news part one: Pickles ruled that the sustainability of tropical biofuels is a 'material consideration' in planning decisions - in other words, it can be taken into account. This was the argument that I proposed at the planning meeting that rejected the application, and which the committee (and especially Councillors Woodman and Breckels) agreed with. In making this ruling, he overruled his own Inspector who backed W4B's argument that the term 'natural environment' only applied to Bristol. This ruling will make it easier for campaigners to fight tropical biofuel plants elsewhere in the UK.

The good news part two: Pickles only gave planning permission subject to W4B being bound to use only fuel sources that meet the sustainability criteria in the 2009 EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED). This is a far-from-perfect document in many ways (limited in scope, questionnable calculations, based on self-declaration and so on), but it does prevent the operators from using the worst sorts of cheap and nasty fuel from the metaphorical 'back of a lorry' (e.g. illegally deforested areas).

The good news part three: By doing one and two above, Pickles has effectively bound the use of tropical biofuels in the UK to the ROC system. The RED forbids national governments from setting tougher sustainability standards for fuels than contained in the RED itself, so Pickles couldn't have simply banned them on his own sustainability grounds - the Germans tried this and got stopped. However, ROCs are a UK government subsidy for stimulating the renewables market and they can set their own rules for eligibility for ROCs, including potentially withdrawing them completely for tropical biofuels, like the Dutch have. Maybe, just maybe, Pickles decision is a prelude to an announcement from Lib Dem Chris Huhne MP - Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, the department that runs ROCs.

The good news part four: Pickles overruled his Inspector again (a bad day for him, for sure!) and ruled that the Council acted 'reasonably' in refusing the application. The word 'reasonably' has an important meaning in planning law and it effectively means that, "you got the answer wrong, but you weren't ignoring the rules or being arbitrary." Not only is this vindication for the Council's decision to defend the appeal, but it means that the Council won't be saddled with W4B's legal costs, bless them!

The decision, while certainly disappointing and a setback, makes the future campaign much clearer: I and the other campaigners will be putting pressure on Chris Huhne to axe ROCs for tropical biofuels, which would almost certainly make these plants go away, especially if they are banned from using dodgy fuel sources. The ROCs for biofuels were intended to be for waste chipfat, not for importing millions of gallons of palm oil from East Asia. I hope that Chris will see sense!

I have an increasing sense that this decision is a Pyhrric victory for W4B. Will they really want to pour millions into a project were there is still so much uncertainty, with a fairly good chance that the ROC rules will change - or maybe even the RED will? They will need to operate the plant for maybe 20 years to recoup their investment, so can they be sure that the ground won't fall apart beneath them? I should imagine that they're having a long, hard think just now...

Decision expected on biofuel plant

Today is the today planned for the decision by the Secretary of State on planning permission for the massive proposed tropical biofuel plant at Avonmouth. This was rejected by Bristol's planning committee a year ago (with Lib Dems and one Labour councillor voting against), but the wannabe operators, W4B, have taken it through a massively expensive public appeal. At very least, I am proud of having helped to delay this dreadful project for a year. Hopefully Eric Pickles will have the good sense to kill it dead and to change the rules to stop these sorts of plants emerging - they use massive subsidies intended for reusing chip fat that were misguidedly implemented by the last government. If you're unsure about why this approach is such a bad idea, there is a useful piece to put this in context on George Monbiot's Guardian blog.

Speed sign on Hampton Road

Anthony and I met this morning with the traffic engineers about our campaign to get a 'new' vehicle activated speed sign on Hampton Road near to the junction with Abbotsford Road.

I say 'new', as the agreement that we've brokered is to move the one that's currently on Cotham Road and which needs to be removed as the zebra crossing is built (see below). This would seem to be a really good solution and we're told that it will move across in the next few weeks.

The stretch of Hampton Road that it will serve will be the one heading north from the mini-roundabout as you approach the zebra crossing near Warwick Road. This is an area where speeding is common and where Anthony collected a petition of many dozens of signatures in favour of measures to slow things down.

P.S. The other good news from this morning is that work is planned to start on installing the Cotham Road zebra crossing in two weeks time.

Shattered dreams!

Alas and alack... I didn't get the award for Sustainability Champion of the Year! Very nice to be shortlisted nonetheless. It's also been pointed out to me that the other four people were all full cabinet members and so have much more power than a lowly assistant like me. Hopefully 2011 will be another great year for sustainability in Bristol and we can have another bash next year.

Two new licensing applications

In the relentless march of new licensing applications, two more have hoved into view in the last few weeks:

• Clifton Mini Mart (formerly Benny's Chicken) at 12 Cotham Hill have applied for an off-licence until 2am on Sundays, 4am on Fridays and Saturdays and 3am the rest of the week. It's case number 10/06287/PREM and you can object to (or support) the application until 21st February.
• Fishminster (formerly Flipper) at 133 Whiteladies Road (opposite Clifton Down station) have applied for a late night food licence until 3.30am on Fridays and Saturday, 1am on Mondays and 3am the rest of the week, as well as alcohol sales until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays and 11pm the rest of the week. It's case number 10/06240/PREM and you can object to (or support) the application until 17th February.

In both instances, you can register your views by e-mail licensing@bristol.gov.uk. If you are objecting, remember to refer to one or more of the four 'licensing objectives'.

Spot the difference!

People sometimes say that there is no real difference between the political parties, but today threw up one of the little examples that shows where those differences exist.

It was a meeting of the Corporate Parenting Panel, discussing how the Council looks after young people in the care system. The matter at hand was the Council piloting a new approach to delivering support and services, by allowing groups of social workers to set up outside the framework of the council - a bit like a GP surgery. The theory is that without the constraints of being inside the Council, the social workers can offer objectively better services for less money. It's part of a national scheme and four other councils are already trying it out.

The Corporate Parenting Panel is a 'voluntary' committee which has no political power or kudos, so all the people there are there because they genuinely care about the 650 or so young people who the Council has responsibility for. It is important to say this for context: anything that was said, was said in the context of trying to do the best thing for the young people.

Labour councillor Derek Pickup waded into a long and passionate exposition of why the pilot scheme was completely wrong. He believed that the Council knows best and that it needs to keep complete control over services and support for children in care. He believed that an independent organisation, even a voluntary one linked closely to the Council, couldn't be trusted to get things right.

With respect (and I'm not having a go at Derek), I think he's wrong. I think business-is-usual is just as risky as looking at alternatives. Events like the Baby P case have demonstrated that councils can't always be trusted to get things right, whatever the intentions of the people involved. If Bristol can offer a better deal to young people, then I think that we have a duty to look into it, with all the checks and balances that are possible put in place. And I guess that's a real political difference.

(Interestingly, one of the non-councillor members of the Panel argued that the pilot was the wrong thing to do because it would offer better services and support to those covered by the pilot compared to the majority of young people in care. I think he was wrong too - sometimes you have to have short-term unfairness to create long-term improvements and fairness.)

A new carbon tax - who nicked our recycled money?

One of the facets of the Energy Bill that is wending its way through Parliament at the moment is that the "Carbon Reduction Commitment" (CRC) is going to be simplified from that introduced by the previous government last year.

Trying to explain the old CRC to the 'person on the street' is not the easiest task and I have seen many eyes glazing over. Crudely, it is a legal requirement on big organisations (including councils) to buy credits for the carbon that they emit, starting in July 2011. The amount by which emissions were reduced each year would then be used to construct a league table and the money paid for the credits would then be recycled back to the organisations according to their position on the league table. So, the good boys and girls would not only get their own money back, but they would also get some of the bad boys and girls' money too. Sort of - and I'm never sure I get it completely.

What the Energy Bill does is to ditch the recycling, effectively turning the CRC into a simple Carbon Tax in which everyone loses. This sounds like bad news, but the more I reflect on it, the more I think it's actually good.

The headline bad news is that Bristol City Council will probably have to pay something like £750,000 in the first year, based on £12/ton of carbon. In the old scheme, we would have got some or all or more of this back depending on where we came in the league table. Now we'll get nothing. The money will be going into national carbon reduction work - probably carbon capture and storage projects.

And this is the first 'good' news. The league table was unlikely to do Bristol City Council many favours. Firstly, it was based largely on annual carbon reduction and this favours the laggards who've done little or nothing in the past. Given our long-standing commitment in this area, we've already (to use a much hated phrase) picked the low-hanging fruit - we've done the simple stuff that cuts lots of carbon for little money. Basically, the more you cut, the harder the next cut is, so the system would have favoured 'dirty' councils and companies.

Secondly, it takes councils a long time to do things - even good councils. We have to consult and do legal checks and go through procurement procedures. In contrast, companies can act much quicker as they don't need to go through the same red tape. The net result is that I would have expected to find most councils in the bottom half of the table and this would have meant that our taxpayers' money could have been recycled to fleet-of-foot and deep-pocketed multinationals like Tesco.

So, my best guess is that we wouldn't have done particularly well out of the recycling system - we'd have got some cash back, but the most would have gone to reward people cutting carbon for the first time or those able to throw quick money at it. I don't think we'd have been winners, though I think we'd have done ok compared to other councils.

The big 'good news', however, is the certainty of a tax. It means you can plan. It was very difficult to get people's head around the old system - "we have to give them money and then they might give some of it back and maybe more" isn't a good basis for building financial models and doesn't make sense to accountants. Now we know pretty much exactly what CRC will cost the Council and we can factor it into things.

This is a good thing because it, for the first time, means that we can 'cost' a carbon reduction. For example, if there is a possible project that will cut 800 tons of carbon next year, it makes complete financial sense to spend anything up to £10,000 on doing it, because we'd save that in tax at £12/ton. At the moment, we have to mess around with projections of energy savings and this is messy because energy prices are unpredictable.

Where this will be particularly useful is in schools. Around £350,000 of the Council's bill will be derived from schools who contribute 40% (and rising) of the total carbon. Because schools are largely independent entities these days, there is no means of passing the tax onto the schools, even if someone wanted to - it's the Council's problem. What the new CRC system does is give the Council a financially compelling reason to proactively do things to school buildings to save carbon. Previously, the lack of clarity made this very difficult to justify as the cost saving was practically impossible to calculate with any certainty.

I hope this made some sense - I can almost hear people glazing over even through the internet!