Local energy plans

A community-led Local Energy Plan enables the local community to look at its existing and future energy needs (in terms of power, heat and transport) and state where it sees priorities for action. It also identifies opportunities that can help the community take practical action to support its current and future energy system developments.

As local community plans, they tend to focus on smaller geographical areas, but can benefit, and indeed support, other local, regional, and national strategies. We encourage any community considering undertaking developing a community-led Local Energy Plan to engage with their local authority to understand how the plan can integrate into the wider strategic plans that exist.

Community-led Local Energy Plans are developed by local people who have an interest in the community, for example residents, businesses and community organisations. They are developed in collaboration with other stakeholders such as the local authority, the distribution network operator and local generators.

Local Energy Scotland has a toolkit that provide a step-by-step process and resources to help communities develop Local Energy Plans. The toolkit has six stages; each stage has additional guidance, templates and examples to help you develop your plan. The toolkit is available via the Community-led local energy plan toolkit.

Our Local Energy Plans and Beyond guide will help you link your Local Energy Plan to local authority-led planning, whether your plan already exists or is yet to be developed.

The approach to developing Community-led Local Energy Plans was developed as part of the Delivering COmmunity BENefits of Civic Energy (COBEN) project. The Scottish pilot developed the approach to be part of a whole system approach where communities’ energy generation, energy efficiency, heat, transport, storage and future usage needs are considered together. Read more about the COBEN project.

As part of the pilot, community-led local energy plans were developed in four local communities:

• Brae (Shetland Islands)
• Drumnadrochit (Inverness)
• Barra and Vatersay (Western Isles)
• Oban (Argyll).

Here are two additional examples of local energy planning in the UK:

• Fife Council wanted to understand how Burntisland could reduce its carbon footprint by 80% and lead the development of the Burntisland Community Energy Masterplan
• Local Area Energy Plans have been piloted in England and Wales by the Energy Systems Catapult project in Bury (Greater Manchester), Bridgend (Wales) and Newcastle. This project established a planning framework to help local government, energy networks and other key stakeholders prepare for a low carbon future. More information is on the Energy Systems Catapult website.