Towards resilience: Building energy systems with community at their heart

At the beginning of this year, we teamed up with different organisations to explore how handing power to communities can help reshape our systems for a more resilient future. For the final briefing in this series we worked with Forum for the Future to investigate resilient energy systems.

COVID-19 has brought into sharp focus the fragile state and deeply interconnected nature of the critical systems we rely on for our health and prosperity. Our energy system is a case in point; the pandemic has underscored that existing top-down, centralised models of energy supply and management are not a good fit for the future.

We sought the views of a range of voices within the current energy system from energy companies to grassroots organisations. This report summarises some of the key themes arising from those discussions and points to a potential path forward.