King's College London

The project ‘Social entrepreneurship at the grid edge’ explores how community groups can generate value through an energy system that is becoming more flexible and distributed. The project focuses specifically on demand side response and collective self-consumption opportunities. The project team has carried out a comparison of two national contexts; the Netherlands where there is regulatory support for community-led innovation and the UK where there is less support.

Drawing on critical infrastructure studies and place-based entrepreneurship theory, this project explores how community groups are responding to such opportunities appearing ‘at the grid edge’ by co-creating new social and technological innovations in collaboration with other organisations such as local government and technology companies.

We have also produced a toolkit to support more community groups to engage with the energy system. The Co-design Toolkit for Energy Democracy was developed and tested by working with diverse community groups in Newham to co-design collective energy projects that contribute to Newham’s climate strategy and generate local value. The outreach we conducted during this project supported the formation of a new community energy cooperative - Community Energy Newham.