25 June 2013: DECC Minister Greg Minister, during a Guardian Environment Q&A on local energy earlier today, set out his ambitions on where he’d like the ‘license lite‘ activities, currently being tested by the Greater London Authority (GLA), to go:
“You bet! I want local energy markets to take off just in the way the local food economy is growing. Just as people shop local, eat seasonal and fresh and look to procure with in a certain distance, so I want people to adopt a local mindset for community scale renewables. Hydro schemes, active coppicing for bio fuels (that can help bring local woodland back into active management – great for flowers & wildlife!) solar on community buildings or brown field sites, community heat neworks based on CHP as well as wind and other technologies all have a place.
“Licence Lite is being pioneered now by the GLA but I want to use that learning to be able to roll this out around the country, to allow a new generation of small scale local power producers to cut through the current complex electricity market regulations and sell direct to customers. Cutting red tape and bureaucracy to let in the electricity entrepreneurs is the future!”