00:00 Good afternoon, Minister.
00:02 What consideration has the Welsh Government given to ensuring community involvement in
00:06 renewable energy schemes?
00:07 OAQ51934
00:08 Jane Hutt AM: Thank you for that question, Jane.
00:10 Local ownership and community involvement is front and centre of our energy policy.
00:14 We've already achieved 97 per cent of our target of one gigawatt of renewable energy
00:18 to be locally owned by 2030.
00:20 Our investment in local area energy plans provides further opportunity for communities
00:24 to get involved in those schemes.
00:25 Y Llywydd / The Llywydd: Diolch yn fawr iawn, Yng Nghwilfyr.
00:28 You've addressed part of my question when you were referring to the schemes that you
00:32 visited with Siân Gwenllian, but one of the key challenges when we're transitioning to
00:37 green energy is making sure that benefits are felt by local communities, because too
00:42 often the profits go from large renewable energy projects and they don't stay in the
00:48 local area.
00:50 There are some different approaches to providing tangible benefits to communities.
00:55 For example, Octopus have their energy fan clubóas in fan club, if you can't see me,
01:04 fan clubówhich allows discounted energy bills to those who are affected by their wind turbines,
01:14 and when the wind is blowing, they receive money off their bills.
01:18 So, I just wondered what your view was on those large companies that are coming into
01:25 areas, how you would feel about them offering discounts to communities on their energy bills
01:33 for a really chunky period of time in order to allow communities to really benefit.
01:40 Diolch yn fawr iawn.
01:41 Julie James AM: Yes, thank you, Jane.
01:42 I would love to do that, but it's not in the rules, unfortunately.
01:45 Octopus has a particular exemption from the rules.
01:48 We have been working with the UK Government for some time to make sure that we can reform
01:52 the energy market in order to enable us to do just that.
01:56 There is a real issue with renewable energy being linked to the marginal price of gas,
02:00 which is why the energy bills are so high.
02:02 There's no need to have that as the way that the energy market works, but it is the way
02:06 it works at the moment.
02:08 So, we do a combination of things, and in fact I must pay tribute to Adam Price, who's
02:13 tried very hard to get this into the infrastructure Bill, for reasons I completely understand,
02:17 and I'm looking forward to working with you, whatever hat I have on, to make sure that
02:21 we can do that in the right policy way.
02:24 But what we want to do is make sure that people actually own part of each of the generating
02:30 renewable stations, whatever it is, whatever form of renewable it is, not just wind, that
02:35 people actually own part of it, because if they own part of it, they can take some of
02:38 the profit from it in the form of cheaper energy.
02:42 If they don't own part of it, then you're restricted to community benefits.
02:45 Community benefits can be amazing.
02:46 They can do all kinds of regenerative things in your area, but they can't give you cheaper
02:50 energy, although we have been able to agree with the renewables industry that what they
02:54 could do is retrofit the houses so that they would be more efficient and effective.
02:59 So, that's something we're actively pursuing at the moment, is what's actually called the
03:03 gold standard of community benefits that we've been working on for a little while.
03:08 In the meantime, we've been working through the co-operation agreement on expanding community
03:12 energy as much as we can right across Wales, because only by actually owning it can you
03:16 make sure that the profits are not just fully exploited.
