BA/Leverhulme Small Grant: Power Grids
Community energy projects (CEPs) present an efficient and cost-effective way of rolling out green energy infrastructure across the UK. From rooftop solar to rural heat networks, CEPs produce clean energy and keep costs low for vulnerable users. They also empower communities by bringing people together and giving them control over the essential infrastructure they need to live their lives. Yet uptake in England has been relatively slow, and research into the challenges has hitherto centred on government policy. By contrast, this project will research the lived dimensions and firsthand experiences of those involved in delivering community energy through the medium of comics. By hosting two comics co-creation workshops with participants in CEPs and enabling co-production through collaborative research methods, this project – funded by a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant – will generate a digital graphic narrative designed to reveal existing obstacles to CEPs and provide a practical, human-centred guide for communities that are interested in starting new projects.
Rapidly building sustainable infrastructure for the provision of green energy will play a pivotal role in reaching Net Zero and limiting the impact of the climate crisis both in the UK and globally. Community energy projects (CEPs) present an efficient and cost effective way to roll out this infrastructure and move the UK towards a green transition. Comprised of localised energy infrastructures that range from rooftop solar and onshore wind power to rural heat networks, CEPs have immediate economic, social, and political benefits for the communities that run them. By producing clean energy at a time of rising fuel prices, CEPs provide collective security and protect vulnerable users from the impact of the cost of living crisis. They also involve community members in the construction, repair, and maintenance of energy infrastructures, spreading practical skills that empower people who might otherwise feel alienated from infrastructure as a specialist service that is “done to them” by top-down organisations. Finally, CEPs help to rectify a democratic deficit by bringing people together through collaborative action and decision-making processes. This is linked to the wider social benefits of feelings of collective agency and belonging.
While CEPs therefore present a multifaceted solution to a range of challenges currently facing parts of the UK, the growth of community-owned energy capacity has been slowing in recent years, particularly in England, despite central and local government grants specifically ear-marked for such projects. At the time of writing, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has issued an open call for evidence on the barriers to CEPs in England in order to better understand this slow uptake (this will close on 30 June 2024). This proactive call evidences a broad recognition of the value of CEPs and existing political will to reduce the cost and complexity of community energy. In a 2022 report, the non-profit organisation Community Energy England identified 160 community organisations with CEPs in development. While these ranged from electricity and heat generation to energy efficiency and storage to local supply and forms of low carbon transport, this marked a relative decline in uptake since 2016, influenced by factors ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to a lack of government subsidies. Community Energy England are currently gathering data for an updated state of the sector report that will be published in late 2024.
The project proposed here will conduct original research into CEPs through two workshops that use comics co-creation as a collaborative method. Together, the workshops will produce co-created material for a digital graphic narrative about the lived experiences and existing challenges of running CEPs. These workshops and the digital graphic narrative will be organised around four core research aims:
to document the stories and experiences of CEP practitioners that are not currently visible in relevant research;
to share practitioner knowledge and experience between existing CEPs, as well as with policy makers and other key stakeholders;
to identify obstacles to establishing, running, and expanding CEPs;
to produce a practical, human-centred guide for communities interested in learning more about CEPs and/or developing new CEPs of their own.
Comics are particularly suitable for achieving these research aims because they are a creative, accessible, and “infrastructural” medium. As I have shown in my research into comics collectives from cities across the global South (Urban Comics, 2019), comics and graphic narratives – the two terms are used interchangeably here – are built from an “infrastructural form” that includes frames, panels, gutters, and grids, combining image and text in a way that is planned out spatially on the page. This very particular “narrative infrastructure” has made comics especially adept at representing and responding to forms of infrastructural violence, just as it has also allowed artists to reimagine more socially and spatially just forms of infrastructure – including energy infrastructure – in a range of cities, from New Orleans and Beirut to Delhi and Cape Town. The title of this project, “Power Grids”, plays on the parallel between the documentation of energy infrastructure in comics and the fact that the gridded form of the comic is particularly adept at generating new ways of seeing and understanding infrastructure.
In addition to this spatial or infrastructural form, the creation of comics also lends itself to collaborative co-production between artists, writers, journalists, community members, and other stakeholders. The multi-modal form of graphic narrative is particularly adept at building stories around diverse voices and perspectives, self-reflexively acknowledging different standpoints and their contexts, and presenting both concordant and conflicting views together in juxtaposition on the page. Comics build intergenerational and multifaceted stories, and they communicate ideas through intuitive and interactive sequences of images and icons. They do not necessitate specialist expertise in semiotics, drawing, design, or other creative practices, and they remain widely accessible to those who may lack confidence in textual or visual communication skills. Comics are therefore able to articulate concepts and perspectives that are often complex, taboo, or overlooked, providing different ways of seeing problems in the world. Many of the artists I have engaged in my research have developed their work around infrastructure through comics co-creation workshops, deliberately “drawing” communities together through collaborative artistic practice.
This project will use the “infrastructural form” and collaborative potential of comics to conduct research into the lived and human dimensions of community energy infrastructure in England. It is important to emphasise that this project does not simply use comics as a tool to communicate existing or new research. Rather, it actively uses comics as a core part of its research method. “Research-based comics” or “research comics” are gaining traction across the humanities and social sciences as a vital tool that allows researchers to tell stories with people, rather than about them. This project will draw on emerging comics research and co-creation methodologies to empower community energy practitioners to give artistic expression to their lived experiences of CEPs. These artistic outputs will feed into a collaborative documentation of CEPs, and this in turn will inform the project’s core output of a digital graphic narrative.
