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Welcome to our new website. You may still see some pages from our old site as we move things over.

What we’re funding

Taking local action on energy use can lead to many personal and community benefits. Using less energy can reduce carbon emissions, lower energy bills and lead to improved air quality. Well-insulated homes are both warmer and more comfortable. Energy projects can also create new “green” jobs and regenerate local communities and can in turn enable and inspire communities to take collective action.

We’re funding projects where communities are inspired to take action on energy and the climate crisis.

Our focus on energy and climate

We're funding projects that can do at least one of the following:

  • encourage people and communities to use energy in an environmentally friendly way
  • bring communities together so that they can explore ways to promote energy efficiency
  • enable communities to understand and engage with opportunities for clean energy generation, which do not use fossil fuels

Supporting vulnerable groups

Climate change and the energy crisis has more of an effect on groups that may find it harder to engage with climate action. Organisations we’re funding have to consider how everyone across the community can get involved with climate action and address any reasons why some people might be left out.

We've prioritised projects that aim to support and engage with vulnerable groups facing multiple issues. This includes low-income households and people with health conditions.

We're aiming to fund a wide variety of projects. Including projects that engage with communities to:

  • educate, inspire, and start community-led energy action that leads to a reduction in carbon emissions over the long-term. This includes demonstration projects that people can visit in their community.
  • build skills, tools, and resources to enable local action, such as training community energy champions, exploring cost-effective easy-to-use solutions such as draught excluders or using LED bulbs
  • share skills with people in the community so they can get involved in projects where they can generate their own energy through renewables. We are not funding the purchase of solar panels, wind turbines or other generators of renewable energy. However, we can fund groups to engage with communities and help them build their understanding about community energy projects.
  • use data to encourage action and positive behaviour change

What projects should be able to show

All projects should be able to show:

  • what they want to change and give strong evidence of the potential to achieve their goal
  • how other social and economic benefits will be achieved, such as: the creation of strong, resilient and healthy communities; development of green jobs; regeneration opportunities for communities
  • how they will put communities first
  • how they will bring together a range of people and groups across different sectors such as communities, local authorities, private sector, academia, policy and practice
  • how they will engage the public, including those not already taking climate action
  • how they will measure and prove their environmental and social impact
  • what will happen when the project ends
  • how they will use stories or case studies to share their work and inspire communities to learn about the climate emergency and act

Projects that work in collaboration with others

We’re particularly interested in projects willing to connect with other local, regional and national initiatives to get inspiration, share learning and increase their effect.

We are funding projects that inform and promote different things such as:

  • retrofitting
  • energy generation
  • advice

We aim to fund projects in a mix of different locations across the UK. We are supporting applications from partnerships that cover a broad geographical area and promote cross-country collaboration.

Funded projects are expected to show they are keen to connect with others to share learning and amplify the effect and legacy of their work.

What else we expect from applicants

We expect applicants to be able demonstrate a strong understanding of community-led energy projects and have strong links with relevant projects and communities.

We're offering structured opportunities for development and co-learning to the projects we fund.

We'll talk to the projects that progress to stage 2 of the assessment about the sort of support we can offer.

The projects we’re unlikely to fund

We’re unlikely to fund:

  • projects which focus on delivering structural domestic upgrades that benefit individual households
  • the purchase or installation of solar panels, wind turbines and other sources or generators of renewable energy. This fund cannot pay for the capital costs of energy generation activities.
  • advice for individuals focusing purely on the cost-of-living crisis. We have committed other funding to help with this. There are other funders more suitable for projects reducing household energy costs or providing debt support.
  • projects that are not able to demonstrate a strong climate action focus
  • broader energy projects that focus on transport
  • political activities that promote a particular political party, political belief or any targeted action to influence elections
  • applications that cannot show how their project matters to the community
  • applications that promote the agenda of a single organisation or group
  • applications for statutory activities
  • applications that are only looking for capital funding including applications that only request funding for structural changes to a community or private building that is not part of a wider behaviour change project
  • applications that aim to deliver economic activities that are likely to have a significant effect on competition. Read more about subsidy control.
  • organisations applying for significantly more funding than they have experience of managing, or that significantly increases their annual turnover