Carbon Co-op
(Carbon Co-op started its life out as ‘Low carbon social networks’)
What’s your idea?
For a while I’ve been aware of the slow uptake of renewable energy technologies amongst households. Simply put they are too expensive. But if people clubbed together as a co-operative and bought in bulk they would be much cheaper.
I want to develop a social networking site that helps put people who want to buy low carbon technologies together. This will enable people to save money and find others in their neighbourhoods who want to reduce carbon emissions. It’s a simple idea but it has lots of potential and no one is doing it.
What is the social need or challenge your idea could address?
We need to cut out carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. Domestic energy will play a big part in this. Everyone knows this but no one is quite sure how to do it.
My idea allows individual households to do it for themselves and gets over the problem that renewables are too expensive to buy because take up is low but won’t become more popular until they are cheaper.
What’s really new about your idea?
Government policy on reducing carbon is all around behaviour and encouraging people to use less carbon. This idea offers a practical action people can take to save money and reduce carbon emissions.
It’s based on the concept of solar clubs developed in USA and environmentally-motivated bulk buying co-ops in Japan but it synthesises them in a new and innovative way.
What inspired you to come up with your idea in the first place?
Living in Hulme, South Manchester. Looking out of my window and imagining the potential of so many empty roofs and imaging a community self sufficient in its energy production. All that is needed is to bring people together.From
1-5, what stage of development would you say your idea was in?
About stage three. I’ve been working on the concept of a low carbon co-op for a couple of years. I have a background in co-ops and have been working with an urban design company, URBED, developing the idea.
We were shortlisted for NESTA’s Big Green Challenge but unfortunately didn’t win. So we have the idea and have demonstrated the need and demand, we just need to make it a reality.
Idea submitted by Jonathan Atkinson
Jonathan freelances on environmental projects as a researcher, project developer and a marketing consultant. His clients include voluntary and community sector groups, social enterprises and universities.
The problem setting up sites like these are payment systems. Ebay/Paypal and other payment processors will gouge your users for 2-7%. Fundable.com has to take 10% to survive, even a meta-charity like Just Giving has to claim 5% – and only managed to break even because they could automate gift-aid claiming (http://www.justgiving.com/statements/about_us/fee.asp).
And the pricing of renewable energy technologies has been really vulnerable to government policy flip-flopping about their tax status…
All the ideas on offer for this round of voting are important, but it seems like the Carbon Co-op addresses the most serious range of issues in a way that has the potential to be genuinely empowering for many people. As well as tackling climate change issues it offers solutions for fuel poverty by making renewable energy more accessible to people who aren’t savvy about the (limited) government grants system or who have very limited capital to outlay.
This already exists in the States, it’s called “1BOG”: http://1bog.org/
Doesn’t seem much point just replicating exactly the same thing, maybe it’d be better to just help them expand into the UK.
Thanks for the comments.
In answer to Saul’s question, the site will be primarily about bringing people together in order to make collective purchases, it’s unlikely that the site itself will take payments. Government is indeed often shifting its position on tax but overall I believe there are enough opportunities for us to exploit.
Thanks for the shout about 1BOG, the site looks great. The key differences are that we will be focusing on all types of carbon reduction technologies, from energy meters to wind generators, and our key element is co-operative ownership, members will own a stake in the co-op and any profits stay within the community.
Also, as a rule I believe in co-operation and local solutions so I feel it’s better that we develop projects in our own communities rather than encourage a project from another country to get bigger and bigger.