Attendees: Keith Farvis, Alister Hamilton, Judith Shepherd, Liam Young
The information gathering since the first meeting on 21/1, and additional information brought by Liam to this meeting, highlighted how much is already going on in Edinburgh that we weren’t all aware of.
A challenge for a communities-based initiative such as Transition Towns is to decide where to get actively involved to be most effective. This is particularly challenging for a power/energy sub-group since an Energy Descent Action Plan is the future major deliverable of the whole group.
The energy-related initiatives already happening in Edinburgh appear to be “top-down” – national and local government programmes, obligations on the power companies, demonstration projects by businesses, one-off funded initiatives by charities.
Specific things we agreed to feed back to the whole group on 24/2:
- The learning and sharing we’ve done so far has highlighted how much is going on in Edinburgh already.
- We need some bottom-up awareness raising of energy issues for Edinburgh. This sub-group will produce a couple of items to give to the Communications sub-group for a planned drip-feed campaign of awareness raising. We suggest letters/articles in the Evening News. Likely items will be:
- Question to Council and government – what next on the report “Powering Edinburgh into the 21st Century”?
- Comparison piece with one of Edinburgh’s twinned cities (Munich?):
- Munich Germany 1954
- Nice France 1958
- Florence Italy 1964
- Dunedin New Zealand 1974
- Vancouver Canada 1977
- San Diego USA 1977
- Xi ‘ an China 1985
- Kiev Ukraine 1989
- Aalborg Denmark 1991
- Find at least one specific energy project to progress as a community/householders. Candidates are:
- North Edinburgh and Leith Community Energy Project that Mark Lazarowicz MP is trying to get started (next open meeting is likely to be 15th March)
- Energy efficiency and/or generation measures in a stair/street of people within the Transition group
- A demonstration flat (tenement/colony flat/high rise).
