Released today, this report, commissioned by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), explores how the city region can meet its clean energy ambitions through collaboration with community energy. It was produced by Carbon Co-op and Regen, with contributions from a wide range of industry stakeholders and policymakers.
The Local Power Plan (2026) and launch of GB Energy Local constitute a significant commitment to both community and municipal energy. Together, these initiatives create a unique opportunity to grow these sectors and forge new collaborations between them.
The report identifies policy and energy system opportunities for community energy, highlights key barriers to realising them and formulates enabling actions to unlock potential. Recommendations are informed by real-world case studies and new and emerging approaches and the work on implementing these recommendations has already begun.
Key recommendations for support and collaboration
- Technical Support – A new Greater Manchester Community Energy support and coordination network organisation.
- Project Origination – A match making service to broker relationships between community energy, local authority officers and site owners/developers.
- FundingSupport – A new Greater Manchester Community Energy Fund grant to support the development of the sector.
- A social enterprise offer to support community building solar photovoltaic (PV) installations.
- Commercial Partnerships – Greater use of public sector power purchase agreements (PPAs) to support local clean generation.
- Public-Commons Partnerships – developing collaborative relationships, developing new Community Energy infrastructure to quickly scale the sector.
- Plus a range of holistic policy, convening and financial interventions.
Read the Executive Summary report
This report summarises findings from research conducted by Carbon Co-op and Regen during 2025 including interviews with local community energy organisations, discussions with local government officers, interviews with regional and national stakeholders, findings from a spatial data analysis of community energy generation potential and Regen’s assessment of the emerging policy and regulatory reforms.
As the Local Power Plan encourages collaboration between municipal and community sectors, the report seeks to influence the GMCA’s approach to community energy, but more broadly to offer guidance to strategic authorities across the UK on approaches they can take to support and collaborate with community energy partners in their areas. The report identifies a number of ‘policy levers’ and areas of intervention that strategic authorities can use to do this:
- Direct delivery – initiating projects, services, employing officer time.
- Collaboration with the sector – joint initiatives, delivering projects, joint ventures, establishing mayoral development corporations etc.
- Policy – developing combined authority policy, influencing national policy, influencing borough policy, using devolved powers, setting targets, initiating working groups, taskforces etc.
- Convening – in relation to local authorities and other public sector institutions in the city region
- Financial – offering grant funding, investing, issuing loans, purchasing power and services directly.
- Voice – advocating, promoting, marketing and communications
- Political influence – campaigning, speaking out (in particular via the mayor)