Andrew Bannister

Stop asking “wind or solar?” Start asking “what does this place have?” Decentralisation Pt2. Energy. The decentralisation conversation has collapsed into two options — panels on the roof, turbine on the hill. It’s a poverty of imagination, and it’s costing communities the energy that’s already under their feet. Every location has an energy signature. Read it properly and the options multiply: → A fast stream or a weir on an old mill site? Micro-hydro runs day and night, season after season —...

There is an alternative that is greener than zero. We’ve spent a decade treating “net zero” as the summit. But zero is just the point where we stop making things worse. It is not the same as making things better — and it quietly accepts a model where energy is generated far away, pushed down long wires, and metered to people who had no say in any of it. There is another route. Instead of pouring national money into ever-larger grid-scale generation and the transmission upgrades it demands, we...

Somewhere tonight, a child will fall asleep on a floor made of compacted earth, beneath a roof of corrugated iron held down by stones. In another city, on another continent, a young couple will lie awake in a rented room they cannot afford, calculating whether next month’s pay cheque will cover the rent or the food, but not both. In a third place, an elderly woman will sit in a tower block built half a century ago, its concrete walls blooming with damp, its lifts broken for the third time...