Greener than Net Zero

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 fund energy where it is actually

used: local, community-scale generation and storage, with surplus pumped back into the

existing grid.

This is not the familiar solar-and-heat-pump story. Panels alone are intermittent, and

intermittency is a luxury the people in our social housing cannot afford. Real

decentralisation needs a firm anchor — community-scale combined heat and power now,

and advanced modular generation as regulation catches up — so that reliability is built in,

not hoped for.

Done at community scale, it protects the people most exposed to energy costs and grid

dependency: social housing tenants. A shared community asset — a battery, a ground loop,

a generation unit serving a block — spreads the cost no individual tenant could carry,

smooths demand, and lets surplus be used locally before it ever touches the grid.

The barriers left are not technical. They are the network connection rules and the market

constraints on trading power locally. Those are reformable.

Greener than zero is not a slogan. It’s a design brief.

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