This is one of those rare pieces that makes a complex idea feel exciting and understandable.

In this article, OVESCO Board Member and DabApps Co-Founder Jamie Matthews lays out a bold, optimistic vision for how communities could build real energy independence from the bottom up. Read on for a clear, captivating vision for community-led energy independence.

The Electrocommunity: Building Energy Independence from the Bottom Up

The transition to renewable energy is already well underway, not just in the UK but around the world. There are, of course, attempts to culturally weaponise it for political gain, but fortunately the economics are on our side. Businesses and governments realise that renewable energy, if deployed correctly, is far cheaper than fossil fuels. This means that the energy transition will happen. Maybe not as quickly as we would like, but economic forces will squeeze fossil fuels out of the system eventually.

But something that isn’t discussed quite as much outside of “energy geek” circles is the other side of this equation: electrification. In order for all of these new green electrons on the grid to be put to best use, we need the right kind of demand that can take advantage of them: transport, heating, and industry. That means switching to equipment powered by electricity rather than fossil fuels wherever possible.

One country that is really leading the way on this is China. China has been called the world’s first electrostate. In 2025, renewable energy crossed over 60% of China’s total installed power generation capacity. They added more than 430 gigawatts of new wind and solar in a single year, more than the entire EU consumes. On the electrification side, electric vehicles now account for around 60% of new car sales in China, with over 11 million EVs sold in 2025 alone. They’ve essentially built the world’s largest renewable energy system and the world’s largest electric vehicle market simultaneously.

The benefits are clear: energy security through domestic generation rather than imported fuel, cost stability as renewable energy has zero fuel costs, resilience through distributed generation that can’t be easily disrupted, and as a side effect, massive reductions in air pollution and carbon emissions.

But China’s electrostate status was largely imposed, top-down, planned and implemented by the State. That’s not really how we do things here. Without the consent and trust of the people, governments struggle to retain their mandate, as we saw so often during the Covid pandemic. So how can the UK become an electrostate without the totalitarianism? It’s all about bottom-up hierarchy.

The Electro-Unit Stack

The concept of an electrostate is fundamentally a nested hierarchy of energy autonomy and strategic electrical infrastructure. Rather than a monolithic national policy, it’s better understood as a stack of electro-units that align from the household level up to the national grid.

Electrohome (Household Level): Individual properties with solar panels, battery storage, heat pumps, and EV chargers. The basic building block of energy self-sufficiency.

Electrocommunity (Neighbourhood/District Level): Local energy sharing networks, community solar farms, microgrids that can island from the main grid. This is where collective bargaining power and resilience really begins to matter.

Electromunicipality (City/Regional Level): Cities and regions with substantial renewable generation, industrial battery storage, demand management systems, and local grid balancing capabilities.

Electroprovince (State/Provincial Level): Large-scale renewable projects (offshore wind, utility solar), inter-regional transmission, seasonal storage, and coordination between municipalities.

Electrostate (National Level): National grid infrastructure, energy independence targets, international interconnectors, strategic reserves, and industrial policy.

Each level must be coherent with the others. A national electrostate strategy only works if it enables and incentivises the levels beneath it. You can’t have a robust electrostate without vibrant electrocommunities, and you can’t build electrocommunities without making it economically rational for electrohomes to participate.

Electrocommunity: The Missing Middle

The electrocommunity is perhaps the most interesting and underdeveloped layer of the stack. It sits between individual household action and municipal/corporate systems, and it’s where the economics and social benefits become genuinely compelling.

Scale Efficiency: The capital cost can put solar and batteries out of the reach of many lower-income households, but a neighbourhood with 100 homes could collectively install a community battery, negotiate better rates for bulk solar installation, and share excess generation. The economics could improve dramatically.

Social Infrastructure: Energy communities build social capital. Neighbours who share energy infrastructure also share knowledge, tools, and mutual support. This creates resilience beyond just electrons.

Grid Services: A coordinated electrocommunity could offer demand response, frequency regulation, and grid balancing services that individual homes cannot. This could create revenue streams and strengthen the business case.

Democratic Control: Communities that own their energy infrastructure make decisions democratically rather than being price-takers from distant corporations. This restores a sense of agency and local control.

Resilience at Human Scale: When the grid fails, an islanded electrocommunity could keep critical services running (streetlights, community centres, medical equipment) at a scale that’s meaningful but manageable.

The UK Context

The UK is surprisingly well-positioned for electrocommunity development:

• Strong cooperative tradition (credit unions, housing coops)
• Relatively dense housing in towns and cities makes shared infrastructure efficient
• Smart meter rollout provides technical foundation
• Community Energy movement already exists with proven models, like Ovesco CIC Ltd here in Lewes.

And now, the policy alignment we’ve been waiting for has arrived. Yesterday, the

government published the Local Power Plan: the biggest public investment in community energy in UK history. Great British Energy is committing up to £1 billion to support over 1,000 local and community energy projects by 2030.

This isn’t just funding. It’s a complete package: grants for early-stage development, construction loans, expert advice and templates, and crucially, policy changes to tackle the regulatory barriers that have held community energy back for years. They’re working on mandatory shared ownership offers for large renewable projects, simplifying grid connections for community schemes, and making it easier for communities to sell their power locally.

The plan explicitly recognises the electrocommunity layer as critical. They’re backing partnerships between councils and community energy groups, developing “community energy in a box” toolkits, and exploring smart local energy systems that let neighbourhoods share power and access flexibility markets.

What’s particularly encouraging is the bottom-up approach. Westminster isn’t just dictating solutions, it’s enabling communities to shape their own energy futures, with the government creating the conditions for success rather than imposing targets from above.

Building the UK Electrostate

An electrostate isn’t built top-down through government decree alone. It’s constructed by aligning incentives across every layer so that what’s good for the electrohome is good for the electrocommunity is good for the electromunicipality is good for the nation.

China demonstrates one model: centralised target-setting and industrial policy. But the UK is now pursuing a different path: enabling rather than commanding, supporting rather than imposing. The Local Power Plan shows how democracies can build electrostates through market mechanisms, local democracy, cooperative ownership, and community engagement.

The key insight is that energy is too important to remain purely a commodity market. Nations that treat electrical infrastructure as strategic, develop domestic capacity, and organise citizens as participants rather than consumers will have decisive advantages over those that don’t.

The electrostate isn’t coming because of climate activism. It’s coming because it makes economic and strategic sense. The UK has just taken the first serious step toward building one the democratic way: from the bottom up, community by community. Climate benefits are just the upside.

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