Meet the Makers & Maintainers: Carbon Co-op

Carbon Co-op is one of ten community businesses funded by the Power To Change Makers & Maintainers programme, which supports community businesses who are already on a journey of creating community tech – technology that can meet their specific needs, respects their autonomy and creates value that sticks to places.

Meet Carbon Co-op

Carbon Co-op is an energy services and advocacy co-operative that helps people and communities to make the radical reductions in home carbon emissions necessary to avoid runaway climate change.

Carbon Co-op grew from a collaboration between local climate campaigners, a local urban planning Co-op and early adopter householders, with a vision for radically transforming housing in Greater Manchester. 

Now, over 400 members pay an annual subscription to receive help and assistance in reducing their home carbon emissions through Carbon Co-op’s bespoke home energy management services.

How Carbon Co-op is creating and using community tech

Carbon Co-op has created a range of community tech, from modelling building performance, tracking individual carbon emission reductions through to automating control of high-power devices. 

Carbon Coop’s Home Energy Management system allows users to have complete control over their high energy devices, using a fully customisable dashboard.  The system is not tied to a particular energy provider or device manufacturer, but allows users to see the data they are interested in in a way that makes sense to them. For example, this may enable users to reduce consumption at times of peak demand, reducing their costs and increasing resilience to recent energy price increases.

Operating on the principles of open collaboration, Carbon Co-op’s open-source software solutions are designed to meet the needs of its membership and the wider community – while allowing control and flexibility over the final product, without externally imposed limitations.

Members are actively involved in the design and delivery of community tech solutions from the outset, through user group testing of beta products. Alongside this, Carbon Co-op has a well-used community forum and a monthly meet-up, Eco Home Lab, to discuss new ideas and product outlines with early adopters and enthusiasts.

The fundamental strength of Carbon Co-op is that they are trusted by their members that solutions are based on the best available data without commercial preference. This trusted position gives them access to a unique environment to pilot modelling, prediction, monitoring and control software within a living lab of real households. 

In order to maintain this position of trust, control of flows of data is vital, with a focus on privacy and local device control over the cloud-based systems favoured by device manufacturers. Sharing a common system amongst the community further encourages skills transfer and mutual aid, in many cases this occurs organically without Carbon Co-op’s mediation.

Carbon Co-op’s software operates on open communication standards, ensuring their services are not vulnerable to manufacturers changing the conditions of use, restricting access or simply turning off their servers. This provides an attractive alternative to the accelerating trend for proprietary devices to mine user data, thus generating additional revenue streams for the equipment provider. 

Carbon Co-op intends to draw on Makers & Maintainers funding to further develop its services, creating a fully open software stack that will allow communities to participate fully in the energy transition and support the further rollout of renewables by both reducing and shifting their energy demand. 

How community tech is strengthening local communities

Carbon Co-op exists to empower households across Greater Manchester to play their part in tackling the devastating impacts of climate change. And by partnering with other local community energy organisations, other communities are able to benefit too.

Alongside the community tech solutions they have developed, Carbon Co-op brings benefits to the local community hosting public talks, information webinars, free workshops and training, and speaking as part of community and voluntary networks. Carbon Coop proactively aims to engage with and support marginalised groups, as well as those who are typically underrepresented in the wider tech sector.

Carbon Co-op also campaigns for energy justice, delivering projects that are co-created alongside hard-to-reach communities and people with lived experience of fuel poverty.  Recently, their focus has been to ensure greater tenant engagement in social housing energy efficiency schemes via their Retrofit for All campaign. 

Carbon Co-op works closely with local government, social housing providers, civil society networks and other community stakeholders through working groups and task forces, such as Greater Manchester Retrofit Taskforce and Great Manchester Mayor’s Green Summit. 

As the engagement lead on the Greater Manchester Local Energy Market project, Carbon Co-op championed a greater voice for local citizens in developing the proposals. This included augmenting traditional surveys with the innovative use of vox pops and a citizen jury, to challenge existing assumptions and allow deeper, more fully informed engagement.

Through its continued commitment to creating positive change in Greater Manchester and beyond, Carbon Co-op is leading by example when it comes to creating empowered, resilient communities using community tech.

Find out more about the programme

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