I have an idea evolving in my head, and I want to put it out there for your feedback and thoughts. As the ‘Hands’ part of the Head, Heart and Hands approach I am developing towards the response to peak oil, I am exploring structures and mechanisms that we can develop for driving localisation. The one I am focusing on at the moment is the ESCO, or Energy Supply Company, which is designed to provide people with the services that energy does, rather than the energy itself. ESCOs are often the tool used to drive forward microgeneration initiatives, the only one I know of in the UK being Thameswey, which was set up and is owned and managed by Woking Borough Council in London. You can read a very detailed guide to microgeneration and ESCO’s in Greenpeace’s excellent ‘Decentralising Power’ report. The subtle shift in emphasis from providing energy to providing the services that energy does, means that it becomes more cost effective to insulate houses than to just sell energy to poorly insulated homes. This company could be owned by the community through a share launch, as have many of the community wind developments in the UK such as Baywind. There is a lot of data about community ownership in the Irish context in ‘To Catch the Wind’, a report edited by Richard Douthwaite.


The clever bit that came to me when listening to Bernard Lietaer last week, and then in discussion with David Boyle of the New Economics Foundation , is that once you have a company generating local energy, you have an asset that you can use to back up a local currency. The problem with many local currencies such as LETS is that they can’t be exchanged for things in shops, and are not much use to business. Lietaer said you have to start with the idea that the currency can be used by business, and then also by the community. A currency backed by energy achieves this. Then people can part pay their bills in the local money, which would liberate the workpower needed to start to implement localisation in other areas such as land use and community development. The currency would be of use to everyone, not just to people who want an aromatherapy massage, as can sometimes be the problem with LETS. It can be either a printed currency or an electronic one. The company could give favourable loans to business start-ups that are driving forward the Energy Descent Action Plan.

The idea of energy backed currencies is not new, they were promoted by Shann Turnbull in articles called Selecting a Community Currency andDemocratising the Wealth of Nations - from new money sources and profit motives, and also in a piece called “Notes on the World Kilowatt Dollar”, which I can’t find on the web anywhere, but which appears in David Boyle’s excellent book “The Money Changers”.