Essay from the year 2006 in the subject Economy - Environment economics, grade: 2, De Montfort University Leicester (Institute for Energy and Sustainable Development), language: English, abstract: This paper considers in closer details the role of communities in developing renewable energy schemes. Resource scarcity and climate change have introduced the necessity to replace the current energy supply system. This system is based on the combustion of fossil fuels and has been developed to an ever more centralised and inefficient stucture with a few giant power plants and a complex arrangement of distribution lines. As energy generation and energy consumption have been spatially separated by huge distances, consumers are anticipated to have lost the right idea of energy and the implications of its generation.