ResPublica’s Caroline Julian Awarded Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship

28^th February 2013

Prestigious award given to ResPublica's senior researcher

Caroline Julian, a senior researcher at ResPublica, has been awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship to pursue her research on community energy. The WCMT fellowship is a highly competitive and well respected award. From 1161 applications, 238 individuals were interviewed and only 125 were successful this year.

Through her fellowship, Caroline will travel to Germany to research the innovative models and partnerships forged between communities and public and private organisations, which have enabled localities to have an ownership stake in their energy production and distribution.

The policy paper, Re-energising Our Communities, co-authored by Caroline Julian and Julian Dobson, was published in January 2012 and is recognised as an important contribution to the community energy policy debate in the UK. It argued that there are manifest opportunities to transform the energy market by encouraging consumers to become producers and owners of their energy. The paper reviewed the benefits created by existing community energy schemes, and how these create a framework of responsibility for users, landowners and developers.

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