“What if we forget rural people?” Citizen perspectives on fair rural energy demand reduction

Members of the EDRC Citizens’ Panel were concerned about the impact of energy demand reduction (EDR) measures on rural communities right from the start of the panel in April 2024. This inspired Fair Rural Energy Futures, an Early Career Flexible Fund project, which explored the panel’s views on how to decarbonise rural places by drawing on a wealth of evidence generated by the panel’s deliberations.

When we’re talking about energy transition, there’s often an implicit bias to urban areas given decarbonisation is seen to have higher impact when it can be rolled out at scale and pace in high-density environments. Yet in many ways, rural areas will be the next frontier of the energy transition, acting as critical sites for renewable energy infrastructure and nature-based carbon removals (Uleri et al. 2025). Many of the challenges to rural places from the low carbon transition focus on energy supply, leaving a gap to explore issues surrounding energy demand.

Challenges facing rural places are familiar and multiple – ranging from ageing populations, to unreliable transport infrastructure, and economic viability in the farming sector. Many of these challenges are amplified when it comes to decarbonisation, particularly given the relative lack of funding available to rural authorities (UK100, 2021). Fair Rural Energy Futures considered how EDR can be used to address some of these more systemic rural challenges and deliver co-benefits for rural communities.

The project aimed to add to the evidence base, not by restating well-known problems, but by bringing together new kinds of data to point towards solutions, drawing on the lived experience of rurality from a citizens’ panel. The project explored:

1. secondary data from the panel’s discussions around transport, home heating, food and goods;
2. new primary data from a workshop with a subset of rural panel members; and
3. written materials produced by the panel around ‘place-based visions’ of a low energy future.

Through this triangulation of methods and data, the project aims to offer insights from a novel evidence base on rural EDR.

The first part of the project involved reviewing resources from 19 separate meetings of the panel covering the sectors contained in the Positive Low Energy Futures scenarios. As could be expected, food and transport themed sessions dominated the discussion of rurality, particularly around the challenges of active travel, electric vehicles and shared mobility, and the risks to rural life from changing diets and farming practices. Another barrier for the panel was accessing repair and maintenance services for heating technologies, both old and new. This was not necessarily a challenge unique to rural areas, but concern about being able to access repair services was exacerbated in this context. This analysis shaped the design of a follow-up workshop with 12 rural members of the panel.

Working with Involve (the public participation charity) we identified two main challenges to rural EDR from their discussions to date:

• Avoiding dependence on private cars; and
• Accessing local services (to avoid having to travel as far to meet basic needs).

The workshop with rural panel members was therefore loosely structured around the idea of ‘asset mapping’; that is, highlighting the physical, social and economic strengths of rural communities. Workshop participants were tasked with identifying how rural assets could help overcome the two challenges.

To do this, we used 7 positive case studies from real rural communities as prompts for discussion, exploring views on these initiatives. In tackling car dependence, the examples included community electric car clubs, on-demand bus services, guaranteed bus services, and ‘hub-and-spoke’ style active travel connections. On the local services side this included a mobile ‘library of things’, a community pub, post office and café, and a multi-purpose community hub.

Car clubs were posed as a way to cut down on second car ownership in rural households, as well as reducing parking issues on narrow roads. Challenges persisted around increasing bus usage, given longstanding dependence on cars and entrenched negative perceptions of bus service quality. However, on-demand buses – where buses are booked based on need rather than following a certain route or timetable – were a well-received alternative, and seen as an efficient option to respond to uneven levels of demand. Many of the options for improving local services were seen as dependent on community cohesion to be able to work.

Figure 1. Infographic summary of the rural workshop.

A third source of evidence to explore panel views was from a day of in-person deliberations. Panel members were sorted into groups representing 5 fictional place types (reflecting where they currently lived), including a:

• Small village (Oldburn);
• Large village (Tilham);
• Small town (Puddlevale);
• Large town (Tamborough); and
• City (Riverport)

The task was to come up with a vision for these places in 2040, imagining they have become ‘flagship’ low energy communities, and considering a range of different sectors and issues including: work and economy; community, wellbeing and leisure; and green space and nature.

Notably, the small village and town brought up the idea of community-owned energy, something increasingly recognised in mainstream policy (for instance in the recent Local Power Plan) for its ability to generate co-benefits for local communities. There was a tendency in the place-based discussions (as well as the rural workshop) to focus on more general preferences for what local communities should look like, rather than thinking in terms of energy demand. This does emphasise the importance of avoiding looking at decarbonisation as a challenge separate from everyday lives (something well documented in work on relational approaches to retrofit; Davis et al., 2025). The decarbonisation initiatives we discussed were often framed as a way to generate co-benefits for the wider sustainability of rural life – for instance improved public transport to ensure rural places can be work places.

The discussions also surfaced more normative values around people having the choice to stay in rural locations, whether young or old – i.e. not being forced to relocate because of poor infrastructure and connectivity. There is an equity question in here around the right to access rural spaces, where there are currently high barriers to entry.

To report back to panel members and to recognise the value of their contributions, we created a number of outputs, including the infographic included above, a summary booklet, and a recorded presentation. These outputs mark an interim step in the project, and future work will involve further analysis of the panel discussions as more resources become available, as well as continued work to establish the policy relevance of the findings.

• Davis, M., Middlemiss, L., Hall, S., Brown, D., Bookbinder, R., Owen, A., Brisbois, M.C., Mininni, G.M., Cairns, I. and Hannon, M., 2025. Towards a relational sociology of retrofit. Sociology, 59 (3), pp. 466-484. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385241298177
• UK100. 2021. Rural Net Zero: The role of Rural Local Authorities in reaching Net Zero. [Online]. [Accessed 4 March 2026]. Available from: https://www.uk100.org/knowledge-hub/rural-net-zero
• Uleri, F., Vigano, F., and Musolino, M. 2025. Understanding rural energy transitions through the spatial dynamics between rural change and energy system transformation. Journal of Rural Studies, 120, p. 103895. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2025.103895