Introduction

Previous meetings of the Leeds Energy Forum held over 2013 & 2014 have been very useful in developing the Council’s strategic thinking. We thank you all for your contributions so far.

The next stage in development is to use the community developed around the Energy Forum to create and deliver more and better energy projects in Leeds. In simple terms we’d like to harness the goodwill and shared collective intelligence generated within the operation of the Energy Forum and develop a pipeline of projects that deliver against the city’s objectives of reducing carbon and beating fuel poverty through projects with a sound business case.

To move this forward the Council has agreed to pilot SmartKlub, which is a new operating model for project co-production at city scale. SmartKlub is a new approach to developing distributed energy infrastructure at city scale. It works to conceptualise and develop the overarching strategy and projects to enable cities to have affordable energy, become zero carbon and move towards more sustainable, resilient communities. You can find out more about SmartKlub at SmartKlub.org. Put simply it brings councils, communities and businesses together to create projects that help cities improve the way they supply and use energy, for the benefit of everyone that lives there.

Building on the non-exclusive and collaborative nature of the Energy Forum, we would like to introduce SmartKlub Leeds to you and how you and your organisation can become involved, at the next meeting of the Leeds Energy Forum on Wednesday 22 April 2015.

We will introduce the concept, tell you how SmartKlub will work and how we expect it to develop and build more and better low carbon energy projects for Leeds.

We will also be working on a real life co-production opportunity around how we can optimise the low carbon energy infrastructure opportunities associated with the Council’s high rise tower blocks.

We hope you will be keen to attend this session to learn more about this exciting opportunity and next phase in the development of the Council’s approach to working with Energy Forum members.

Please register your interest for this event to be held at the Leeds Open Data Institute.

Yours sincerely

Neil Evans

Director