To effectively fight climate change and end the nuclear threat we need to build a new energy system built on smaller, cleaner, more efficient energy options and turn off the big, dirty and wasteful power plants of yesteryear.

Imagine a system in which electricity is produced near where it used. Individual buildings - residential, commercial and industrial - stop being just consumers of energy and start generating it.

Whether through solar panels or wind turbines, buildings start generating electricity for use by the local community.

Using combined heat and power units, which can vary in scale from supplying a single home to a whole city district, heat produced by electricity generation is channelled through underground networks to heat buildings and provide hot water; minimal energy is lost as waste heat, or in transmission. Regions become increasingly self-sufficient.

Being diverse, the electricity supply is far less vulnerable to massive failure or attack.  By transforming our homes, schools and factories into power producers, families and communities can act to stop climate change, transforming the way society thinks about energy production and use.

Sound unrealistic? Actually, 50% of Denmark's electricity is created using a decentralised system, and 40% of the Netherlands'. In Finland, 98% of Helsinki is heated by community heat networks.

The nuclear lobby knows that the biggest threat to its survival is the success of renewable power and decentralized supply.   It takes at least 10 years to build a nuclear station mega-project, and history shows that nuclear projects are plagued by cost over-runs and delays.   Green power options, meanwhile, can be deployed more quickly and cheaply than any nuclear station.  And over the ten years it takes to build one nuclear plant, small, decentralized renewable energy sources can add up to provide a bigger energy punch than a big nuclear plant.

Introduction to decentralized energy