The SLES Pathway Guide: Navigating drivers, barriers and action plans

Damiete Emmanuel-Yusuf and Walter Wehrmeyer

June 2023

The upscaling of Smart Local Energy Systems (SLES) is regarded as a key avenue to realise the UK’s Net Zero future. This is because increasing the deployment of SLES will significantly contribute to climate change mitigation, enhance energy security, and improve access to local and affordable energy.

This guidebook presents the SLES pathway tool, which is designed for stakeholders, as well as present or future SLES actors, who wish to establish and upscale their systems. It accompanies an earlier report, Pathways for the upscaling of smart local energy systems. Developed by WP6.1 of the EnergyREV consortium, the tool explores the pathways in more detail. It highlights underlying drivers and barriers for each pathway and then provides guidance on how to overcome the barriers and enable the drivers through action plans that are categorised according to the various aspects of the system. Finally, it suggests lead actors and collaborators for each action plan to facilitate pathway progress and hence the upscaling SLES.