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There's a particular danger in calling something a revolution too early. Revolutions are easy to announce from lecterns, conference stages and during ministerial visits. They sound good in investment prospectuses and regional strategies. They generally arrive with clean graphics, artist impressions, job forecasts and the language of inevitability.
But in the North East, where the last great energy economy didn't simply disappear but was systematically dismantled, contested, grieved and lived through, people know that the word revolution has real-world consequences.
Coal wasn't just a fuel. It was work, heat, danger, injury, pride, politics, rhythm, culture, memory and organisation. It was the stuff that shaped villages, families, brass bands, welfare halls, reading rooms, football teams, choirs, banners, union lodges and ways of belonging that were both practical and profound. Its decline didn't simply remove an industry. It tore through a social world.
So when the North East is now described as one of the great frontiers of Britain’s renewable energy future, the question isn't whether the transition should happen. The climate emergency makes that argument unavoidable. The question is who gets to own it, shape it, work in it, benefit from it, and hold it to account.
That's the warning being issued by Threads in the Ground, the climate action organisation working with the Durham Energy Council, a voluntary group drawn from former mining communities, to create a new energy manifesto.
The message is clear: the green energy boom mustn't repeat the mistakes made when coalfield communities were left to carry the costs of industrial change after decisions had already been made elsewhere.
“Forty years after the collapse of Britain’s coal industry devastated our communities, the green energy revolution must not repeat the mistakes of the past,” says Alison Paterson, a miner’s daughter and manager of Blackhall Community Centre, where the latest Durham Energy Council consultation took place in May.
“Former miners, workers, and the local community must be consulted so they are not left behind. This new industry is a unique chance to rebuild social connection and community.”
'Rebuilding social connection' has to be at the heart of any action, either regionally - or nationally. Too often the green transition is discussed in terms of infrastructure alone: turbines, ports, cables, grid capacity, heat networks, hydrogen, carbon capture, supply chains, investment zones and skills pipelines. Obviously that all matters. But it's not enough. A just transition can't only be a technical programme. It has to be a civic one too.
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The North East has strong claims to leadership in this new energy economy. Its ports at Blyth, Sunderland and on the Tyne are increasingly central to offshore wind supply chains. Its universities and technical institutions are embedded in energy research and skills development. Its coastline gives it access to some of Europe’s most significant offshore wind resources. Regional leaders are talking openly about tens of thousands of future jobs, billions of pounds of investment and the chance to make the area a national clean-energy powerhouse.
So, it's clear the opportunity is a real one. But history asks a harder question: will the new energy economy build local power, or merely use local assets?
Adam Cooper, Director of Threads in the Ground, argues that communities shouldn't be invited into the conversation as an afterthought: “It’s vital that the renewable transition delivers real, lasting social gains,” he says. “Coalfield communities didn’t just power industry, they built strong social infrastructure, from welfare halls and brass bands to workers’ rights and educational initiatives. The Durham Miners’ Association laid the groundwork for institutions as transformative as the NHS. With the right foundations, extraordinary achievements are possible.”
This is where the Durham Energy Council must become more than a consultation exercise.
The Council is bringing together local people from former mining communities, aged between 18 and 80, to talk about the future of energy systems, community benefit and the values that should guide the transition. Its work isn't based on any nostalgia for coal. It's definitely not a retreat into the past. It's an insistence that the past holds knowledge: about solidarity, organisation, ownership, local pride, democratic accountability and the damage caused when communities are told that economic change is simply something they must endure.
Its manifesto is set to be launched on 11 June at Redhills, the Durham Miners’ Hall - the historic “Pitman’s Parliament” where representatives from pit villages once debated the issues shaping working life, family life and public life across the coalfield.
This venue is not incidental. It's the argument made in brick, timber and memory. Opened in 1915, Redhills was built by the Durham Miners’ Association as a headquarters for one of the most powerful working-class organisations in Britain. It was a place where ordinary working men, representing their lodges and communities, helped shape collective responses to industrial power. It embodied a belief that those who produced energy also had the right to political voice, education, mutual support and cultural life. In 2026, as energy is again about to reshape the region, that belief feels newly urgent.
The danger isn't that renewable energy might fail to arrive. The danger is that it will arrive in ways that feel distant, opaque and extractive: owned elsewhere, governed elsewhere, measured in regional totals but not felt in household security, community confidence or local control.
That's why the hopeful language of “jobs” has to be treated carefully. Jobs matter deeply, particularly in places still marked by the long afterlife of deindustrialisation. But numbers alone don't answer the real questions. What kind of jobs? For whom? With what training? On what contracts? In which towns and villages? With what routes in for young people, women, former industrial workers, coastal communities and those who've been furthest from opportunity? Will local people help design the future, or merely be expected to service it?
Cooper is clear that the North East has the ingredients to lead. But he's equally clear that leadership must not mean communities being placed in the audience while others write the script.
“The North East has all the ingredients to become a European leader in renewable energy,” he says. “But communities must be front and centre in decision-making. A just transition means ensuring working-class voices help shape what comes next.”
Isn' that the central point? This isn't an argument against green energy. It's an argument for the very best version of it.
For community ownership models. For local investment. For meaningful consultation before decisions become irreversible. For training routes that begin in the places most affected. For new forms of social infrastructure, not simply industrial infrastructure. For energy policy that understands belonging as well as megawatts.
“Working-class communities powered previous energy revolutions,” Cooper confirms. “Community ownership models, local investment, and meaningful consultation will be essential to securing public support in this historic industrial region.”
And the phrase “public support” is important too. Across Britain, the politics of climate action is becoming more brittle. Net zero's too often treated as either a technocratic inevitability or a culture-war target. Neither approach is acceptable. If communities feel that the costs of transition are local but the benefits are remote, consent will fray. If green growth becomes another story of outside capital landing in places still living with the consequences of previous industrial extraction, then resentment won't be irrational. It'lll be historical memory doing its job.
The North East knows what it means to power a country and still be left with poverty, ill health, dereliction and broken promises when the national economy moves on.
That's why Threads in the Ground’s intervention is crucial. It asks whether the renewable future can learn from the coalfield past without sanitising it. Coal was dangerous, polluting and bound up with hardship. But coalfield communities also built forms of mutual life that modern policy often struggles even to imagine. The lesson isn't to recreate the past. It is to understand what was lost when work, community, culture and democratic voice were separated from each other.
A green transition worthy of the North East wouldn't simply replace one energy source with another. It could rebuild power in the fuller sense of the word.
It would mean communities having a say in what's built near them and what they receive in return. It would mean local supply chains and apprenticeships that reach beyond any glossy announcements. It would mean investment in community centres, schools, transport, culture and health as part of the energy settlement, not as charitable add-ons. It would mean asking the former coalfield not only to host the future, but to help design it.
Threads in the Ground are about to send 100 copies of the Durham Energy Manifesto to industry leaders, policymakers and renewable energy stakeholders. That number is small enough to sound modest, but the symbolism is massively significant. A document created by local people, at the edge of a vast industrial transition, being placed directly into the hands of those with power.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” Cooper says. “As the transition accelerates, leaders must listen. The people of the North East should not simply experience change, they should help inform it.”
That might be the cleanest definition of a just transition: not something done to people, but something made with them.
The North East doesn't need to be persuaded of the importance of energy. It's lived inside the story of energy for generations. It's given its labour, its bodies, its landscapes, its ingenuity and its sons and daughters to industries that shaped this nation. It's also seen what happens when economic change is managed without love, memory or obligation.
The turbines offshore might belong to the future. But the moral test is older. Who benefits? Who decides? Who's heard? Who's left behind?
If the essential green revolution is going to mean anything in the North East, those questions can't be treated as obstacles to progress. They've got to be the foundations of it.
Sources:
The NECA says its green jobs plan aims to create 25,000 green energy jobs in the North East, while national plans are framed around nearly doubling the clean-energy workforce to 860,000 by 2030. The Combined Authority also said in March 2026 that future Crown Estate leasing could open up six gigawatts or more of offshore wind capacity off the North East coast, with ports at Blyth, Sunderland and the Tyne positioned to benefit.
For wider context, recent CBI Economics research commissioned by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit estimated the UK net zero economy at more than £100bn a year, supporting 1.1m jobs including supply chains, with an estimated £455bn of potential energy infrastructure investment in the pipeline. (Guardian.)
Header image: Industry on the North East Coast (Howard Senton)
