Power Station Screening and Community Infrastructure Conversation with Govanhill Baths
Architecture Fringe Co-Producer Scott McAulay recently hosted a post-film conversation about community energy and infrastructure at the Deep End after the Govanhill Baths’ sold-out screening of Optimistic Production’s 2025 documentary Power Station. The film follows artists and filmmakers Daniel Edelstyn and Hilary Powell as they set out to catalyse a Green New Deal on their street in Walthamstow: creating their own economic stimulus and creatively crowdfunding, reimagining homes and schools as renewable energy power stations and building community power, cohesion and solidarity in the process.
Power Station builds upon lessons learnt by its protagonists in their prior film Bank Job, and delves into energy justice and community infrastructure at a time when skyrocketing energy bills - intensified by geopolitical flux and warmongering - show no signs of stabilising or dropping. Technological solutions to accelerate the phase out of fossil fuels and decouple our energy system from their shocks and volatility have not only existed for a long time and are well-understood, but they’re becoming evermore affordable and accessible; the U.K.'s Committee on Climate Change also recently determined that it would cost less to get to net-zero by 2050 than dealing with one more fossil fuel crisis. Dan and Hilary’s film is as much about cultivating infrastructures of the imagination, and their neighbours’ and audiences’ senses of agency as it is about putting solar panels on their streets’ rooftops - prefiguratively demonstrating the kind of place-based approach to renewable energy generation that our governments could be empowering, enabling and supporting if they chose to do so in the process.
After the screening, Scott invited audience members to share their own experiences of community energy projects and of community organising around it. Discussions very practically identified that government funding purposefully designed for supporting individual homeowners in detached properties to retrofit their homes or access renewable energies does not provide accessible nor inclusive support to the two-thirds of Glaswegians living in flats.
Inspired by Take One Action Film Festival’s insightful and impactful Pathways to Action handouts across their Real Utopia’s programme, the screening’s audience were signposted towards practical actions they could take themselves. These included: supporting the Our Power Scotland campaign, listening to Glasgow Community Energy’s freely accessible audiobook version of Cathy McCormack’s The Wee Yellow Butterfly, exploring resources such as Local Energy Scotland's Community Energy Launchpad, reading Living Rent’s Lochend MTIS: A Retrofit Case Study - How to ensure a just transition for all, following the developing Power Station story and signing up to access their DIY guides.
The Govanhill Baths are set to host their 10th annual International and Festival and Carnival from the 1st-16th of August and you can find out more about their festival programme here.
Scott McAulay, Cross-Sectoral Co-Producer with the Architecture Fringe
Image above by Optimistic Productions