There is an increasing awareness that renewable energy production is important, for a wide range of environmental, social and economic reasons, as electricity from fossil fuels gets ever more expensive and scarce. Since key producer countries like Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iraq and Iran have unpredictable socio-economic circumstances of their own, the supply of fossil fuels is increasingly unpredictable. Furthermore, the cost and reliablity of energy from the national grid is increasingly called into question - it needs expensive upgrading and there is no sustainable plan to do so. As a result, many local communities are beginning to use a variety of energy production sources. Typically electricity from the national grid is being supplemented by local renewable energy from solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal and hydro facilities. We at DistGen have an idea that this diverse range of local energy production facilities needs to be managed by a local computer-controlled device, in order to manage in real-time the various local energy sources that are available and to match local consumer demand. We call this device the Semi-autonomous miniGRID Controller or "SmC". We do not believe that such a device exists at this scale which addresses the needs of a local community, and yet we believe that this is the scale that is best suited to communities taking relevant and appropriate action to address these critical matters for themselves. This project is clearly innovative as there is no such device commercially available presently at this scale, and obviously the project has direct environmental, social and economic benefits in the UK and abroad. Our objective is to enable communities to deploy a range of local energy production in an integrated way, so that diverse local facilities can be deployed effectively and efficiently. Without a device such as the SmC each local community will have to solve this integration of local demand and supply for themselves.