Community Energy Inspiration Evening

Project description:

So what is Community Energy?
Community Energy projects are community led, and benefit the local community. They can empower people, support stronger local economies, and help people save money on their energy bills. They include projects that help reduce energy use, manage energy more efficiently, generate sustainable energy, or purchase energy more effectively.
Speaker Summaries - Slides from the speaker presentations can be found here.

Jodie Giles - Senior Project Manager for Regen 
Jodie gave us an overview of the development of community energy projects in Devon, and talked of the exponential benefits of these over the years. Jodie was also on hand to answer questions and share her vast knowledge and expertise with us.

Dan MacCallum -  Awel Aman Tawe (AAT)
AAT has been developing and advising on community schemes, including wind, solar, biomass and hydro since 1998. They have implemented energy efficiency measures in thousands of homes and community centres. 

Phil Powell -  Gwent Energy CIC 
This community organisation has installed 300kW of PV on community buildings and supported over 70 community energy projects. Their latest project ‘Fully Charged’ is about the uptake of electric vehicles in communities. 

Ant Flanagan - Gower Power 
This organisation has installed a 1MW ground mounted solar project with a community share offer to enable local people to invest. Surplus profits will be used for regenerating the area.

We hosted a workshop at the event; we have briefly summarised some of the frequent responses:

What are your community energy aspirations? 

• Increase community engagement
• Reduce emissions
• Changes to more sustainable energy sources as the norm
• Sustainable community transport
• Changes in attitude and awareness
• Positive social impacts
• Influence planning procedures 
• Easy retrofit solutions
• Inspire local authority to be exemplar

What Will The Project Achieve?

The inspiration evenings event was designed to hopefully inspire our guests to consider developing a community energy project of their own.

Who are the project beneficiaries?

Communities and the environment in The VoG.

What’s next for your project?

We hope that the evening proved inspiring and that participants are encouraged to explore community energy project possibilities in their own communities.
If you are now thinking of developing a project idea, please do get in contact with us so that we may support you to take the next steps. This may include:

• Sign posting to the relevant support agencies
• Site visits to similar projects
• Developing mentor schemes
• Facilitating peer to peer learning
• Facilitating community consultation
• Advice and sign posting regarding funding models and grant schemes
• Funding revenue based pilot projects
• Hosting topical surgeries 
• And more!