Project Summary
The project proposed to fit solar systems to a number of local community assets. However, the feasibility study demonstrated that none of the projects gave sufficient return on investment to set up the organisation necessary to deliver the wider project. The feasibility study has been handed over to individual community organisations to see if they can raise grant funding to install the systems independently.
Background
The project aimed to reduce carbon emissions by providing renewable energy through solar PV installed on community assets and to lower energy costs for the community organisations where the systems were installed
- Potential carbon savings:18.08582 tonnes CO2e per annum
- Potential energy creation:87350 kWh per annum
Our Role
Love the Future CIC received Community Energy Fund (CEF) Stage 1 (feasibility) grant funding of £25,040 from the South West Net Zero Hub to develop the project.
Location
North Somerset
Technology
Solar PV, battery storage and EV charging points
What Happened
Key tasks carried out:
- Ensure technical feasibility;
- Ensure the projects commercial viability;
- Ensure there were no major planning or legal issues
- Ensure secure grid connection suitable for a local supply model
- Engage with the local planning authority via pre-app
- Conduct non-site-specific community engagement.
- More site-specific community engagement was carried out than originally planned.
As a result of the study, the project was unable to ensure technical feasibility.
Lessons learnt
The challenge was that the finances didn’t add up. This was partly due to scale – the roofs were not large enough to offer any significant profit and partly due to community building use – there was limited use of the energy as it was being generated, so the systems would have required expensive battery storage systems, further reducing ROI.
Community Benefits
The community has benefitted through a great deal of learning, increasing local knowledge and expertise, and it is hoped that in due course the community will benefit from solar systems being installed by those individual organisations that participated in the feasibility study.
Next Steps
As there is insufficient scale locally, they are planning to join forces with Low Carbon Gordano to try to establish a broader partnership of community asset owners and other organisations to increase the amount of community energy generation across the area.
They will continue to offer expertise and support to the organisations who participated in the feasibility study to help them fit the systems on an individual basis.