Challenges and opportunities continue to arise in the development of our first community renewable project. From chatting to our supporters in Exeter and friends in the community energy sector around the country, we are often reminded that what we have done so far is a big achievement and what we want to do is not easy.
We have recently been having positive discussions with Hospiscare about their care centre next to the RD&E hospital, and with the South West Ambulance Service about their Skypark centre. These two sites would add 130kWp of installed capacity to our overall target of 250kWp for the first share offer, and we’ll keep you posted as things progress. As ever, new roofs continue to be identified and we’re doing everything we can to bring them on board.
Unfortunately, a structural survey at Shillingford Organics has revealed issues with the roofs that would need to be rectified in order for them to take the extra weight of a solar PV installation. The cost of doing this is sadly prohibitive. This isn’t good news for our partnership with Shillingford . Is there going to be a way we can proceed?
We’re currently waiting to hear about our application to the Urban Community Energy Fund. It will pay for a more systematic site search, further project management time, expert technical advice and a broadened community engagement campaign. However we’ve ended up with a funding gap of about 8 weeks. We’ll continue to do everything we can to keep things going and hopefully when the funding does come in it will make a huge difference to what can be achieved.
The work so far – While putting together this application we realised we have carried out 280 desktop surveys of roofs in Exeter, approached around 50 organisations, had meetings with about 15 and have two signed Heads of Terms agreements. Through this process we have also learned that at least three organisations may have said no to us but the reason is they are planning to install their own PV systems. So, not always the change we aimed to implement, but change nonetheless!
