The January sun rises over ECOE’s panels at Pinhoe Road Baptist Church
As the sun rises over our panels in early 2026, Exeter Community Energy is in a very different position from how we started 2025.
We completed the transfer of our former energy advice activities to a new charity, Sustainable Community Solutions, in November 2025. You can read the reasons for this decision here. One of the main ones was to secure physical premises, with charities getting beneficial treatment for business rates. Under the brand ECOE Advice, the team has now taken managed office space at Longbrook House, New North Road, Exeter. Drop-in advice clinics will happen every Thursday there from 10am-3pm.
The transition has been difficult and at times contentious. A major part of this is that several hundreds of thousands of pounds of grant money for energy advice work had to be transferred, which we had to carefully assess. That exercise is complete, and while ECOE’s bank balance is lower, the solar PV business that remains within the community benefit society will sustain itself. We also continue to believe passionately in local participation in projects like this through community benefit societies like ECOE.
Several directors have stood down during this process, including James Rowan, Emma Sueref, Ananda Nidhi and Ionna Elliott. Tara Bowers, the award winning manager of Healthy Homes for Wellbeing, has left ECOE Advice altogether and stood down as an ECOE director, but is now doing some volunteer work for us. Rachel Kelly, who was developing new solar PV projects and managing the existing ones, also left to establish the Globe Hotel, Torrington, as a community benefit society. We thank everyone who’s helped ECOE through the transition, especially Tara.
A new dawn
ECOE is now looking forward positively. The last financial year saw us surpass 3GW of solar electricity generated, equating to around 1200 tons of CO2 emissions avoided. That’s equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of around 100 British people. Over the last year we have new welcomed director Martin Shaw and operations and maintenance officer Dan Grey. As part of the transition, ECOE has been looking closely at its resourcing strategy. We have identified the key skills that we need to recruit. We have also developed a succession plan for when our chair David Bacon and other directors step down.
We are also now reviewing our plans for new energy generation projects. We had planned to construct a large new solar PV project early in 2025. However this collapsed when the partner site found funding to develop the array independently.
Other opportunities continue to emerge, but we have already done the easiest ones. We need very specific conditions now to make projects financially viable, as the government has withdrawn subsidies for solar. We hope to explore these conditions in more detail in a future post.
There had been talk of the government opening a capital funding scheme specifically for community energy groups like ECOE. We had lined up a potential project with a large local sport organisation to take advantage of this. However the capital funding scheme never materialised, so we need to explore different ways to fund the project.
We had also planned a new share offering to fund the large array at the start of 2025. With no new projects in prospect we have paused this. We may soft launch it in 2026 so that new members can join – there is currently no mechanism to allow this. It would also mean that we are ready to ramp up quickly if we do get new projects.
Thankfully, we still have plenty of volunteers keen to help the directors and Dan going forward. That includes ECOE member Sarah Alsbury, who has taken on responsibility for our community fund. We’d welcome your involvement as well. If you would like to join them, please fill in this form.
Beyond those we have already thanked, ECOE would like to thank everyone for their patience and support over the months we have been going through the transition process. May the light shine brightly on all of us in 2026.
