Chris is a Director of Emersons & Lyde Community Energy CIC, in this blog, he shares his story, how the community energy group plans to help local residents in the area, and how Bristol Energy Network has been a key partner in helping to make this all happen.
It is now just one year since Emersons and Lyde Community Energy was incorporated. It has six local people as directors and set out initially to consult local people about their views on renewable energy through a survey developed in partnership with Bristol Energy Network The ELCoE directors attended a whole series of local events, such as Mangotsfield festival and Emersons Green’s Spring Gathering, engaging people in a wide-ranging, conversational survey about their views on climate change, renewable energy, fuel poverty and the potential for bigger projects such as wind turbines, big solar installations and the use of the disused mines as a heating source. More than seventy such surveys have been completed by ELCoE during the year.
This process has helped us to chart our way forward as ELCoE. Our partnership with Bristol Energy Network alerted us to the extraordinary community benefit that can arise through a major renewable energy project like the Lawrence Weston wind turbine. ELCoE directors carefully considered how such a community benefit might be managed in our area and agreed that we should aim to serve the people of Emersons and Lyde Green as well as the surrounding communities of Westerleigh, Pucklechurch, Mangotsfield, Staple Hill and Blackhorse, recognising that these are all very different communities, rural and urban, with their own mix of needs and aspirations. Some of these communities are amongst the most deprived in South Gloucestershire, while others are relatively wealthy.
Our basic aim is to build a community of people who are interested in renewable energy and in making homes more energy efficient and to apply our resources to that end. We will work with partners such as Bristol Energy Network to further major renewable energy schemes in our area and, if income becomes available to us through major renewable schemes, we will aim to devote 50% of the income, after necessary staff costs, to schemes to address energy-related poverty in our area. We will also seek a partnership with South Gloucestershire council whereby we form an agreement on a specific set of actions to address the climate agenda in our area of benefit.
Our partnership with Bristol Energy Network resulted in the award of a grant in regard to our survey work and a LEAD Demonstrator grant toward putting on a Green Open Homes Day, which together allowed us to employ, a part-time community energy worker, taking the pressure off our directors and allowing us to host a Green Open Homes Day in November 2024. The day was successful with four local homes open throughout the day and the clear beginnings of a keen, local community of people interested in retrofit. These homes included an air source heat pump, a Zero Emissions Boiler (Tepeo) and solar installations. Each of these homes is commissioning a survey to help them consider what they might do next.
This survey activity and the ongoing development of our community is continuing now with the additional help of a grant from Retrofit West, which will allow us to host monthly community meetings throughout our area of benefit in 2025 and will focus on retrofit measures that can be applied to homes and feature everything from insulation and draught exclusion through to air source heat pumps and solar installations. As part of this we will promote our ‘Every Roof Challenge’, which aims to encourage everyone, both in private homes and public buildings to install a solar array on appropriately- oriented roofs. We intend to work with Lendology in this process, giving our people access to low-cost loans. We will encourage one another within this community by telling stories of our personal retrofit endeavours and generating a list of trusted installers, thereby taking the worry out of this process for those new to it.
Bristol Energy Network have been a vital part of our success to date, supporting us at every level, helping us with all the detail of our Green Open Homes Day, keeping us up to date with potential major projects and bringing us into contact with other community energy groups in the area.
Our aim is to grow a community of people actively and practically engaged with the issues presented by climate change, inspired by the idea that a local area such as ours can generate much of its own energy and recognising that we can all be part of the solution.