Will Cottrell, Brighton Energy Co-op

“Brighton Energy Co-operative backs We Support Solar’s ‘Save our Solar’ campaign. We believe in solar power at a community scale and if the Government wants solar power owned by local groups, it should understand that we need larger scale solar projects above 50kWp.   What the Government does not seem to understand, is that community energy schemes have running costs. It’s not sustainable to run them on volunteer power for 25 years. An energy co-op director, for example, may have legal responsibility for a multi-million pound project: is it really viable to assume this role would be filled by volunteers for a quarter of a century?

“So the project needs to be of a certain size - it can then earn enough to cover these costs, deliver a return to community investors and fund community projects.

For Brighton Energy Co-op that size is 350Kw - enough to pay for things like accounts, admin, dealing with members and running community projects. Without scale none of these essential overheads are possible.”

Will Cottrell, Brighton Energy Co-op

Stephen Frankel, WREN

“There has been a total misunderstanding of what community schemes should be. The main reason for reviewing the feed in tariff was said to be fear that large-scale renewable energy schemes might use up all the money for community schemes. Where the economic benefits remain in the locality, the problem that has concerned the Secretary of State – FIT revenues being diverted by speculators – simply does not arise. The problem with PV arrays is not their size, but who receives the benefits. Chris Huhne did seem to accept this point, and was interested in following up what we are doing in Wadebridge to see if it can be applied more widely. We have written to him, as he suggested, to seek a further meeting at his Department”

Stephen Frankel, Wadebridge Renewable Energy Network

“We’re backing We Support Solar as believe the Feed-in tariff review should exclude community owned installations up to at least 100kWp in our view as many schools will be loosing out on solar power.

Low carbon Oxford North is in the process of setting up its own energy company called ONCORE. This will be a community benefit Co-op. The beneficiaries will be three: first the investors who will get a modest return on their money capped by law; the school will get cheaper electricity based on how much they generate and use directly; finally the remainder of the amounts of money generated will be given to LCON to service ONCORE (the smaller amount) and for its own community low carbon activities.

We have identified a local secondary school who are vey interested in having a scheme largely because they want to be connected to the community. The likelihood is that we could put somewhere between 50 and 100kwp onto the school roofs. Currently we will only be able to install 50 kWp because to do more would be to risk investors money while the outcomes of the review are unknown. Thus, while the review won’t stop us doing the installation, it will artificially limit it to 50kw.

The result of this would be to miss an easy opportunity to add capacity to the installation at little extra cost.This sort of installation, community owned and totally for community benefit, fits entirely with the spirit of FIT. “

Sam Clarke, Low Carbon Oxford North