Boost for BEC’s innovation plans in South Gloucestershire
Our mission to help build a clean, green, home-grown and resilient energy system received a huge boost recently with news of two successful grant bids. Will Houghton, our Senior Project Developer, shares the news.
BEC received a total of nearly £80,000 from the newly established national Community Energy Fund (CEF) to develop innovative projects at two identified sites in South Gloucestershire.
These projects aim to tackle two challenges which are currently being faced by community energy groups across the country: severely constrained grid capacity and the issue of selling electricity locally to residents or commercial consumers. Finding a good solution to these challenges crucial to the development of new schemes which are supported by the community.
The CEF grants will be used to assess the feasibility of two projects which will use a combination of ground-mount solar and wind generation with battery storage, with a total capacity of around 2MW. This will mean we can maximise the clean power generated by each site, whatever the weather. We will also explore how these projects could introduce local supply arrangements that will directly benefit the local community around the sites through reduced electricity bills. We will manage the study with our consultants RenewEV carrying out the technical analysis and we’re also looking forward to partnering with Energy Local on the local supply options. All this will be built from our work forging a strong relationship with the community.
Building a resilient energy system isn’t just about increasing capacity for generation. It’s also about bringing those sources closer to where people live, and building a more flexible electricity system which can make the most of that power. This kind of challenge is what community energy is made for – we’re proud to be developing innovative solutions which decarbonise our energy system *and* maximise benefits for local people. We’re very excited to get started!
