We are very excited to welcome our new CEO, Helen Martin. Helen comes to BEC with extensive international experience in infrastructure and finance. For over 15 years she worked with governments and development finance institutions to reform policies, develop investor pipelines and bring bankable projects to market. After returning to Britain, she led the staff team of a local Bristol MP. Welcome to the BEC family, Helen!
What attracted you to work for Bristol Energy Coop?
What attracted me to BEC was the chance to work with my community to address an existential challenge and make the world a greener, fairer place. Confronting the realities of the climate crisis can be so overwhelming. BEC helps connect people so we each feel we can contribute personally, at a scale that makes a difference.
You’ve lived and worked all over the world, can you tell us how that experience has shaped you?
My career in international development gave me experience working with people from all types of backgrounds and communities, from senior officials in Brazil to community groups in Uganda. This has helped me become very flexible in the way I engage with people over the challenges they are facing. It also made me really conscious of the difference that energy and water and other basic services make to people’s lives. We take them for granted in this country but there are many people who don’t have these things on tap or at the press of a button. Building these systems in developing countries got me thinking about how they worked here in Britain and the challenge of shifting those in response to the climate crisis.
What does community energy mean to you?
Community energy for me means people getting together to take control of how they produce, manage and hopefully reduce the energy that they use. There are all sorts of forms that can take, but the common factor is putting people at the heart of the energy system. It might mean local people owning the solar panels or the wind turbine, using the energy, or both. It usually means making sure local people share in the benefits from the revenues that come from that generation, by channelling those resources back into the community that they’re serving.
What are the main areas of focus for Bristol Energy Coop in 2024?
BEC is in a really interesting place in its development. Through the last decade we’ve developed an approach that works for solar generation – basically building a power station on the rooftops of Bristol one community building at a time. We know how to do it and we want to scale up our generation capacity in and around Bristol as quickly as we can, directly contributing to lowering carbon emissions. At the same time BEC also has a long history of innovation, finding new ways of harnessing people power in and around the city. Recent examples include the microgrids in Water Lillies and Bridport. Looking forward, for example, we are exploring new approaches to generation that combine different technologies like wind and solar with batteries to provide reliable green energy capacity to the grid or heat generation for urban heat networks.
What are you looking forward to most this year?
There is such a thriving community in Bristol of people working in different ways to tackle the climate crisis – our BEC team and members are a big part of that, along with our many partners across the city. I’m really looking forward to getting to know and working with so many passionate people. I’m also excited to see our solar panels go on roofs. It’s a tangible sign of the contribution we make to the amazing community work going on in the city.
What is your message to BEC members and supporters?
BEC is about connecting energy and a community. We can’t do anything without our members and supporters, who share our commitment to tackling the climate crisis head on and putting people at the heart of the energy system. I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has been part of BEC’s story so far and to our members and supporters for coming with us on this next stage of the journey.
