If you are interested, do read this article and complete the survey (link below), or if you are too busy – go straight to the survey Please complete by 10th March – once we have thirty responses we will make a donation to Trees for Life, who plant trees in the Scottish Highlands.
If you were at our AGM, you will have heard that we won a grant application to the Rural Community Energy Fund to meet the costs of technical and feasibility studies for a new round of solar photovoltaic panel installations on schools.
The feasibility studies are now almost completed. Six schools and five hospital sites have expressed interest and have been assessed as feasible using a similar financial model to our existing installations, members will be invited to purchase shares and will receive annual interest payments and the investment capital back in instalments over a 20 year period.
The Feed-in Tariff scheme, which partly funds our current installations, is due to close for new installations on 31st March 2019. To ensure that these new installations are commercially viable we have chosen large sites which will use most of the electricity generated themselves, and also hope to benefit from a 40% grant from Dorset County Council’s Low Carbon Dorset project, leaving 60% to be raised from a share offer. This will allow us to offer the selected sites significant discounts on the unit price they pay for electricity.
We are now at the exciting stage where sites are confirming their agreement in principle to progress. So far two schools with a combined capacity of 150kW have confirmed their interest. We are also hopeful that at least one of the NHS hospital sites will take part. The total capacity of the 11 sites identified is just over 700kWp and we are aiming to take forward around 500kWp. This would take our total rooftop solar photovoltaic portfolio to around 1MW which is more than double the existing capacity, and would be an excellent milestone!
More information on which sites are going ahead should be available by early March, and we will keep you informed as the project progresses. We hope to issue a share offer in May, so keep an eye on your inbox.
In the meantime to help us prepare please complete our short survey. (Three minutes!)
Please complete 10th March – once we have thirty responses we will make a donation to Trees for Life, who plant trees in the Scottish Highlands.
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