Thank you for reading Neil Gentleman-Hobbs & Ashley Butterfield
It is apt, given the backdrop of a nation torn by social, political and industrial strife, that Citizen Smith be used as a rallying cry to champion scalable community energy. The energy literally comes from nature every day, we just need to get that power in our hearts, homes and hands. We believe we can heat and eat if communities work together, community wealth building for a sustainable future.
Hybrid wind and solar projects must power British communities to deliver community wealth building opportunities at growing hub, parish, town and district council level, when the country most needs it. Combined with circular economy growing centres, aka Micro-farms, we can eat and heat. Lincolnshire the breadbasket of Britain can and should lead the way.
The solution is scalable, from as little as £20,000 for a vertical and circular economy based growing area with an additional solar only solution producing 9000 kwh per year. This would power all of the machinery and even a bottling centre with enough spare energy for two houses or a village hall.
According to Ofgem, the average household in the UK has 2.4 people living in it, and uses 8 kWh of electricity and 33 kWh of gas respectively, per day, 242 kWh or electricity and 1,000 kWh of gas per month, or 2,900 kWh of electricity and 12,000 kWh of gas each year. The average medium-sized business will use 40,000 kWh of electricity and 35,000 kWh of gas per year.
A 225KW Wind turbine with a mere 5m x 5m footprint could power 138 homes for free plus negligible operation and maintenance costs. Add in a micro-farm and they and, up to 5x of their neighbours, could be fed too. The Budget cost would be £500k with an annual generation forecast of 400,000 KWH. Remember the land footprint would be a mere 5M x 5M.
A 250KW Solar Array at a cost of £280,000 plus O & M, would power 72 homes or 5 medium sized businesses every year with 757 (330Watt) panels taking up 1600-2,000 square metres of land
A WIND Community solution would power 1,379 homes or 100 medium sized businesses every year using a 2MW turbine. Using wind speed of 6.5m/s, each 65M high unit would produce circa 4,000,000 KWH per year. Budget cost considering purchasing and refurbishing a second hand wind turbine, Logistics, Installation, Planning, ecology, power infrastructure, radar assessment, flicker etc £2M.
Scale this up and we could power villages, towns and districts. So 10 turbines would power a town with 13700 homes for £20m. If everyone paid 1499 year one (50p per kwh there would be a one year payback on the outlay. Year two onwards the community could share out £10m proceeds to good causes if everyone paid 25p per kwh
It begs the question if the Government is prepared to throw billions at effectively subsidising and protecting abnormal profits, then why not fund local community based generation and the upgrades to the Grid? The privatised, anything but national, grid is finally looking to update its network at a cost of £150bn.
Although wind may not be constant in any one place, it is nationally, especially given we are an Island. Additionally it blows in excess of 6m/s which would generate more. The key problem with natural and national energy security is the gatekeepers who hold us all back. Change the planning and Shell, SSE or the French and German governments and their pension funds wont bag all the profits, our communities will!
Our pension funds are currently being saved by the bond buying escapades of the Bank of England. How about they cut out the middle men and get their heads together to do some non green washing ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) investing, that would benefit us for a change?
The problem is political and ideological, in practice it is not as pie in the sky as they would have us believe. Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facilities opened last week in Oregon. It will generate 300 MW of wind power, 50 MW of solar power, and 30 MW of battery storage. The Wheatridge system charges the batteries with electricity generated by the solar assets; the storage can provide continuous power for four hours The collaboration between NextEra Energy Resources and Portland General Electric is the US’s first utility-scale project to combine wind and solar generation with energy storage.
The tech has been around for years, we just need to follow the electric leads
