Leominster Community Solar

We generated our first few kWhs a few minutes ago and have our MCS certificate – Eithne is now busy getting the paperwork done to make sure we are correctly registered for FiTS in time! If you were waiting to invest and become a member of the co-op, now’s the time to go for it

The paperwork has now been sent into Good Energy, so we’re just waiting for acknowledgement.  A huge thank you to everyone at Southern Solar who worked hard to  get this done in time – in all weathers.  Glad to hear you are now in the pub celebrating!

Anyone who would like to come to our celebratory event on Tuesday 13th December from 6-8pm at the Bridge Street Sports Centre, please let me know: eithne@sharenergy.coop or 01584 875881.

Its a battle against the weather right now – we love a bit of wind but could it wait until Monday please! Some pics from yesterday

Latest from the installers:

We have over 100 panels on at Halo, another 58 planned today, scaffolding alteration booked in for tomorrow morning, remaining panels on tomorrow.

Tomorrow (Thursday) we will also have the electrical witness testing going on for the inverters, along with some DC testing too. The system will be commissioned on Friday.

The guys are doing really well, it’s incredibly windy up there, despite that they are making excellent progress.

We still need around £60,000 of investment – with 2 weeks to go, help us to make Herefordshire’s first community-owned renewable energy co-op a success by joining our 60 members!

On schedule, the first half of the array is now installed and the scaffolding is in the process of being moved, to enable the second half to start going on tomorrow.  More photos to follow soon.

Panels and mounting gear are on site and installers are up on the roof, racing against time to ensure the installation is completed in good time for registration before 12th December.  The photo here shows progress so far, with panels now attached to the roof and more up there ready to be installed next.

We are roughly half way through our share offer in time and in members investments – we still need the other half so please tell anyone you know that the project is going ahead! The scaffolding was up and nearly complete yesterday as you can see (click for larger images):

We have installed a 49kW solar array on the  Bridge Street Sports Centre in Leominster.  This is generating clean, green electricity for the centre.  94 people have joined our co-op and will make a healthy return on their investment. This is a first for Herefordshire as a wholly community owned renewable energy project and one of the largest solar roofs in the county.

The £150,725 we required was raised by 22nd December 2011 – in fact the share offer was oversubscribed by over 40%.

We’re now looking for the next roof in Herefordshire.  Please get in touch if you have ideas.

We’ve now paid the first deposit to the installers and are going full tilt to build the array before the new Feed-in tariff cutoff point. To see a great video of them at work on a previous site see our Installers page.

On 31st October the Department for Energy and Climate Change announced its comprehensive review consultation on the solar feed in tariff.  This proposes to slash the Feed in Tariff from 32.9p per kWh to 15.2p per kWh for any installations of the size we are proposing, which are installed and registered for FITs after 12th December 2011.  This is in spite of the consultation only closing on the 23rd December!

Installation will go ahead to ensure the array is up before this proposed change to the tariff and measures have been put in place to mitigate the risks associated with this. Please read our Addendum on the downloads page to understand how this affects our project and our strategy for tackling the problems posed.  The consultation document is also available in the downloads section.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.  For all those who have invested already, we will be in touch to ensure you are still happy with the terms of the offer.

We’re very excited to announce that since launching the share issue last week that the first membership applications and investments have started to come in, so please keep them coming and spread the word so we can get on and install the Bridge Street solar roof.