UK — Lewes community power station

Nicola Mares • 13 March 2020
Author: Alicia Webb

A community group in Lewes, East Sussex in the UK have built a rooftop solar park, entirely funded by local investors. The solar park is on the roof of a brewery and the power will be used for brewery operations with excess sold to the national grid.
Main topics covered in this article include:

  • Project overview
  • Project cost and funding
  • Background
  • Challenges
  • Results
  • More information

Project overview

Non-profit community energy company OVESCO has installed the UK's first 100% community-funded solar power station. The Lewes Community Power Station started generating on Saturday 30th July, just hours before the UK Government’s new, lower feed-in tariff rates came into effect. The 98 kW system consists of 544 grid-connected solar PV panels on top of the warehouse roof of a local brewery.

Southern Solar, co-founders of OVESCO, estimate that the system will generate in excess of 90,000 kWh of solar electricity per year. The brewery will use the electricity and any surplus will be sold back to the national grid.

The system has virtually no visual impact on the surroundings, and provides green electricity for the surrounding area.

The team behind the Lewes community solar power station on their roof
 

team
Source: positivenews.org.uk

 

Project cost and funding

Ovesco raised 100% of the £307,000 installation cost from local people and investors. Anyone in the UK was able to invest. The model allows for 4% interest on investment and the capital repaid by the end of the scheme.

Shares were £10 each; with a minimum investment of 25 shares (£250) and a maximum of 2,000 shares (£20,000).

Background

The launch of the Lewes Community Power Station is the result of many years of hard work. The Ouse Valley Energy Services Company Ltd (OVESCO) was established in 2007 to encourage energy-saving practices in domestic, business and public buildings, and to create local generation of non-polluting energy.

Over the past three years OVESCO has focussed on small-scale projects to generate renewable power for the local community. These projects range from around 25kW – 250kW in size. They also ran a local grant scheme on behalf of Lewes District Council for domestic renewables.

When the UK Government stopped their Low Carbon Building Programme, they replaced the grants scheme with a Feed in Tariff (FiT). At this point OVESCO began to focus on community PV projects.

Challenges

Like Australia, solar installations in the UK depend heavily on subsidies such as Feed in Tariffs. When the UK Government announced a FiT programme review in February 2011, OVESCO knew that the impact would be significant.

Earlier in 2011 Chris Rowland at OVESCO said, “Any review of 50kW+ FiTs would have a serious effect on our business model for future projects, as it may not be financially worth undertaking a community share issue for projects under 50kW, especially for groups starting up and trying to become financially independent of grants.”

The FiT was reviewed and reduced, effective on the 30 July 2011. Luckily, the Lewes community power station met the deadline with hours to spare.
OVESCO has developed the only community initiative to go live in time for the changes in Government policy on solar. The changes have been extremely frustrating for nearly 1000 other community projects across the UK.

Results

OVESCO received a very positive response to their share issue. Not only was all the money raised, but it came 85% from the Lewes community and they required no grants or bank lending.

The installation is complete and share certificates have been sent out to investors with an invitation to a celebration party.

They are now in talks with other site owners on new projects and will be posting updates on further developments as and when they happen.

More information

OVESCo home page

Related articles

  • Solar park project basics
  • Solar park: getting started