Good News on a local Community Owned Solar Project

Over to Gordon Coppock for his Good News:

The community owned energy generation project that I started working on during Covid times in March 2020 is finally underway! I had to choose a business near to Tenbury since that was the nearest point to Kington that we could have a large enough connection to the electricity grid that could be contracted to Western Power (now called National Grid Energy Distribution – NGED). It is a large 300kWp solar PV system on most of the suitable roof area of the Kerry factory and we have had many hurdles to jump over to finally get the design done and the contract signed with the International HQ of Kerry in Ireland.

I started working on this on behalf of Pomona Solar Cooperative as a new project but it soon became clear that it would be a good project to do as one of the first with the emerging Big Solar Co-op that has been developed by Jon Hallé and others. This is still linked with Sharenergy whom we have been working with since 2010.

Big Solar Co-Op is a not for profit company structure that has been created to provide a solution for medium scale energy generation to the challenging post Feed in Tariff period and has been growing in parallel with the development of the Kerry project to now have a large pipeline of projects across the UK. All will be community owned, and the share offer is still open.

Here is the press release and more info on Big Solar Co-Op where you could be part of it as a volunteer (with a defined role of your choosing) and /or as a shareholder if you wanted.

The Kerry site at Tenbury, like many food manufacturing sites, uses a very large amount of energy and our installation will save them around 54 tonnes of CO2e emissions per year and reduce their costs. As one of the larger employers in the central Marches area this helps bring job security as well to people in the north Herefordshire area.

Please email any questions you may have about the project to me at gjcoppock@hotmail.com.

I’m now focused on using this hard won contract on other UK suitable sites within the Kerry Foods group.