Fund
Raising
Please help with the fundraising for the community solar farm feasibility study by donating on our crowd funding page:
Why donate?
1. Raise money for the community – 100% of the profits from the solar farm will come back to the community – this could be worth £10,000s per year
2. Reduce energy bills – 10-30% reduction in our home electricity bills possible from the Energy Local Model
3. Reduct carbon footprint – Eliminate much of the nearly 1,000 tonnes per year of CO2 our community emits from electricity usage
We have raised over £2,300 already from personal donations ranging from £5 to £1,000.
We are applying for grant funding from Cotswold District Council (CDC), Somerford Keynes Parish Council and the Lower Mill Estate Homeowners Association.
With your donations and expected grant funding, we are well on course to raise the target of £16,585.
Community commitment particularly helps with our application to CDC, the number of donations, not just £s matters, so even if you can only make a small donation it really helps, thank you!
Background
Thames Head Energy is a community social enterprise based in the Parish of Somerford Keynes, focused on delivering lower-cost and renewable energy solutions to the community. Helping us reduce our energy costs, cut our carbon footprint and raise money for our community.
As we go into this winter facing an energy crisis, and one that is likely to persist through next winter and beyond, it feels like our work has become more important than ever. We have now launched the next phase of how we will seek community support, and to coincide with that we wanted to update you on our progress so far, and ask for your support on the community solar farm project.
Projects
Our work is split into three projects for the community:
A group solar/batteries/EV charger purchase, where 105 homes have signed up to explore with us a group purchase of solar energy systems for individual households. We have shortlisted three potential suppliers and expect to start installing in the spring;
A community-owned solar farm, where we have undertaken initial feasibility work with the local grid company SSEN and are progressing discussions on potential sites; and
A community-based heating solution, where we are undertaking initial feasibility studies with specialist company Kensa.
Community Solar Farm
We have made excellent progress on our ambition for a community-owned solar farm. A key tenet of this is that it will be community owned and legally required to deliver benefits and return a profit to the community. This progress has been driven by the fantastic support we have had from our network of ‘champions’ in the community. We have undertaken extensive consultation with SSEN on the capacity of the local grid and identified optimum sites for where we could seek to site a solar farm. We are now starting to engage with local landowners. We have had extensive discussions with Cotswold District Council about financial support for our project, which has been very positive, and have submitted a bid under the Rural England Prosperity Fund. And we are progressing with detailed work on the financing structures which could be used to fund and deliver the project.
We have now reached a milestone where we need to commission a formal options appraisal and feasibility study of our potential sites. Once this is complete, and we have agreement from a landowner to lease a site, we will need to move to formal planning, which will include engaging with the community as well as the technical, environmental, financial and legal aspects of planning.
Cotswold District Council has indicated that they will be willing to fund a large proportion from their Build Back Better fund, but they have indicated that we will need to demonstrate community buy-in and support to unlock this. We have set up a crowd-funding platform to support this, and show members of the local community have “skin in the game” (based on CDC advice we are using their Crowdfund Cotswold Spacehive platform).
The Lower Mill Estate Homeowners Association has agreed to provide funding and we are in active discussion with Somerford Keynes Parish Council to also help financially.
Once operational all the profits from the enterprise would legally be required to be returned to the community. So, any contribution you make would continue to deliver benefits to the community over time.
We will certainly work with the community on where such benefits should be distributed, and how (money, funding projects, etc).
Our goal is to raise a total of £16,585, which should see us through to the design and planning permission stage, which we expect to use commercial funding for. Following this, we plan to launch a community share offer, to raise the capital to fund the construction of the community solar farm. This is the proven financial model used by nearly all of the 400+ community energy organisations across the UK.
We launched our fundraising at the start of November and have raised over £2,000 already from individual donations.
Please join us and help the project and our community by donating now: