How will income and savings be generated

for the community?

There are three main ways community energy returns money to the community:

Profit: Any profit it makes from selling the electricity, after paying back the loans and other operating costs, can be returned to the community

Discounted electricity. This is a model called Energy Local (Welcome to Energy Local | Energy Local). It’s a commercial model between an electricity retailer and a community energy project. The retailer buys the energy from the community energy generator and sells any of that locally generated electricity at a discounted rate to homes (and businesses) in the community. Right now it’s Octopus Energy that worked with Energy Local, although Good Energy is expected to join soon when they have completed updating their billing system. As an aside, this is somewhat similar to the approach the government has been encouraging to get more communities on board with local generation, by giving them the benefit of reduced bills from locally generated electricity

Discounted heat: If we adopted a community heat network approach then this could sell heating to the community, potentially at a reduced rate due to the low cost of the source of solar electricity. This would likely be similar to the Energy Local model above, where we’d actually partner with a company that would be selling the heat energy service

In summary – a commercial solar farm returns its profits to its shareholders, and a community energy solar farm returns its profits to its shareholders, who are the community.