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# Banter 55: 05Feb25 Wight Community Energy with Stephen Cockett

{% embed url="<https://youtu.be/D_7iy9wkYOE>" %}

#### Video Timeline (min:sec):

00:00 - 30:05 Presentation\
30:05 - 52:42 (end) Q & A

***

#### Presentation:

{% file src="/files/zRLePIMJInGEpyZnHvg4" %}

You are welcome to download this presentation.  A markdown version is provided at the bottom of this page

***

#### Meeting Summary:

Feb 05, 2025 11:37 AM London ID: 834 5460 8536

#### Quick Recap

Stephen and Josh discussed the proposal of having two sides for their project, focusing on recognizing and addressing unmet needs, and the use of data visualization tools. The team also discussed various environmental challenges in their locations, with Andrew reporting ongoing flooding issues in Somerset and Stephen sharing his area's landslide risks. The conversation ended with a discussion on community energy projects, the challenges faced by Wight Community Energy, and the potential for local energy resilience through interconnections and the use of local resources.

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#### Next Steps

Stephen to share his contact details for follow-up discussions with interested participants, particularly Joolz

Stephen to consider exploring local energy trading schemes to potentially sell electricity at a higher rate than 4p per unit.

Stephen to look into innovative schemes using local substations as hubs for renewable energy distribution.

Wight Community Energy to continue monitoring and evaluating the potential for vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology as it develops.

Wight Community Energy to prepare for the anticipated £150,000 surplus revenue from the 4 megawatt system in the coming years.

Stephen to share information about the Green Open Homes scheme with interested participants.

Wight Community Energy to continue seeking new solar projects on the Isle of Wight, particularly for schools and small industrial units.

#### Project Proposal and Data Visualization

Stephen and Josh discussed the proposal of having two sides for their project. They decided to focus on two main points: recognizing unmet needs and addressing unmet needs. Stephen asked for help in visualizing the data, suggesting the use of percentages and graphs to show changes over time. He also suggested using the human figures from the narrative decks to represent the data. Stephen asked for assistance in working on the second part of the project, which involved using the expert consensus findings and guidelines. He emphasized the importance of giving more space to the expert consensus findings and adding a call-out to the definition of drug-induced PAH.

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#### Environmental Challenges and Solutions Discussed

The group discusses various environmental challenges in their respective locations. Andrew reports ongoing flooding issues in Somerset, with recent incidents affecting multiple houses. He mentions an upcoming farmers market where they will showcase flood prevention tools. Stephen shares that his area on the Isle of Wight faces landslide risks rather than flooding, which is affecting his efforts to sell his house. Graham introduces a volcanologist who is studying seismic activity in San Francisco. Dale joins the conversation from Battle in East Sussex.

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#### Wight Community Energy Introduction

Stephen Cockett, the general manager of Wight Community Energy, introduces himself and his organization, which is based on the Isle of Wight. He plans to discuss their current projects and the future of developing community energy projects, particularly focusing on solar initiatives.

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#### White Community Energy Operations Discussed

Stephen discussed the history and operations of Wight Community Energy, a community-led renewable energy organization founded in 2015. He explained how the organization came into existence through the government's scheme to sell existing solar farms to viable community energy groups. Wight Community Energy took ownership of a 4 Megawatt solar farm, initially with 700,000 in the local share raise and 4 million pounds of debt. The organization has since increased its number of members to 246 and raised 1.1 million in member equity. Stephen also mentioned that the solar farm has not been as successful as hoped, but expects to generate around 150,000 pounds per year in surplus revenues for community projects in about two years. He also touched on the organization's status as a community benefit society and its wildlife management practices. Graham expressed interest in discussing the solar challenges faced by Wight Community Energy.

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### Thermal Camera Project and Retrofit Advice

Stephen discussed the success of their thermal camera lending project, noting mixed feedback and the need for someone experienced to interpret the results. He also highlighted the importance of retrofit advice, suggesting that people should focus on cavity wall insulation, loft insulation, and heat pumps rather than solar panels. Stephen also mentioned their Green Open Homes project, where people can visit eco-improved homes to gain insights for their own properties. He emphasized the need for networking and advertising to promote these initiatives.

<br>

### Going Electric Show Success and Challenges

Stephen discussed the success of the "Going Electric Show" held on the Isle of Wight, which brought together electric car dealers, solar panel installers, and heat pump installers. The event, held over two weekends, attracted 1,000 to 2,000 visitors each time and was well-received by exhibitors. Stephen also mentioned the upcoming event in August and the challenges faced in the past due to network capacity constraints. He highlighted the importance of community ownership in renewable energy projects, such as the 4-megawatt solar farm on the Isle of Wight. Stephen also outlined the criteria for a successful solar project, emphasizing the importance of a solid roof, good orientation, high on-site consumption, and owner occupancy.

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### Community Solar Project Financial Model

Stephen discussed the benefits of a community energy solar project on a host's rooftop. He explained that the organisation would buy the complete array for the host's roof, providing them with cheaper electricity and green kudos. Investors would receive a 6% annual return and a return of their shares over time. Stephen also presented a financial model for a 50 kW solar project, estimating annual expenses, returns to investors, and community benefits. He emphasized the importance of selling as many units as possible to the host site and the potential for community benefits after 20 years. Stephen also mentioned the possibility of selling the solar project for profit after 20 years, but with an asset lock to ensure the project's sustainability.

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#### Clarifying Surplus Revenue and Trading Schemes

Graham expressed appreciation for Stephen's presentation and initiated a Q\&A session. Stephen clarified that the 150,000 pounds surplus revenue he mentioned was from a 4 megawatt system, not the number Graham saw in the spreadsheet. Stephen also explained that the community energy sector has faced challenges, but this has led to a growth of knowledge within the space. Tristram suggested the possibility of a local energy trading scheme, but Stephen explained that this would involve additional administration for their small organization.

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### Local Energy Resilience and Innovations

In the meeting, Graham and Stephen discussed the challenges and potential solutions for local energy resilience. Stephen emphasized the importance of energy efficiency and interconnections for a resilient grid. He also mentioned the difficulties in implementing bi-directional chargers for electric vehicles (EVs) and the need for further innovation in this area. John Payne raised concerns about the future of energy and the need for more resilient local grids. Stephen suggested that resilience could be found through interconnections and the use of local resources. Graham proposed the idea of using local substations to share renewable energy within a community, which Stephen confirmed was a new innovative approach. The team agreed on the need for further exploration of these ideas to improve local energy resilience.

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### Electricity Costs and Power Purchase Agreements

Graham and Stephen discussed the cost of generating electricity and the pricing of power purchase agreements (PPAs). Stephen explained that they currently receive 8 pence per kilowatt-hour (kWh) from their PPA, but they model lower costs for long-term modeling to avoid sudden increases in electricity costs. Graham asked about the cost of producing electricity by main providers, to which Stephen responded that it's around 80 pounds per megawatt, translating to 8 pence per unit. Dave asked about funding development costs and replacing inverters, to which Stephen responded that they depreciate the inverter over 12 years and cover development costs from their existing funds. Henry asked about the source of their PPA price, to which Stephen responded that it's most likely from Unity, a branch of Octopus. Graham then introduced the next topic of discussion, a workshop on building a roadmap towards net zero, to be led by David Morgan Jones.

***

#### Chat:

00:26:04 Ian Bowater: Yes representing. CHARGE CIC <br>

00:32:49 Joolz Thompson: Yes, @stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy - would love to discuss your solar challenges (we've a CEF Feasibility study about to commence for 5MW Agroivoltaics project).

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00:50:56 John Payne: What are your views on small rural resilient smart electrical grids?\
We live just inside Wales adjacent to The Forest of Dean. We often have outages in the recent extreme weather. At the present time the main road (A466) is closed because of hillside instability, the A40 ( main economic trunk Rd link between Wales and England) has its Eastbound carriageway closed due to the same reason. We feel worried for the future.

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00:56:54 Joolz Thompson: This is fab - could you share spreadsheets? @stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy 🙏

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01:03:07 Adam Birchweaver - Energy Team Essex CC/[Stour Power CE: ](https://stourpower.com/)Also [Energy Local.](https://energylocal.org.uk/) I would imagine they would handle the admin
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01:10:48 tristram cary winchfield Parish Online: Many thanks Stephen, I need to leave now

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01:13:30 Henry Lovegrove Dorset CE: Actually the Local Energy admin is performed by an electrical supply company. At Bridport this was Octopus but they have now ducked out of the scheme and we haven't found anyone to replace them.

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01:13:36 John Lockton Hadstock: Going back to the 4p question - why so low when Octopus for instance is offering 15p?

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01:15:21 Henry Lovegrove Dorset CE: Who is your ppa supplier at 8p Stephen?

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01:16:13 John Taylor: yep offshore wind and gas are around 8p/kWh, onshore and large solar more 5-6p/kWh on the Contracts for Difference

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01:18:22 Henry Lovegrove Dorset CE: Nuclear guaranteed price is even higher

### &#xD; 01:19:35 John Taylor: [Growing Community Energy Through PPAs](https://www.younity.coop), Funding & Volunteer Younity, used to be Cooperative Energy

***

#### Audio-Transcription:

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Hi, yeah. So I'm Stephen Cockett. I'm the general manager of whites. Community energy. The clue is in the name. We're a community energy organization based on the Isle of Wight. And I just want to talk a little bit about some of our projects and then about the future of developing community energy projects which pertains to solar projects.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Primarily.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: And yeah. So I'll start sharing my screen just a second. I have got a little bit of a cough, I'm afraid, and we'll see how that goes. And yesterday my laptop turned itself off in the middle of a meeting for the 1st time ever. So if I disappear, maybe that's what it is. But fingers crossed, we'll we'll go smoothly.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Okay, so I'm just looking to share now.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: so the famous words, Can you see my screen.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Yup successful? You're still into regular mode. Rather. There we go.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Okay. So there you are. That's us, white community energy, easy to find out more about us. You just pop into Google, and you'll get straight to us whitecommunityenergy.org. So don't worry. There's not lots of lots of text, heavy slides. It's just this one which I created literally 1 min ago.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: I guess I can read it out for those who don't want to read community energy. What is it? It's the refers to the delivery of community led renewable energy energy demand production and energy supply projects, whether wholly owned and or controlled by communities or through a partnership with commercial or public sector partners. So where does white community energy fit into that?

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: We were founded in 2015 and started operations in 2016.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: What happened in 2015 was the Government at the time launched a scheme whereby existing solar farms were going to be sold at their market value to viable community energy groups. So some people on the Isle of Wight got together, and they formed a group, and through a long and complicated process that I was not involved with at all.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: They took the 4 Megawatt Solar Farm into community ownership. At that time 130 members of the community bought into it. So it's co-owned by them.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and at that time there were. They had 700,000 in the local share rates.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: The 4 Megawatt Solar Farm itself cost in the region of 4 million pounds. So to start off with, there was in the region of 3.5 million pounds of of debt, and the rest was made up by Member Equity

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: around one year ago we had another share race, and we increased our number of members from 130 up to 246, and we now have 1.1 million of of Member equity.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and the objective is that the Solar Farm is that the surplus revenues from the Solar Farm are diverted into community projects.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: as of this time. For long and complicated reasons the Solar Farm has not been as successful as we had hoped for, and I could.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: I could go into them off this call. If anybody has a particular interest in that, so we have not derived the community benefit that we were hoping for, but in around about 2 years time we should have in the region of 150,000 pounds per year in surplus revenues coming from the Solar Farm that we're going to be able to use for all manner of community projects.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: The organization itself, in common with a lot of other community energy organizations is a community benefit society, which is a type of Co-OP. We're registered with registered and controlled by the Fsa.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Okay.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: that's a picture of the Solar Farm itself. That's at least that's half of it. We have that part in one field, and we have another field adjacent to it. It looks rather different today. I think that photo was taken in 2016. This area here. Can you see my pointer? Okay.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Yep.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Area here in the curtelage is now very much wilder than it was at that time.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: We do have to manage that because it won't take long, and the birds will start planting acorns, and we have trees shooting up there.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So that area is managed.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Go on to the next slide. As you can see. This is how it looks in springtime. We don't have a particular wildlife management scheme

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: for the area inside the fence, however, even in the absence of having a particular wildlife management scheme. You can see just by leaving it to go wild and just cutting the grass inside. Twice a year you end up with this sort of a landscape. It's very pleasing to go there in the springtime. In the summertime it is literally buzzing with activity.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: And that's not just the inverters getting the electricity, that is, all of the birds, bees, and the rest of it flying around. So we're very pleased in that sense.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: I can actually do quite a long talk on biodiversity and the conflict perceived conflict between solar farms and food security, and so on. But that'll be maybe subject for another talk sometime in the future.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Okay.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: so about projects that we do at white community energy. Just go through a short list of them. Now one of them is lending out thermal cameras, which has been quite successful. We have half a dozen thermal cameras that we that can attach into people's smartphones, and they can contact us, and we post them out to them. And people collect the cameras, and they go and have a good look around inside their houses and to look out for obvious faults.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: We've also just given half a dozen cameras with some Grant money that we needed to reallocate. We've just bought and given half a dozen cameras to the local library service, having thermal cameras go out of local libraries is quite a common project happens all over the place, up and down the country, but there's nothing of the sort on the island, so we've done that

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: mixed response with the thermal cameras in all honesty, it does really help to have somebody with some experience behind the camera so that they can interpret a little bit better what they're seeing

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: so I mean, it seems to be a bit of a 50 50 feedback. Some people say it's fantastic. I found some things, and now I know, you know where where I need to act.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: And the other 50% of people who borrow the camera seem to be a little bit nonplussed about it. So

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: it's a good project. It's a low hanging fruit project. You could say the thermal cameras. They come down in price all the time, but really it would be much, much more enhanced to have somebody operating the camera as well.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Just very quickly. Talk about 2 photos there. There's my dog

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: always like to squeeze a picture of my dog into any presentation I do, and the more prescient photo on the left hand side you can see the what the thermal camera, does it? Highlights the contrast between warm and cold, and, as you can see there, the blue, very, very, very clearly is the cold parts of that room.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Okay.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: there you go. Picture of me. That's me posing outside my house, getting a bit of a free stock photography done from my 12 year old. It's actually disappointing. It's so blurred. I've got the original somewhere which isn't blurred, but also white community energy. We do offer retrofit advice to people. I've been out to visit a couple just this morning, actually on the other side.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: you know Island, who have a 19 seventies bungalow very similar to mine.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and they were looking to have some advice. It's actually quite a good property they have, and they're quite nice and warm and snug inside.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: but they do have money. They are environmentally minded. They do want to do new things with their property, and it's very good to get somebody in like myself who can steer them at an early stage.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Quite typically, people don't want to sound disrespectful. But you know, quite typically people can have the wrong ideas about what they should be doing on their houses. The best example of that is, that people very, very immediately assume that they should put solar panels on their houses, and solar is a great thing. I would always advocate for that, but it doesn't keep you warm.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and it doesn't do anything for your bills in the winter so, and it, and in terms of carbon reduction. It's not particularly. It's not not fantastic in comparison with other measures either.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So what I like to do is try to steer people away from that and typically advise people to sort out the low hanging fruit. And that's cavity wall insulation loft, insulation drafts, getting some good extractors in place, and then try and steer people towards heat pumps which are unquestionably the heating of the future.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So and yeah, so our service white communities energy. We charge a very modest amount for our retrofit assessments. There's a lot of much more. I mean, there's a lot of much more professional companies around these days, and they are charging a great deal of money for their retrofit assessments.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: I can tell you that typically you can walk into a house, and very often within 20 min or 30 min you have a pretty good size and shape of the property, and for, and to be able to point people in a sensible direction.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: You do not need a 500 pound report made up of 20 pages full of charts and graphs which are basically cut and paste from other products. So retrofit advice.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: A scheme which we've got going on at the moment is green open homes, and that is where people who have made a number of eco improvements to their own homes

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: open them up for the general public to come round and have a look.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So I advertise within within my networks.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: And I managed to corral 7 people, willing volunteers and then accumulate them on the green Open Homes website. There is a website dedicated to green open homes. It's run by the center for sustainable energy.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So I've corralled. The ones are there and then press releases. And so on, and again more networking to advertise the show, and people come in. The visits are typically 45 min. They come in. They take a look, and we have a passive house. We've got some new builds. We've got retrofitted houses, timber frame, concrete block. There's a whole variety of different homes.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: featuring solar heat pumps both air to water and air, to air, heat, pumps, mechanical heat, recovery, ventilation systems. So really, I mean, if if you are at the beginning of your journey yourself. By the time you go around these these 7 homes you'll be in a really really good position to

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: to advise others on. Sorry in a very good position to understand how you should proceed with your own property.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: It's a easy project to run, really. You just. You know, you get a couple of press releases, you, start a start, a spreadsheet

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and inquiries come in and you match up the people, and then over the course of a couple of weekends, you know. People go around. They make the visits, and that's that everybody who took part in the 1st edition of the show wanted to take part in the second edition of the show. I call it a show of the event

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: which I think demonstrates that is really an enjoyable experience for everybody. It's enjoyable for the hosts and enjoyable for the visitors. No, I have to say, when you do. 6 visits back to back on a Saturday at the end of it. You're really, you know, really desperately in need of a good cup of tea and a sit down. There's only so many things you can say which original about heat pumps, you know.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: One of our biggest public facing events of the year is what we call the going electric show.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: That's an event. It brings together lots of electric car dealers on the island, electric bike dealers.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: We even had electric boats along last time as well, solar panel installers, retrofit installers. Who else have come along? Heat, pump installers, and so on, and all the local charities who are working in that space in energy, advice, and, you know, related fuel poverty, and related fields.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So we've had 3 of these shows now to each show we've had between 1,000 201,500 people come along the last year, unfortunately, wasn't so busy. I think that's because we just accidentally held it on the hottest day of the year, and people didn't necessarily want to be traipsing around a concrete apron when it was, you know, 2829 Celsius, and that's about as hot as it ever gets here on the Isle of Wight.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: But according to all of the exhibitors, and it's the exhibitors who are really the important people. They had a great show. Anyway, it's not about quantity of people. It's about quality of people. So having the people come along, and you know, and converting those fewer people into a few sales, is always a good thing.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: so, as well as the show itself. We also run a full day of seminars with 3 topics, 3 headline topics.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: electric transport, low carbon homes, and the big picture. The big picture enables us to and any into each of those topic headings. We have 3 speakers who stand before the crowd, for you know, 15 or 20 min.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Having the big picture enables us to like bring in a much sort of broader, miscellaneous environmental subjects in into that. And the talks are always, very, very, very well received.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: To give you an idea of the scale of the event. I'll just include the picture from the back of the the pamphlet we gave out. So the pink sections are the automotives. So that's motorbikes and cars.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: The greens down here were all different charity stalls, all in some way related to low carbon activity.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Solar panels and heat pumps for these chaps here in the, in the yellow and blue bit of catering and purple miscellaneous. And here's a seminar room down at the bottom. So a really, really.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: quite a lot of work to put on, I mean, total cost to put this on is in the region of 12,000 pounds.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: I mean the things just add up. We found a lot of efficiencies so hopefully, the next event, we're going to be able to run it, for I'm pretty confident we'll run it for less than 10,000 pounds. But and the combined exhibitor fees

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: were in the region of 7,000 pounds, so the difference there has always been made up by sponsorship.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: We've been very lucky to have our main sponsor rich, clean energy, who are in the process of building a Solar Farm on the Isle of Wights, and they have a few renewable energy projects around the country. And another couple of smaller sponsors.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Yeah, a great event. It sort of cemented itself into the landscape of events on the island this next one upcoming. We'll have it again down by the river, and it'll be at the end of August so hopefully, not the hottest day of the year, I mean, actually, for this event. You kind of want a bit of drizzle. So nobody's got anything else to do on a Sunday, except, you know. Look around cars.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Okay.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: other projects. Yeah. Last, but not least. We've also been very key funders of an electric cargo bike business that has taken roots on the island.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: When it started off they had a couple of volunteer riders. Now I think they have

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: 5 or 6 paid staff with the equivalent of 3 full time staff. So they're zipping around all over the place. They've just done their annual reports. I can't sorry I have to apologize. I can't remember the exact details inside there, but they're saving many, many tons of emissions per year, and they offer a really fantastic bespoke customer service as well. They've actually just added a secondhand electric van to their operation.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Which is hopefully, gonna really sort of like, turn up the turn up the dial on the the level of activity.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: The picture you can see there on the right hand side. That looks like a lot of electrical gear, doesn't it? Because one of the other things that white community energy does is commission studies. We've commissioned 2 studies into the network capacity constraints that we've had on the Isle of Wight.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and the net effect of those have been some quite significant policy. Changes

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: which have come down from Ssen, who are our local dno, our local local provider.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So it's quite sort of obscure work, and it's well above my pay grade. It's very, very technical work, but it's taken care of by professionals and by some of the directors who have a great deal of experience in networks. But yeah, I mean some of this stuff. The electricity companies themselves aren't willing to pay for it. The Council's unable to pay for it. So it requires somebody in the 3rd sector to do some of this work, to discover where the constraints are in the system and how they can be overcome.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: And yeah, and actually, I say about the net effect of it. The net effect of it is that we are now able to have medium sized solar installations on the island, which were previously blocked for a long time.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So, as I mentioned before, we have a 4 megawatt ground Mount Solar System. That's been in place since 2,015 in community ownership since 2,016,

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and I also mentioned on that last slide I mean, up until very recently we were unable to do any medium sized solar installations on the island. So what that means is, if you had a domestic size, something just up on top of your roof. The local operator was obliged to connect you, and if you were doing a megawatt scale

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: installation, you know

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: thousands of panels out in a field. Then those developers were in a position to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for the network reinforcements

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: now, and the problem was that everything in the middle of that. The smaller stuff, you know, 50 kilowatt or 200 kilowatt, the kind of thing you'd see on a school. We weren't able to do any of those, any of those projects. But thanks to partly, and thanks to the work that we've done with our capacity studies

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: partly, I think, with some pressure which actually helpfully came from from government. Those restrictions have now been have now been softened, so we at White community energy, are now on the lookout for new solar projects.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So what are the useful ingredients for a new solar project? Something to go on to your school or or so on?

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Well, you definitely want a solid roof with with at least 25 years left left in it, and there's no use putting a solar array up on a roof. And then, 10 years later, realizing all has to come down

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: because you've developed some leaks and that there's there's some issues with it.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: A good orientation to self is very, very, very useful. However, having said that if you have a pitch roof and it faces perfectly, you know one side east, one side West, then actually, your capacity, your overall generation, could still be as much as 90% of the theoretical

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: ideal self generation. So good orientation to self is not actually vital, but very useful.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: The next one is kind of tricky, high, on-site consumption. Now, the reason that high on-site consumption is important is that using electricity on site means that the host site can avoid buying electricity.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and when they avoid buying electricity they're always going to be saving quite a significant amount. However, if they are having to export their electricity, then those units can only be exported at a much lower rate, and of course that affects the overall

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: the overall. revenue that that's generated from there. I'll touch a little bit more on that in a minute.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Also very useful is to have a good owner occupier the last thing you want to do. Well, not the last thing you want to do, but it gets increasingly difficult if the tenure is complicated, and you have issues with landlords and so on, particularly, I mean, people often look at industrial estates and shopping centres and the like, and say, well, why didn't we put solar panels over all of those roofs?

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: And then you do a little bit of research, and you find out that the industrial estate is mostly owned by a Hong Kong property conglomerate, I mean, who are you going to phone up in Hong Kong to try and you know? Get them get your panels onto their roofs. I mean, just just forget it. Really.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So, owner occupy by far and away that the best situation is, if you have a local business, and then you can talk directly to the people. You can explain the benefits. And yeah, and you can do the deal

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: a long term arrangement. So to make the finances work here, you're really looking at 20 years years plus and sorry. I mean, I should have included a slide before this, and I'll know for next time what is the actual deal with a community energy solar project on somebody else's rooftop. I mean, the deal is, the our organization would buy a complete array for that host roof.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and then that host roof would benefit from cheaper electricity and the green kudos of having that immediate solar

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and for us to buy that roof. It involves us going out to our membership or out to the wider public looking for investors and those investors. Obviously, they want to return, which is which is correct and fair enough.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: And typically the return to investors is in the region of 6%, and then a return of their shares progressively over the years.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: If you have a look, if you have a look, simply Google ethical investments, you'll very soon get to

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: website called Fx, and they always have different offers which are ongoing around the country. There's some very well established organizations who are doing this, and they can, they can no no doubt they would find an extra couple of bullet points to add on to my add on to my presentation.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: There you go. So I only just made this this slide deck sort of in a hurry yesterday. So I did put something in there about. Yes, so the the investment model, we aim to pay the investors 6% a year and return 5% of their capital per year

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and the benefit to the host. They get green energy, they get returned to the local investors. Assuming the people in the locality are the people that invest in the project, and they will be the ones that get their 6% per year, which is obviously a good thing.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: And they and a significant amount of funds will get returned into a community benefit fund, which I'll return to in a minute

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and also for the host roof. They have a hedge against future price shocks. So, for example, if we set up a project and we say we will pay you 20 p.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: For the next 20 years for every unit of electricity you buy from our solar panels. Then, if the price, if the general market electricity prices rise to 30, 40, 50 p. Then they're still paying, you know, 20 P. Plus Rpi. We do have an inflation increase.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: They would still be paying 20 P. For everything that comes off their own roof, which is obviously good for businesses.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: how do you work out? I'm just going to go now for another few minutes into the spreadsheet. So how? How you actually work out. If a solar project is viable, don't worry. This only go through this in a few minutes. So I mean, hopefully, a few people on the call will find it quite interesting.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So the system size here 50 kilowatts to give you an idea. That's something around about a tennis court size array that would generate 50,000 units per year. The Ppa. That would be the price that we would sell the electric oops. That would be the price that we sell the electricity to the host, for

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: that's the assumed annual rise. So every year we we have to increase our price. So we assume it's going to be 2.5%, although, as you know, inflation's been lot rockier than that in recent times.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: And as you see, there's a huge difference. This is that how much we will be able to export the electricity, for we're assuming that we can only get 4 p. For every unit we export so as you can see, that's why we really want to sell as many units as possible to the to the host site itself.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and a 90% on site usage. And

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: so the 1st year, because we've gone in, we've had to build this thing, and the finance hasn't worked out yet. All the investment from the members hasn't come through, and we have to have a bridging loan of one year. That factors in 20 years is the is the repayment. There's an assumption that it's going to cost in the region of 40,000 pounds to do that tennis court size.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Projects.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: The panels themselves will last on and on, and on and on and on. We have no sort of concerns about the panels breaking down, really. But what will break down is the inverter, which is, you know, the big electrical box which goes in the room in the building underneath. We can assume that around about 12 years in in that will break down, because sadly, these things do. So we have to. Cap. We have to consider that cost.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: And yeah.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: the end result of all that is, you put all that data into your spreadsheet, and as if by magic, you get these numbers which come out at the end. So we have, as mentioned 40,000 pounds worth of solar projects. Our costs will be in the region of 10% of that our development costs. Obviously, it costs us money to do the development. So therefore, we actually need to borrow 44,000 pounds.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: as you can see here the interest that's what we're going to pay back to our investors is 2,200 pounds per year.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: the repayment of the bonds, because we want to pay them 5% of their original investment back every year is 2,200.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: The top line I should have done 1st is our annual expenses. Okay?

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: And oh, I was definitely missing another line from this one as well. So

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: the overall generation per year from that 40,000 pounds is, we estimate we can make a little over 10,000 pounds per year from that.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Okay.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: so from that 10,000 pounds, we have 1,600 pounds in cost. We have here 4,400 in return to investors.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Leaving us with 4,000 pounds at the end.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and that 4,000 pounds will then be divided into our community benefit fund.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: which we would hope, which we would aim to have 80%. So we're in the region of 3.5,000 pounds per year of community benefits.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: And then that would go on to do other solar schemes to potentially run an enhanced retrofit scheme to do more of the aforementioned projects.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: miscellaneous accountancy, fees and taxes. We can guess around about 10% each. So I, yeah, I will know in future. I need an extra, at least one minimum of one additional slide there to show that it's 10,000 pounds a year and around about 3.5,000 pounds that will eventually go directly into the community benefit fund, and everybody's paid off. After 20 years all the investors would have had their money back.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: But after that 20 years, of course, the solar panels are still functioning perfectly well. I mean, you are available even as a private individual. Now you're able to buy solar panels that have a 40 year performance guarantee on them. So once that 20 years has expired, then there's still a tremendous amount of additional value that can still be garnered, generated from the from the Solar project into the community.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: There's also an asset lock on these projects, which means that we would not be able to sell them for profits, so the investors can be, can be secure in in the knowledge of that. But for the host roofs themselves they will have break clauses, and they will be able to buy their way out if they chose to do so, because we have to make it quite a favorable deal for for the host. It can be difficult to persuade them.

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Joolz Thompson: To participate in that it that it's a good thing for them, even in spite of the aforementioned

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Benefits. It still requires quite a bit of arm twisting.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Okay, everyone. So that is my presentation.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: After I'll stop the share.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Stephen. That was brilliant. Thank you very much indeed, very much appreciated. It's actually rather more than I thought we were going to get. So that's great for the newcomers coming in, and not been to these sessions before. We now run into the Q. And a session

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: whereby we bombard Steven, with all the questions that his presentation has erased. So if you're familiar with using the reaction tools within zoom you can raise your hand and say I would like to be

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: listened to, please, and just so that you are all not worried about priority. The system will

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: place people in the order in which they put their hands up. So those who will be 1st will be first.st And so it goes.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: I have a couple of questions just to start the ball rolling before we get on to everybody else. So thank you very much, Stephen. One question right at the start. You said something like in a couple of years time you expected to have 150 k. Available for community benefit.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: It's not the number that I see from your spreadsheet. So where did that one come from?

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Okay, so the 150,000 pounds is what we would expect as a surplus revenue which will come from our 4 megawatt system. Sorry I I should, I should explain.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Yes, of course. Yes.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: The the spreadsheet that I ran through at the end was really just a demonstration. Just to give an example of the kind of factors which are which are which you need to think about. And the data which you need to get to figure out the business case for doing new community solar projects.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Then you did say that you hadn't had the sort of success that you were expecting, but I would have thought that anything that generates 150,000 pounds for the community would be.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: It classifies, as quite a substantial success.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Well, yes, but it should have come on stream a couple of years ago, and unfortunately for a whole variety of reasons which

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: are above my pay grade. This is director stuff which are above my pay grade. Unfortunately, that hasn't worked out. I mean, you mean the benefit of white community energy and actually several other megawatt scale community energy organizations not having the immediate success that they thought they would have

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: is that it's grown a lot of knowledge within the community energy space. So now, if you go into that space, if you go to community energy, England, which is a large, vibrant organization.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: You know that they have

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: countless countless amounts of case studies and examples. So I mean, if you're an early sort of adapter, an early adopter, you know there's always a possibility that things aren't going to go quite the way that you thought so. I would like to think that, you know, certainly in terms of megawatt scale projects in the future community owned ones would would work out better.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: The smaller projects I was talking about. You know, schools, small factories, small industrial units owned by the community. That's actually a much simpler proposition.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: It's when you start getting into megawatt scale. I mean, the main problem has been because we had to take on, you know, 3.5 million pounds worth of debt to buy the original Solar Farm and

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Then then that was. That was a rocky road, sadly. But we but we're inching towards that that position where we will have have that money, and I hopefully, I'll still be in in this post by then, because that that'll be an exciting time.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Okay, well, I have a whole bunch more questions. But let's pass on to other people just in case they ask them first.st So, Tristan, would you like to have a go? Please.

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tristram cary winchfield Parish Online: Yes, Stephen, thank you very much.

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tristram cary winchfield Parish Online: I noticed you're selling date. You sell your electricity to the grid at 4 pence.

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tristram cary winchfield Parish Online: Is there not a way that you can have a local energy trading scheme, so that people on the island could buy the electricity from you at maybe 15 pence, you know, below the standard rate, and if they have batteries they could top them up, and you'd get a bit more trading locally.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So I would have to say possibly would would be the answer to that.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: And

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: I mean, I'm aware that there are local energy trading clubs, and so on. But I mean for us, as a small organization that would involve an entire new tranche of administration. We do not have any. I mean talking about our Megawatt farm, the 4 Megawatt farm. We don't have any way to sell that directly to people that's all sold at bulk actually goes to Edf at the moment that they buy the whole office straight away.

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tristram cary winchfield Parish Online: Okay.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: with the smaller installations. You know this, this, for example, 50 kilowatt installation. There's just not enough generation there to justify that level of of additional administration. With the megawatt scale there could be. But it's not something that we currently do.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: But I am aware that other renewable energy generators do that, I mean, most notably ripple. I mean, they're the big one.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: But obviously, you know, they'll have dozens of full-time staff who are managing these things where I'm the only staff member. And I only work on a part-time basis. That that's the scale of white community. Yeah.

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tristram cary winchfield Parish Online: Okay. Thank you very much.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Just to bring your attention. Stephen, there's a couple of questions in the chat that people would like to go offline with you, particularly Jules.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: so maybe you can set up a conversation with him. He's clearly wants to go ahead.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Yeah. And you're you're you're obviously very welcome to share my contact details. I'm I'm very happy to discuss any any of these topics.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: But everything we're discussing today goes public on a Wiki basis. So it will go, John, over in the Forest of Dean.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: and you're on mute, John.

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John Payne: Fine. Yep, got it got it. Couldn't get my menu. I suppose that I'm more apocalyptic about the future, really, particularly with energy.

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John Payne: We've had dreadful problems in in this area. We've had the.

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John Payne: We've just got our main road now, and Monmouth to Chipster Road is closed because of the increased rainfall and hillside instability. And we've also got the main, a 40, which is the main route into Wales from England, really main economic link. And that's only operating 2 of its 4 carriageways. And it's

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John Payne: been like almost like that for about a year. Now, in the light of extreme weather. Uncertain political and global politics.

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John Payne: How do we move to much more resilient local grids where we start to really plan the energy resources that are in the region we live in to provide power for us, the communities. And

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John Payne: do you have any views on that.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: I mean I I don't have the expertise to really speak to it in a in a in a precise way. I mean, it's

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: I would always. The 1st stop in all of these matters, of course, is energy efficiency, of course. And you know, I mean getting electrifying our homes, and and so on, is always going to be the 1st stop.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: generally speaking, I mean, resilience is actually found through interconnections. Isn't it so? Whilst, you know, whilst the sun isn't shining here, it might be up the road, and whilst the wind's not blowing there, it might be blowing elsewhere, I mean. Something that's very often said to me on the Isle of Wight is, wouldn't it be great if we were energy independent over here?

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: And we'll actually know it wouldn't be. What would be great is if we have like a really really high functioning grid, so that we can, we can share these resources on on a ad hoc basis, when when we need them, when it's windy there and when it's calm there, and so on.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: with regards to the sort of like wider questions about about networks

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and the precise sort of pros and cons of how granular your your local community should be. I'm not really qualified to speak to that. I'm afraid.

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John Payne: Thanks. Sam, yeah.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Are you done, John?

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John Payne: Well, I suppose I'd only say that that in Wales I live 20 yards inside Wales we have. The government has funded 40 resilience hubs, which are basically

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John Payne: village halls that have batteries and can provide resources for quite isolated communities. And

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John Payne: that seems to be a very good idea, you know.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Doesn't that go back to Tristram's suggestion of having lots of battery packs that you can charge when there is electricity and then rely on when there isn't.

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John Payne: Yes.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Okay.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Yes, but always, always. To try and use using less is is always the the 1st stop. I mean, if you ever do, the back of the back of the envelope calculation on the sort of

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: quantity of batteries that yeah, you need to get through a long, long period of a of a

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: our outage. It's

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: becomes very eye watering quite quickly. I mean, I was speaking from my personal experience. I have a small battery in this house, and you know, and we get through it very quickly. Unfortunately, so always go bigger. If you're getting a a domestic battery.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: And then, if you can start throwing in your Evs and all the others, you know there are sort of 50 Evs in a village or something. Then this substantial battery power there for an emergency use.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: I mean, of course, even an old banger of an Ev like this, my 2016 Nissan leaf which is out there, which is really the equivalent of an old banger, I mean, that has around about 18 kilowatt hours left in in the battery pack there, which is which, if only I could take it out and stick it on the wall inside the house. It'd be worth a lot more money than the car is on the driveway as much as fond of it as I am.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Stephen, do you get the feeling that the the infrastructure that we're discussing here the ability to plug your Ev in so that it does provide electricity store to your own house, for instance, is that on its way.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Yeah, I mean frustratingly. Yes, it's on its way. But, boy, it's been on its way for a long time.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: It seemed to be stuck in a cycle of studies and tests, you know, and tests modeling. I mean, I know, going back. This is this has always been talked about and going back a number of years. There was a couple of organizations who were installing bi-directional charges into people's homes to test the theory, test the theory. And it just seems like such an obvious seems like the low hanging fruit of this entire realm.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: But it's it's proving a lot more difficult than people anticipated. I mean, you can go out and buy. Buy yourself a bi-directional charger now, and I think they're in the region of 3 or 4,000 pounds.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: which are fantastic, you know. I mean some people if they have the money. I know people really enjoy being early innovators, and that's great. But there's no mass market appeal there, because it's incredibly difficult to make that money back. I mean, the way you would make that money back, of course, is by charging cheap at night, and then running your house through the daytime.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: But you know, if you've had to expend 3, 4, 5,000 pounds for this box next to your car. It's going to take a while to do that. And also, of course, there's a nervousness about, you know, about using your car battery in that fashion. Up, down, up, down, up, down. There is nervousness about how many times you can cycle the car battery. But as time goes on it becomes increasingly evident that car batteries are

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: remarkably robust, but we still all of us, you know, myself included, even though I'm a little bit of a mini expert in this stuff.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: you know. You still can't help but have a bit of nervousness about batteries. That's how we've been conditioned, isn't it? Because we all grew up throwing batteries away after, you know, 2 weeks in the torch.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Yep.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: let me just check if anyone else has questions because I have a bunch. But I don't want to stay on other people's toes.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: No one's showing shines of frantic hand waving or anything. So let me press on. One of your statements. Stephen, was that you wanted the local electricity that you're generating to be used by the host, in other words, exporting. It was a bad idea.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: but my question would be, how far around the Solar Farm counts as local hosts, I mean, can you bring in a local village and supply them.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Okay.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So what I was referring to specifically then was with the host, it's it's it's where that meter is. So where is it you have to print into that that specific electricity meter.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Okay, is is that is that clear.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: No, no, she didn't, on my part.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: No. Okay? So so yeah, so the the host site is is the site that has the electricity meter where you are feeding in the the imports and the exports, and where that host sites, you know, are are taking taking their energy from the grid.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Okay, so as soon as you start to as soon as you export off of that site. It goes into the national grid. And and that's that.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: having said that there are some new innovative schemes around some local energy groups that are that have found a way to use the local substation as

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: a, for want of a better word, an additional substation, an additional hub for renewable energy in that. In the directly connected to that. I mean, that's a new innovative thing that's coming along. And it's something that I can, you know, that's worth looking more into.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So there are. There are increasing innovations in this.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Yeah, because I could see sort of building on Tristram thoughts that the more that you're

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: generated electricity is being used locally as an income source, and as a reduction in costs to the local community, then that's obviously advantageous. And I know that the links to the grid are the the Major holdup. So if you hear of people building their farms, then they can't get connected for 10 or 15 years

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: to the grid. And therefore, if there's a way around that by routing your electricity to your local consumers

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: without interfering with the grid. I mean, you don't start building more power lines, but I would have thought there was a clever way of sharing the same distribution lines.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: I'm sure there is. And, as mentioned, it's only within the last week or so I've sort of stumbled across this this idea of using a local substation. But of course you have to remember that every additional layer of complexity that you add onto this reduces from the revenue which you have available. I mean the typical objective of a community and not

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: by no means exclusive. But the typical objective of community energy organization is to create funds, create revenue that it can put into its community benefit fund. To then go on to deliver other projects, or to give to a local fuel, I mean, in the case of white community energy, we're hoping to give quite a lot of money to a local fuel. Poverty.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Charity, you know the Footprint trust. I'm sure you're aware of Graham and then

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: but so the another objective an alternative objective could be to provide into your local community directly in in that other sense.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: And one more question before I pass on to to Dave.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: The, do you know what it costs the big suppliers to generate a kilowatt hour of electricity, and you're saying you can get 4 P. But surely their cost of generation is higher than that.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: So why aren't they paying you more than that.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: But so so just for your information. So I mean, currently, there are Ppas, you know, there are power purchase agreements available for the likes of us that would give around about 8 p.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: But we, the decision is made that when you do the long term modeling, you go in significantly lower than that, because the last thing you want to do is set up a set up a model for 20 years, and then 3, 4 years into it, you suddenly discover you can only sell your electricity for half the amount. So that's why that's why we tend to put much much lower on the spreadsheet, I mean, in actual fact, we are getting 8 to be at the moment, and it's

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: about 9 PI think we're getting from the from the Solar Farm from the Megawatt scale.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and from that Solar Farm as well. I mean lucky us that was built at the time of when fits payments existed. The feed in tariffs. So we have a significant income from the feed in tariff. So even if our Ppa went to 0, we would still that would end all the fun. Stuff!

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: But you know we would still have an income from fit, but fit is long gone. Sadly.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Okay, thank you. And out of interest. Do you happen to know what the rough cost is of producing electricity? By the main providers.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: I mean, forget. Hinkley Point would have had some big wind farm somewhere.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Yeah. Well, they they generally price themselves in megawatts, don't they? Rather than kilowatts? But I think it's around about 80 80 pounds. I mean if you look at the recent auctions, maybe someone else on the call knows better than me. If you look at the recent auctions for wind power. I think they were hovering it, coming in around about 80 pounds a megawatt, so which translates to 8 PA unit.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and then everything everything upwards from that is, transmission costs and distribution costs and profits.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Yep, and they need to invest for the future. Thank you very much, Dave. Over to you, please.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: A fool man.

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Dave Faulkner Hereford: Yeah, thanks, Stephen. Couple of questions on the

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Dave Faulkner Hereford: sort of model of putting rooftop solar in or something is, how do you fund the development cost.

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Dave Faulkner Hereford: And do you make a provision for replacing the inverter?

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Dave Faulkner Hereford: Didn't see any of that in your spreadsheet. And so you're suddenly gonna get hit with a

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Dave Faulkner Hereford: 12,000 pounds, or whatever it is, cost for an inverter

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Dave Faulkner Hereford: not not 12,000 whatever. It was, a few 1,000 pounds.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Yeah, no, that there was an inverter on there. We we do depreciate the inverter over 12 years. So we put away meaning that model I show that I had up there. There was, I think, 187 pounds a year is put into the cost for for.

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Dave Faulkner Hereford: Thank you, too.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: I'm sorry. The 1st question was.

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Dave Faulkner Hereford: Idfunded development costs.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: So the development costs would be assumed to be principally. It's my time. Well, no, no, it's not actually, principally my time. I mean the biggest development cost is getting a structural survey done to get the structural engineer in to check the roof.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: I mean, that can be between one and a half and 2.5,000 pounds.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: and that is, you know, it comes out of our existing funds, and then we have to add that onto the cost. So in that example I gave, we think we can put that solar array up for around about 40,000 pounds, but the share rates would be for 44,000 pounds, and then that would cover that cost.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: In addition to that, our ongoing costs, we putting in 500 pounds a year for for our time, and another 500 pounds a year for

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: for monitoring and metering and accountancy

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: in total with with the inverter and our time, and and so on. You know, for that example, which is making 10,000 pounds a year. There was 1,600 pounds a year just in costs.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: which is, which is low. I mean other other organizations. Run it, run it higher than that.

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Dave Faulkner Hereford: Great. Thank you. Yeah.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Well, it looks like we run out of questions, Steven. So let me just say thank you very much again for what I actually found fascinating. So thank you very much for those of you who are looking to next week. We've got rather a change of pace, David Morgan Jones, from Ushot, in Hampshire, is going to start the 1st of what I hope will be several workshops on how you build a roadmap towards net 0,

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: and you're doing this at the parish level. So basically, a lot of people are asking us, so where do we go from? Having declared a climate emergency? Well, we're going to be running a series of workshops on building the roadmap that you then can choose to follow. If you can get the volunteers to work with you, so that will be starting next week.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: and I hope that it's going to be fascinating, and look forward to seeing as many of you as possible. Henry has raised his hand.

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Henry Lovegrove Dorset CE: Yeah, sorry. There's a question which stephen hasn't answered. Where do you get your Ap Ppa price? From which firm do you get it from? Please.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: The Ppa. Price for our exports.

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Henry Lovegrove Dorset CE: Yeah.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Most likely from unity. Who are

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: unity, who are a branch of octopus, that very successful, vibrant, interesting company.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Yeah, that's correct, you nitty, yeah, it. It's spelled how it sounds. You, nitty.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: you'll you'll soon find them. They're another great organization, another great organization which are branching out from octopus.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: We have actually had a banter session from them.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Okay, be wonderful.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Let's go. So.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Yeah, yeah, that they they are. They're not the only people, but the only ones that spring to mind. There's

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: 3 who operate in that space. I believe, okay.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: But octopus is such an extraordinary company.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Yeah, anybody else, please, or shall we all say Thank you very much. It's lunchtime.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Look forward to you seeing us again. And Stephen, thank you. Take care.

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stephen Cockett - Wight Community Energy: Okay, yeah, I mean, mean, really, I mean, I'm any queries, be it thermal cameras how to run an electric car show how to how to start a little retrofit advice. Service any of those things. Very happy to talk it through. Okay.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - GreatCollaboration: Thank you. Take care, everybody. Bye, bye.

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Sue Burton Batttle TC East Sussex: Bye.

***

#### Presentation Markdown:

## Insights into Wight Community Energy

**Presentation by Stephen Cockett – General Manager**

### What is Community Energy?

Community energy refers to community-led projects involving:

* Renewable energy generation
* Energy demand reduction
* Energy supply initiatives

Projects may be:

* Fully owned and controlled by communities, or
* Delivered through partnerships with commercial or public-sector organisations.

***

### Wight Community Energy at a Glance

* Founded: **2015**
* Operations commenced: **2016**
* Solar generation capacity: **4 MW**
* Members: **246**
* Equity raised: **£1.1 million**

***

## Current Projects

### Homestead Farm Solar Site

* 4 MW solar farm
* Located near **Shalfleet, Isle of Wight**
* Includes on-site biodiversity initiatives.

***

### Thermal Camera Scheme

Thermal cameras available for loan:

* With or without an interpreter
* Available through local libraries

Participating libraries: **6**

***

### Retrofit Advice

Helping local residents:

* Stay warm
* Reduce energy consumption
* Improve home efficiency.

***

### Green Open Homes

A project designed to:

* Connect householders considering retrofit improvements
* Showcase environmentally efficient homes
* Share practical experience from homeowners.

***

### Going Electric Show

The Isle of Wight's low-carbon event for:

* Trade exhibitors
* Members of the public

Focuses on electric vehicles and wider low-carbon technologies.

***

### Additional Activities

* E-cargo bike initiatives
* Network studies and related projects.

***

## New Solar Projects

### Overview

The presentation outlines:

* Solar project development
* Investment structures
* Benefits for host organisations
* Key ingredients for successful projects.

***

### Business and Investment Model

1. Identify suitable host sites.
2. Community energy organisation raises investment.
3. Organisation purchases and installs the solar system.
4. Investors receive:
   * Target return of **6%** per annum.
   * Repayment of approximately **5% of capital per year**.

***

### Benefits for Host Sites

#### Environmental

* Green electricity generation.

#### Economic

* Returns remain with local investors.
* Community benefit funding is created.
* Protection against future energy price shocks.

***

### Characteristics of Suitable Host Sites

Preferred sites have:

* A roof expected to last **25+ years**
* Good southerly orientation
* High on-site electricity consumption
* Owner-occupier status
* Potential for a long-term arrangement.

***

## Example Solar Project

The presentation includes a financial example based on:

* Capital expenditure of **£40,000**

(The detailed figures are shown graphically in the slides.)

***

### Use of Net Cash Flow Surplus

Annual surplus is allocated approximately as follows:

#### Community Benefit Fund

* **80%** of surplus
* Approximately **£3,300 per year initially**
* Expected to increase over time
* Around **£100,000 total community benefit over 20 years**

#### Administration

* **20%** allocated to:
  * Taxes
  * Accountancy costs
  * Miscellaneous administration expenses.

***

### Key Takeaway

Wight Community Energy demonstrates how locally owned renewable energy projects can:

* Generate clean electricity,
* Provide financial returns to local investors,
* Support host organisations,
* Build long-term community benefit funds,
* Increase local resilience against future energy price volatility.


---

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