South East London Community Energy: The Story So Far....

We have worked with a number of community energy groups over the past year but South East London Community Energy (SELCE) have struck a chord with us: they are a group of passionate and knowledgeable people trying both to increase renewable energy generation and tackle fuel poverty in an area that we all know well. We asked Camilla Berens, one of the Directors of SELCE, to tell us what they’ve been up to…

In my area of South East London, the concept of ‘community financing’ has really taken off. We have a community-funded cinema, two community-run pubs and a colourful selection of community cafes. Just over a year ago, I and a group of fellow SE Londoners took the community financing concept one step further by setting up a community energy co-operative.

The aim of South East London Community Energy’s first project is to provide free solar panels for four local primary school - and we intend to raise the cash for the panels through a community share offer. You could call our particular type of share offer a ‘virtuous circle investment’ because everyone in SE London will benefit from it.

Collectively, the four schools will save around £350,000 on their electricity bills over the 20-year project while their solar panels will reduce our local carbon footprint by 94 tonnes annually. Our shareholders will be rewarded for their support by receiving annual interest of around 4% - and their initial investment will be returned to them after 20 years. As we are a not-for-profit organisation, any surplus from the share offer will be ploughed back into our ongoing work to provide support and advice to people affected by fuel poverty in the south-east of the capital.

The past year has been a rollercoaster ride of highs and lows. Collectively, we have put in over 4,000 volunteer hours to negotiate the myriad regulations and requirements needed to get us to our first share offer. We’ve also been very lucky.

We managed to pre-accredit the feed-in-tariff rate for our schools’ panels at the end of last year; so we have a reasonably good (and guaranteed) income to maintain the project over its lifetime. Sadly, we won’t be able to offer such generous returns for investors in some of our future projects now that the tariffs are to be reduced so dramatically.

Although I say it myself, I think the work SELCE is doing is genuinely pioneering. Our message is that, collectively, we can start building the future we want to see. Community finance has incredible potential. We are part of a growing wave of groups all over the country that is determined to make sure this potential is realised. This is real people power in action.

More information in SELCE’s share offer can be found at www.selce.org.uk/invest. The offer closes at midnight on November 11^th.