Earlier this month, Community Energy England launched the Community Energy Fortnight, a two-week campaign dedicated to promoting community-led energy initiatives and empowering communities to take charge of their energy future through sustainable practices. This year’s theme was empowerment, highlighting the potential of community owned energy projects.  

BrumEnergy is a project delivered by seven community organisations in Birmingham, providing free, independent home energy advice from trained advisors. Over the past couple of years two of the BrumEnergy partners, Acocks Greener CIC and MECC Trust were involved in the £8M Birmingham City Council (LAD3) Green Homes grants. This initiative provided retrofit measures averaging £10K per home, benefitting 230 homes from Acocks Green and Tyseley benefitted from this work, and a further 416 homes in Balsall Heath, where the MECC Trust provide community engagement.  

The project included installing solar panels on 137 homes and a community social value component that provided solar PV for the roof of the Fox Hollies Forum community hall. This has enabled Acocks Greener to apply for and then win a Community Energy Fund grant (this month!) from the Midlands Net Zero Hub to carry out a feasibility study and pilot implementation of an Acocks Greener Energy Co-op in their local area of Acocks Green, Hay Mills and Tyseley. An energy co-op is a non-governmental initiative led by communities and citizens to promote the local production and consumption of renewable energy. Together with Energy Local CIC www.energylocal.co.uk who are experts in energy co-ops, they plan to establish the energy co-op with three types of members: 

1. Organisations with large roof-top solar PV arrays (such as Fox Hollies Forum) 
2. Producers/consumer households (‘prosumers’) who generate electricity with solar PV and consumer some of it for their own use. 
3. Households in energy poverty who can purchase electricity within the co-op at a lower cost that from the grid. 

Ultimately the ambition is for an energy co-op with 25MW of installed solar power, about half the estimated potential generation for the area covered by the local substation. This target is around 1000 times greater than the 2.5KW installed on Fox Hollies Forum and could provide enough power for at least half of the population covered by the substation which equates to approximately 15,500 households (as per 2021 census data from ONS). This would be a major replacement of Grid electricity by renewable solar power and would be an example which can be replicated for cities across UK and beyond. It gives a very different meaning to the slogan “power to the people”!  

If you would like to find out more about what community energy is, take a look at the  Community Energy England website.  

If you are interested in the work of BrumEnergy and would like to sign up for some free energy advice, then sign up here now!