Andrew Moore is a director of Yealm Community Energy, a social enterprise in South Devon that invests in renewable electricity and uses the profits for projects with the local community, from helping people in fuel poverty, to funding wildflower meadows and bee conservation projects.
Yealm Community Energy owns a small part of the Newton Downs Solar Farm, which was built by a company called Good Energy in 2017 and sold to Community Owned Renewable Energy Partners (CORE), a company formed by Power to Change and Big Society Capital that has brought together six solar farms and is helping communities to buy them.
In 2020, Yealm Community Energy will hold a community share offer to raise about £12 million, which, combined with commercial loans, will allow them to fully buy Newton Downs Solar Farm and Creacombe solar farm, a new farm completed in December 2019.
What do you do?
I spend three or four days a week on Yealm Community Energy business, including for our community energy asset management company called Bright Renewables, which looks after the solar panels, transformers and other assets, making sure the equipment is working and the badgers haven’t got at it.
The asset management company is looking after nine or 10 solar farms. CORE set it up and we buy into it and benefit from it. Maura my wife is our bookkeeper. She looks after the funds.
When did you get involved?
Up in Oxford, I had been in environmental schemes, tree planting, maintenance of a playing field, building pavilions and tractor sheds, and creation of a village wood.
When I moved to Newton Ferrers I started going to the local environmental group, and soon after Yealm Community Energy was formed in 2015 I joined. There was a feeling, at that time, that the environmental group should be doing something on their own terms about renewables.
Creacombe solar farm nearing completion. 7.3 MW in total, half of it without subsidy. Should be online by Christmas. Shares in this plus Newton Downs to be offered Q2 2020. pic.twitter.com/txwGGiKqei
— Yealm Community Energy (@YealmEnergy) November 22, 2019
What is the point of the project?
When we have our second solar farm at Creacombe up and running they will produce over 20 million units of electricity a year, enough to service all of the people in the Yealm Valley. That’s 4,000 homes, plus saving 3,400 tonnes of CO2 every year.
We’re creating jobs locally and putting £20,000 a year into community projects. When the second farm is up and running that will be about £35,000 a year.
We’ve put a lot of thought into what we want to do with that money. The top of the list is fuel poverty, low carbon sources, and environmental projects. Apparently there are 500 people in fuel poverty in this area – which looks like an affluent area. It’s about installing new boilers and draft prevention that can transform the interior milieu for these folks. Second thing is low carbon sources. The community hall wanted to put solar panels on their roof, which they are using to reduce bills and earn money. Now they are on a roll. Then the environment.
Over in Yealmpton we funded a wildflower meadow. They persuaded the water board that they didn’t need a car park and got the schoolchildren involved to plant wildflowers, which is good for bees. Then we gave small amounts of money to brownies and rainbows do do projects looking after bees.
Wild flowers blooming at Stray Park, Yealmpton. Great local initiative. One of 14 projects funded in 2018 by our Community Fund. pic.twitter.com/UPZSd9HWAw
— Yealm Community Energy (@YealmEnergy) June 6, 2019
What’s been your proudest moment so far?
The wildflower meadow made me want to cry, it was so beautiful. On a sunny day, looking at it from afar, it is unbelievably beautiful. We did a community event about rowing called Rock Up and Row that was wonderful.
The most important thing is that in the first six months we have touched the lives of one person in 10 of the 10,000 people in parishes around the Yealm estuary.
What’s been the hardest?
Keeping it together as a business. However exciting some of the things are, this stands and falls as a successful business. The way the finances work is that we need to raise capital of of £12 million – £8 or £9 million from commercial loans and the rest though community share offers. The scale of it is enormous, for us, anyway.
What’s the next step?
We are thinking about where we will be after we have bought the two farms from CORE. While we can continue to give a number of small grants, we can also go down the route of creating programmes rather than projects; our energy poverty initiative is being expanded and working over a longer term. Then we need to work with other bodies, other parishes, other charities to see what can be done. There might be an environmental programme to look after trees, fish and birds, or to link the Yealm Estuary with a wildlife corridor to the Burrator Reservoir. There are a dozen authorities in the area and no one is looking at the area as a whole.
Which funders have been most helpful and why?
CORE, Power to Change, Big Society Capital, and the National Lottery. The great advantage with CORE is that you pay the money back. They get to do it again. It’s the business of taking public altruism and aligning it with business.
A lot of this is done through Environmental Finance. Sometimes to know there is someone you can have a conversation with is very valuable, and it’s a two way street, they are an honest broker between us and Power to Change.
How will Brexit affect what you do?
Not at all. The worst thing will be if we as a country crash and burn. You could argue that in a no deal Brexit the economic effects will be greater than anyone has imagined and I do worry that that is the case.
I don’t think anyone in government knows the true impact [of Brexit].
You could see the effects on government as catastrophic because a large decrease in GDP would change demand on the budget, and that could mean a change in the feed-in tariff.
What would you say to someone looking to do something similar?
I would like to give a half day seminar! You need a good group of people, with enthusiasm and skill and ability, and acknowledgement that it will work.
You put a large amount of energy into it. After that, what you need is community backing and that is hard to get – a lot of people are sceptics. It’s taken four years to get that backing here, but now community energy is part of the scenery; I’ll take that as a measure of success.
