BWCE have been grateful to receive Next Generation funding from Power to Change for our Flex Community project which concluded at the end of March 2022. We are now able to publish our Final Report for this project.
BWCE developed Flex Community to explore how we could expand our community energy model beyond the ownership of community renewables to working directly with domestic consumers to match local renewable generation with local electricity demand. This would help deliver our vision of supplying local, renewable energy direct to local people as an alternative to high carbon electricity from the grid. To do this, householders would need to be more flexible in how they used electricity and Flex Community aimed to facilitate this.
We also tested if there was a potential community business model based on securing revenue from the local grid by aggregating individual household flexibility. A Flex Community business model could strengthen the long-term viability of the community energy sector following the removal of the Feed In Tariff subsidy.
Our Flex Community Final Report sets out what we tried to achieve, the progress we made, the problems we encountered and what we learned along the way.
In addition to the report we have developed an online Flex Community Toolkit designed to share our learnings with other community energy organisations who might want to become involved with supporting a local flexibility service.
The experience of this project and the partnerships established were instrumental in BWCE securing three-year funding from the EU as part the ReDREAM research project.
