This is our review of 2022. Click on the highlighted links in each month to go to the relevant news story. A big thank you to all our members and supporters for helping to make all these things happen.

January

We made a positive start to the year with the installation of a large-scale 170kW solar system on the roof of Writhlington School in Radstock and a smaller solar system on the Greens Shed at Lansdown Golf Club.

We announced that the BWCE Fund had awarded £31,706 in funding to 11 projects to help them reduce carbon emissions and tackle fuel poverty

February

Our Board finalised the policy on ethical site selection (before review by the membership) and carried out a supply chain review in order to ensure we were doing as much as possible to source solar panels from an ethical source.

March

We were one of five organisations shortlisted for the Community Energy category at the Green Energy Awards, hosted by Regen at the Assembly Rooms in Bath. We didn’t win but it was a good night!

April

We featured in an ITV News story about how people were becoming more interested in community energy as a way to respond to rising global energy prices.

May

We had great weather for our Supporters Meet-Up at Bath City Farm, our first significant face-to-face event since the pandemic started. It was a great opportunity to combine a visit to one of our BWCE Fund supported projects and engage in some useful networking.

June

We welcomed partners in the EU funded ReDREAM project to a three day meeting in Bath. Over 20 participants came from Spain, Croatia, Italy, Greece, Belgium, The Netherlands and France. We also published a report and a toolkit on the initial development of Flex Community, which was supported by Next Generation funding from Power to Change

BWCE Fund trustees had an interesting visit to one of our grant recipients Corston Community Orchard.

July

We installed our biggest rooftop system so far (262 kWp) on Beechen Cliff School in Bath.

Our latest Supporters Meet-Up was a ‘Solar Walk’ around Lyncombe in Bath and we also ran an online ‘Insight Session’ providing information on our rooftop solar installations.

August

We installed rooftop solar systems on Hayesfield School in Bath and Norton Hill School in Midsomer Norton.

Following a community consultation at the end of 2021 we made further progress on developing a 2.1MW solar array at Fairy Hill in Compton Dando, in partnership with Zero Carbon Compton. In August we received some helpful feedback from Bath & North East Somerset Council planning department in response to our Environmental Impact Assessment screening application.

September

We installed a rooftop solar system on Somervale School in Midsomer Norton, the last of four school rooftop solar systems installed over the summer holidays.

We issued a new share offer document with an increased target interest rate of 5% (subject to performance) with the aim of raising £1 million by April to fund more rooftops solar installations on schools and other buildings.

October

Over the school half-term we installed a rooftop solar system at Three Ways School in Bath.

Our Flex Community (part of the EU funded ReDREAM project) launched a Community Solar trial for households near to our ground mounted solar array at Stowey Farm and a Peer-to-Peer trading trial for clusters of houses in Bath and Shepton Mallett with solar pv on their roofs.

November

In conjunction with the re-launch of our community share offer we worked with If Not Now Digital to produce a short video about BWCE.

Between September and November we took on four new members of staff to help us develop and deliver new projects and activities.

December

By mid December we had raised £972,000 in 2022 through our  community share offer, bringing the total to £1,665,834. This leaves us just £34,166 short of our end of 2022 target of £1.7 million. Our target for April 2023 is £2.2 million and the more we raise, the more community owned renewable energy we can install. So a massive thank you to all the people who have invested, including all new members who have joined us recently.

We are due to install a second rooftop solar system at Corsham School in December and are finalising agreements to install a further 4 in January/February with discussions underway with another 16 rooftop solar projects and 3 ground mount solar sites. We are also in discussions with 3 commercial developers about taking commercial projects into community ownership.