Group Admins:
Location: Slaithwaite and Marsden, West Yorkshire
About this group
Colne Valley Community Energy is a grassroots project that aims to utilise the strong community ties within the Colne Valley to tackle the problems of fuel poverty and CO2 emissions locally. Together we can reduce our energy bills and our energy use.
Our project is designed to deliver sustainable benefits via a multi-phased approach:
Our project is designed to deliver sustainable benefits via a multi-phased approach:
- Bring together energy users (residents and businesses) locally to aggregate our buying power through a simple purchasing cooperative.
- At the same time, use a web-based “virtual smart meter” to share our energy usage information and enable us, as a community, to gain control over our energy demand curve.
- By reporting comparative energy use information we can show how the energy use of individual households relates to the average, and thereby encourage higher than average users to reduce their energy consumption. Coupled with a community-level awareness and behaviour change programme we believe that we can have a significant impact on overall energy demand by our community.
- By acting collectively through the cooperative we can secure better purchasing arrangements on energy efficiency retrofitting work, possibly working in cooperation with Manchester's Carbon Co-op, which is doing pioneering work in this field.
- By smoothing our community's energy demand curve we can - as a purchasing cooperative - secure more competitive energy pricing for our members.
- Armed with detailed knowledge about our community’s energy needs we can then plan and develop appropriate local renewable energy generation capacity that will best serve our needs and provide the best return on investment.
This project builds on the successful work of a consortium of local community-led organisations that has developed over a number of years:
Marsden & Slaithwaite Renaissance has for nearly a decade championed locally focused sustainable development based on creating a low carbon economy. It created the dCarb report as long ago as 2006, which set the goal of reducing the carbon emissions of the Colne Valley communities by 60% by 2050, and offered a strategy for achieving this ambitious goal. Renaissance created the Green Valley vision, a sustainable and prosperous community based on a strong and resilient local green economy.
Valley Wind Cooperative is a major wind energy project that is developing what will be one of the largest - if not the largest - community-owned wind farms in the UK. Led by local people, the project is being assisted by the UK’s leading community wind development agency, Energy4All.
Marsden & Slaithwaite Transition Towns (MASTT) was one of the earliest Transition Towns initiatives. Born out of the Renaissance dCarb project, MASTT works to develop a resilient community capable of withstanding the dual challenges of peak oil and climate change.
Slaithwaite Cooperative Limited (trading as The Green Valley Grocer) is a community-owned retailer which actively promotes the development of local food growing and consumption as a key element in developing a more resilient and healthier community.
Together these four organisations, with other local businesses and in partnership with the local authority, under the banner of Low Carbon Colne Valley, have worked to collectively pursue a common programme, developing and promoting a resilient and sustainable future for the locality. The Colne Valley Community Energy Cooperative represents a key element in the delivery of that future vision.
We are applying for EnergyShare funding support to enable us to launch our programme and fund the first twelve months of pilot activity. We are developing our business plan on the basis that once established, the Colne Valley Community Energy Cooperative will itself be a sustainable social enterprise funding its own activities through multiple revenue streams.
We believe that our approach is highly replicable. We are working in close cooperation with Community Energy Direct, a new organisation established to replicate this model and support other communities across the UK to take control of their energy future.
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