Bringing you a dose of positivity in this update from onboard.earth’s environmental partner: Bristol Energy Cooperative.
Donations from onboard.earth members to the Energy Revolution programme in 2023 were invested in Bristol Energy Cooperative’s 9th Share offer. With these funds BEC is now helping to save lives across the West of England with a new solar array on the roof of Great Western Air Ambulance Charity (GWAAC).
Thanks to investors like onboard.earth, BEC was able to build a new 240 kilowatt peak array on the charity’s airbase outside Bristol – generating enough electricity to power 63 homes a year. The panels will provide home-grown green energy to support the air ambulance and its critical care services across the city, South Gloucestershire and beyond, as well as feed electricity back into the grid. The installation will cut the charity’s annual energy bills by around £7,500, and will save nearly 240 tonnes of CO2 over the project’s lifetime. In this way, Onboard.earth members are not only fuelling the drive to a greener festival future, but also helping power life-saving services to people across the region.
Since it started in 2011, BEC has grown to be one of the country’s largest community energy cooperatives. The co-op now has 21 clean energy projects in and around Bristol: 16 solar rooftop arrays, two solar farms, battery storage and two cutting edge microgrid schemes. Another of these projects is a community-owned solar rooftop array on Bristol Beacon, which won Regen’s Green Energy Award for a Community Initiative this year. BEC is a non-profit and exists to benefit the community. So far, they have raised £400,000 for local projects – community gardens, a volunteer-run swimming pool, energy efficiency schemes among others – all of which help keep our communities alive.
The installation at GWAAC is one of many in the project pipeline of BEC’s South West Local Solar Scheme (SWLSS). BEC was awarded over £500k in grant funding from the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority’s Green Recovery Fund to install 2 megawatts of community-owned rooftop solar capacity across the West of England by 2025.
BEC’s tenth share offer is currently live on Triodos Bank’s crowdfunding platform.