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Totnes residents bulk-buy solar PV |
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1 Oct 2011, 9:04 PM
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Transition Town Totnes won a 2011 Ashden Award for its achievement in enabling behaviour change to save energy in Totnes, through the Transition Together programme. Individuals may find it hard to know where to start when it comes to saving energy, sustainable transport or local food production. Transition Together (T-Tog) tackles this by bringing together groups of neighbours who study a workbook over a period of months, and take action to reduce their use of energy, water and oil-powered transport, while also producing local food and installing solar PV to generate electricity.
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The groups have saved energy, strengthened their community and prepared to take the work further through other projects running in Totnes.
– T-Tog works street by street, engaging interested residents to work together in groups. So far there have been 56 groups involving 468 households, reaching 1,100 people.
– When a group is formed a facilitator attends the first meeting to explain the process and help them plan how they will operate. The groups then hold six meetings, typically one a month, covering energy, water, food, waste and transport.
– The workbook used by the groups explains each topic clearly and comprehensively, with extra detail and references available for those who want more in-depth information. Each chapter includes a range of actions that can be taken to improve sustainability and participants decide which ones they can do.
– The learning environment is non-threatening, and neighbours are able to learn from each other and find ways to collaborate on sustainability activities.
– Each group completes a survey at the start and end of the T-Tog programme to see how many new actions to save energy and other resources they are taking having completed it. So far, the average reduction in CO2 emissions is 1.27 tonnes/year per household. Energy and water bills are falling, and people are buying more locally produced food.
– Just over a quarter of households involved have also been able to participate in Transition Streets, funded by the DECC Low Carbon Communities Challenge, which provided a grant towards the installation of solar PV.
In 2009 TTT won a government grant of £625,000 from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to pilot a community carbon-cutting scheme. After a competitive tender process, a team was chosen to install solar PV systems onto 70 properties, with up to 14 panels per house. The large Civic Hall in Totnes was also part of the scheme, which generates 13,000kWh per annum from 75 solar PV cells.
2010 saw phase two of the project, cutting energy costs to another 60 homes. Each property has a Smart Meter installed, which acts as a mobile phone device calculating how much energy the solar panels produce, enabling the installer, Kier's energy solutions team to log the process by receiving texts from the meter. Householders have already generated 84,685kWh of free energy, saving a total of 48,101kg of CO2.
Now that the DECC grants are no longer available, TTT has introduced a new local bulk-buying club to help fund PV installations to homes in the Transition Streets scheme, with Kier again being selected as the supplier. The Transition Streets projects gets small groups of neighbours together who then help each other to make practical changes to cut their energy bills and carbon emissions.
The solar PV system will not only give home owners and tenants free renewable energy, they will also be paid by energy companies for all the extra electricity they generate, as part of the DECC’s feed-in tariff. Local householders in the scheme have earned an estimated £23,894 to date via the feed-in tariff.
Fiona Ward, project manager of Transition Streets, commented, “As Transition Town Totnes has shown, what we’ve started here can spread elsewhere incredibly rapidly and virally. Solar PV and other renewable technologies play a key part in our transition, giving people the independence of generating their own electricity".
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| Positive review of this story |
gaby de wilde  |
19 Oct 2011, 9:52 PM |
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nice Now we have to study the change in behavioral patterns that comes with this solar anarchism.
At first sight it seems to make people think they invented it which is great.
Then there is talk of doing things with the neighbors which seems kinda 1960 but it might be worth the loss of life.
The biggest accomplishment in Totnes seems to be that the whole world is paying attention. They must be doing something right :-)
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