Today we come to the last in the series of ‘A Story of Transition in 10 Objects’ films, produced by the wonderful Emilio Mula at nuproject.  Thanks also to Sharpham House for letting us film there, the closest thing to the British Museum that we could find!  I hope you have enjoyed them.  We go out in style, presenting our final object, a bottle of beer with a tale to tell…

And here is the moment where Portobello and Hexham found out they had won:

Thursday 20 October 2011 was a landmark day in the Vale of Glamorgan and one that will have a knock-on effect around the country and hopefully beyond. It was a day where community power helped to bring about a unanimous decision by the local county council to deny Coastal Oil & Gas the right to test for shale gas at an industrial estate on the outskirts of the village of Llandow.

Louise Evans on the local BBC News.

A few months prior to this, in February 2011, all that stood between the multi-billion dollar highly environmentally damaging fracking industry and a test drill being carried out in the Vale was one individual. Louise Evans runs a nearby caravan park and when she found out what was being planned she started researching the fracking process and raising awareness. Louise set up a web site and the ‘Vale Says No’ campaign was born.

The local Transition towns, Transition Cowbridge and Transition Llantwit, have been active for the past three years. From the work already done we knew that there was a part of the community that did not need any convincing that something that had the potential to cause significant environmental damage, as well as keeping the focus on an unsustainable finite energy source, should be halted. However, as the wider community have not yet seen the light and moved to a more positive and resilient way of life, both Transition groups donned their awareness raising hats to focus their energies on supporting the Vale Says No campaign.

The Vale Says No set up several public meetings to bring the issue of fracking and its consequences to the public’s attention. Both Transition groups used their existing networks to rally as many supporters as possible. This not only helped to generate a significant number of letters of objection, it was during one of these meetings that Coastal Oil & Gas was made aware that they had failed to consider a house only 200m away from the possible drilling site in their application. This resulted in them withdrawing their application and bought the campaign some much needed time to carry out research into the company and gather further evidence.

As soon as Coastal Oil & Gas re-applied for planning, everyone was quick off the mark and Transition Cowbridge hosted a public meeting to a full house in the Town Hall. Word was spread via the website, the local press and by hand delivering invitations to local councillors, Welsh Assembly members and community organisations. A large number of the people attending had not heard of fracking and alarm bells started ringing. This not only resulted in creating greater general awareness but it also helped to bring some key community members together who would go on to directly support the campaign. In addition to this Transition Llantwit hosted a viewing of the feature length documentary Gasland which highlighted to all the significant impacts that could result if fracking was allowed to take place.

Pressure was maintained by Transition and the campaign called for a ‘peaceful protest’ to take place outside Cowbridge Town Hall on the day that the Council were holding a roadshow inside (see right). Students from a local College piled in with banners and some well rehearsed chanting.  The protest headed up the High Street on a day when the town was full of Saturday shoppers.  A Dogs Trust charity shop was in the middle of a celebrity opening. John Barrowan is a patron and three hundred people had turned up.  They all got the benefit of the marching protesters. More awareness raised!

The week of the planning decision arrived and due to the significant awareness raised the council felt it important to hold a scrutiny meeting. This gave both sides a chance to offer their reasonings for and against and resulted in some crucial questions being raised that defiantly helped to added weight to the councils final decision.

The day of the planning decision arrived and following a site visit by the councillors and a screening of Gaslands, the Planning Committee sat.  They had been met on their way into the building by another lively but peaceful protest. BBC and ITV were filming and interviews were given to BBC radio, national and local.

Decision time

Despite the electric atmosphere in the room there was a definite sense that the there was nothing else that could be done. With great relief one by one the councillors made their cases for overturning the application and in most cases a focused and passionate speech was given as to why neither test drilling or fracking should be allowed to go ahead. The decision was rubberstamped by the councils concerns over a letter sent by Welsh Water which had been voiced at the earlier Scrutiny meeting. If groundwater became polluted by drilling fluid they could not guarantee that the situation could be ‘remediated’. “Once polluted, we would be stuck with it”.

The positive impact of the Transition movement

By supporting the Vale Says No campaign, Transition not only helped to quickly spread the issue to a much wider audience but also broaden the argument to one that incorporated the bigger picture of long term community happiness and resilience. And it was this level-headed approach that gave the campaign a real sense of credibility and one that helped convince the local planning committee to vote unanimously against the application.

So from a starting point of just one person it had very quickly become a community supported campaign that has succeeded in putting a very big spoke in the works for an industry blindly focused on finite energy extraction at any cost.

So where do we go from here?

Fracking is definitely not an issue just reserved for the Vale and as has been shown in Blackpool this processes can happen all too fast and undetected if communities are not alert. And this is where Transition Towns all around the globe can play there part in not just being vigilant to fracking but continuing to do the great work they do at providing communities with a positive vision of life without the need for such unconscious acts.

Having invested a lot of energy and time in the campaign you would think that our Transition projects would have suffered. However, not only have we been able to keep our other projects running well, we also have to say that our involvement has actually raised awareness of transition in the region as well as improved our track record.

So now, we are looking forward to making use of the newly gained publicity and keep it coming while being able to re-channel all of our energies back into our projects. Just today we’ve received some funding for our community growing project, which will enable us to purchase more plants, signage etc. Sometimes, Transition does feel like a full time job!

Links to invaluable info about fracking:

1)      http://bridgendgreens.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/how-was-the-llandow-test-drilling-application-overturned/

2)      http://nofrackinguk.com/ , http://thevalesaysno.com/, http://www.transitioncowbridge.org/108-2/, http://transitionllantwit.wordpress.com/anti-fracking-campaign/

3)      http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/14271

4)      http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/sites/default/files/coop_shale_gas_report_final_200111.pdf

5)      http://www.theecologist.org/tv_and_radio/ecologist_film_unit/1074609/fracking_hell_the_environmental_costs_of_the_new_us_gas_drilling_boom.html

6)      http://www.co-operative.coop/Toxicfuels/shale-gas

7)      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-15399052

They are, in no particular order, the book ‘The Transition Companion’, the online version of the ingredients and tools of Transition, and a beautifully designed set of Ingredients and Tools Cards which can be used to better understand all this.  Together, they represent a sea-change in how we understand what Transition is and how to do it.  So, let’s have a look at those things one-by-one.

No. 1. The Transition Companion: making your community more resilient in uncertain times.

This new book, which replaces ‘The Transition Handbook’, is the result of 18 months of a collaborative process involving people from Transition initiatives around the world.  It reframes Transition as a collection of ‘ingredients’ and ‘tools’ which each initiative assembles in its own way.  It is rich with stories, artwork, case studies and photos contributed by Transition initiatives themselves.  It is rich with insight and the kind of wisdom that can only come from an open-source 5 year global experiment such as Transition.  It represents a quantum leap forward in the Transition movement, a deepening, a maturing, and a very tangible vision of where all of this might go and how we might be most confident of actually getting there.  It has 320 pages, and is in full colour, It’s probably got a picture of you in it somewhere…

You can order it from me (which would be great), from Green Books, from Permanent Publications, from Beetroot Books, from Amazon (if you must), or even better, from your much-endangered local bookshop, or order it through your local library.  If you are in the US you can order it from the US publisher Chelsea Green.  There are no plans for an audio book.  I’ll also be speaking about the book, answering questions, and picking some of my favourite records (Desert Island Discs-style) on the Transition Show on StroudFM, 2pm this Friday.

No. 2. The Ingredients Directory

As well as being gathered together in the book, the ingredients have also been put online in an interactive, interlinked, technologically dazzling kind of jamboree.  Our Transition Network webmeisters have excelled themselves with this, their finest creation to date.  You will notice the homepage now looks rather different, with the ingredients as a major theme.  All the ingredients, and all the tools, are now online, each with space for comments and feedback.  There is also the “Transition Ingredientator”, otherwise known as “Add your own ingredient”, which will give you the opportunity to draft any that you feel we have neglected.  These will be moderated over the coming months. You can either view the ingredients in the 5 stages as set out in the book:

• Starting
• Deepening
• Connecting
• Building
• Daring to Dream

… or see them set out altogether in a directory format. This is an invaluable resource, I hope you find it really useful and link to them often.

No. 3.  The Transition Ingredients Card Game

At the 2011 Transition Network conference we trialled a card game based on the Ingredients.  The idea was that they might help you to familiarise people with them, to better understand the ways in which your group is working, and also to identify ways in which it might be more effective.  They were very popular, and so the wonderful Marina Vons-Gupta has produced a set of beautiful cards which you can download for free, print out (instructions are provided) and use.  Some games are suggested, but they are made available on the basis that you are invited to create you own games and share them, so that in the future we can update them.  They should hopefully prove to be a really useful resource.  You’ll find the cards sat awaiting your downloading here.  Let us know what you think.

We have also reworked the Why do Transition? page at TransitionNetwork.org, and what was the Transition Primer has now been condensed into the link-tastic ‘What is a Transition initiative’ page.  The above projects have been inputted into by thousands of people, but I would particularly like to thank a few people who have put an amazing amount of work and creativity into them, namely Marina, Ed, Laura, Amber, Helen, Ben, Naresh, Sophy, Jim and everyone at Green Books.  It is five years since we kick started this whole Transition thing, which is now active in 34 countries around the world in thousands of communities.

These new iterations of what Transition is represent as deep a shift as the emergence of the whole idea was in the first place.  They are a distillation of all the bravery, innovation, generosity, kindness, success, failure and genius that everyone involved in this has poured into it for the past 5 years.  As a result, they embody a richness and a maturity that is quite extraordinary, yet they remain intensely focused and practical, indeed far more practical than what went before.  Today is a landmark, a key milestone, and I’ll leave the last word to Denise Levertov, the poet, who captures how I feel about this:

Brilliant, this day — a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadow cut by sharpest scissors, deft hands.

Here are some photos to accompany the podcast….

Information about the Tres Hombres

Captain Jorne Langelaan telling the assembled visitors about the ship.

Exeter Brewery's beer stowed safely in the hold.

In a world where income disparity is increasing and social regression is inherent in the current structure of the UK’s Feed-In Tariff (FIT), we need to rethink how community renewable energy projects are structured & financed to ensure full community benefit lies at the heart of the process and that energy reduction is still focused upon as part of a community “power down” process.

Community renewable energy projects generally follow one of two structures: developer led or community led. In the former, a developer takes the pre-construction risk and a majority ownership stake in the renewable energy project. If the project receives planning permission then the developer will invite the community to fund the balance of the project up to their agreed equity value.  In the latter, the community raises the finance, takes the planning risk and tenders different parts of the project development to professional advisors.

In both cases, the predominant form of finance is equity-based – typically, for the community, via an Industrial Provident Society (IPS).  In the first structural option, a developer (probably not based within the community) takes a majority share of the profits. In the second, the community investors would receive all / the majority of the project’s profit, yet taking a higher level of risk.

The key message is this- in both cases, it is only those with the capital to invest that receive the benefits (read profit) of the project.

The problem with this is 2-fold.

Firstly, the returns that the developer / community investors receive from the FIT is a result of a slightly increased energy cost for the 20 million plus homes in the UK – socially regressive as anecdotally it is the wealthy who have the money to invest, and the least well-off who do not.

Secondly, investors are focused on energy generation. There is no focus on using their money to solve the real problem of reducing our current energy demand – particularly in the homes of those who are least well-off and do not have the capital to invest in energy efficiencies.

What about the Green Deal? Well, this will only provide loans of up to £10,000 and this will only be for those investments that meet the “golden rule” of savings equalling costs. The average house probably needs investments in the order of £25,000. Hence, more capital will be required to do the job properly and most of the capital investment required will be for investments that are unable to meet the golden rule

But, let me get back to the point.  We need structures that benefit the wider community – especially those that are unable to invest. By taking a slightly different approach to financing community renewable energy projects we can start to generate income for those households that really need help.

The key “tweak” in the current model is to start debt financing a larger proportion of the community renewable energy projects – what I call community renewable energy finance (CREF) 2.0.

Imagine the following renewable energy project. It has a total cost of £500,000 and will generate £100,000 per year in FIT income. By raising 25% via an equity offering (via the local community to pay for development costs) and borrowing the rest (let’s say at 5% via social loans) then the high-level numbers are as follows:

• Equity: £125,000
• Debt: £375,000
• Debt Repayment for 10 years (capital + interest): £56,250 1^st year. & decreasing
• Sinking fund (for a new project after 20 years): £25,000 p.a.
• Profit in year 1 (before other costs): £18,750

In the current model, the entire £18,750 would be distributed to those investors who had capital to invest, leaving none to be re-invested into those areas that find finance difficult to access. In CREF 2.0 there will be 75% of this figure (about £14,000) left to re-distribute where required.

This is the money that can be used to invest in energy efficiency and reduction in those homes that do not have the capital to invest – a radical opportunity from a not-so-radical change in the financing model. In essence, those households within the community that cannot afford to invest, still receive the benefit from the local renewable resources which they generally share i.e. sun, wind, wood etc.

It requires communities to start taking the harder route i.e. not giving up equity stakes to development businesses and maybe taking on more of the risk. This can be mitigated by pre-agreements to buy developments at “cost plus” or by taking on more of the risk of the development themselves – lowering the risk through using affordable renewable energy development businesses.

It does not take a genius to work out that grants are a thing of the past and that we have to get smarter as communities to create structures that have maximum benefit for the maximum number of people.  CREF 2.0 also has an added benefit 9which I have discussed before in other blogs).  The more money that you can keep local, the greater the economic multiplier and the the economic benefits of cash injections into the local economy.

Let’s start getting smarter about the way we finance renewable energy projects at the community level and ensure we all benefit.

Here is the third film in the ‘Story of Transition in 10 objects’ series, this time looking at a part from an old Victorian gas lamp from Malvern. You will be able to read more about this, and many other Transition stories, in the forthcoming ‘The Transition Companion’.

I have, on occasion, reflected here at Transition Culture about how the natural building movement, with its leaning towards natural building materials such as straw, clay, hemp and so on, has yet to really explore how those materials might be used to retrofit existing homes.  Virtually all of the work done around those materials focuses on new build, but finally, it seems some work is happening on retrofits.  An MPhil dissertation done at University of Cambridge by Keven Le Doujet entitled “Opportunities for the large scale implementation of straw based external insulation as a retrofit solution of existing UK buildings: how much of a good idea is it to externally insulate existing UK buildings with straw bales?” explores this very question.  It is a fantastic and comprehensive piece of work which is a pleasure to read.

Keven’s research is very thorough, and looks at the practicalities of using external strawbale cladding to externally insulate the millions of poorly insulated homes and workplaces in the UK.  This is not the work of a romantic idealist, he is clear about the challenges of doing so on a meaningful scale.  He concludes that it “is a good idea but even if it reaches its full potential it will not be sufficient in itself to improve the sustainability performance of UK buildings to the level required to tackle to combined challenge of energy security, climate change and the sustainable use of natural resources”.  It is not, he argues, a “silver bullet”, something that would address the entire retrofitting challenge we face, but it could prove an excellent solution for around 5% of the UK’s housing stock.

The study looks at some amazing case studies (look at the back of the report), where unappealing buildings are transformed.  His sense of realism extends into his setting out of the obstacles to this, which include:

• Thickness (these walls are thick, and require a substantial roof overhang)
• Installation time (it’s a big project)
• Seasonality (you want work outdoors with strawbales all year round)
• Aesthetics (you can use them to make an ugly building more attractive, but not to retrofit a building considered attractive)
• Financial barriers (it is a realistic option for self builders, but quite pricey if you get contractors in to do it)
• Skills and knowledge gaps (it may prove tricky to find builders who know how to do it)
• Lack of persuasive information (in other words, there isn’t yet a robust knowledge base around this approach)

However, what shines through this excellent study, unusually for an academic study, is a real taste of what might be possible, and what it would actually look like if we used local strawbales to retrofit some of our worst housing stock.  The benefits, in terms of reskilling, locking up carbon, supporting local farmers, hugely increasing energy efficiency and so on would be huge.  Unfortunately the trend over the past 30 years in the UK has been to build houses with virtually no roof overhangs at all, which makes this very difficult for many homes.  However, I reached the end of Keven’s study with a sense of this being something that has just scratched the surface of the potential here.  How about pre-fabricated straw panels which can be made offsite and then put up against the wall?  Hemp and lime or hemp and clay bricks?  If we applied some of the creativity and research support that other approaches get I’m sure we could come up with all kinds of things.  If you are interested in natural building, you will find this a timely and fascinating study.

TTT's Fiona Ward accepts the Ashden Award from Kevin McCloud.

On Thursday 16th June Grand Designs TV guru, Kevin McCloud, presented the Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy and Behaviour Change to the Transition Together project run by Transition Town Totnes (TTT).   The award, worth £10,000 plus support and mentoring from the Ashden Trust over the next 12 months, came just 18 months after TTT were awarded £625,000 as part of the previous government’s Low Carbon Community Challenge. This money made it possible to scale up the previous Transition Together programme and make grants available to install solar PV systems in participating households (you can read Ashden’s very thorough case study here). Here’s a short film about Transition Together (aka Transition Streets) produced by the Ashden Awards:

The local news also did an excellent piece about Transition Streets.  Other Ashden Award winners, four from the UK and five from Africa and Asia, are well worth looking at if only to remind us of the stark contrast between the environmental problems and solutions we see here in Britain and those in the Third World.   The other UK winners were Radian Housing Association whose investment in low carbon new homes and retrofits made them a worthy choice for this year’s Gold Prize; Midlands Wood Fuel, who provide locally sourced wood chips to power biomass boilers to replace oil and gas; the Centre for Alternative Technology which has trained thousands of people in renewable energy technologies and Severn Wye Energy Agency which has teamed up with over 30 schools to empower school students to track the carbon footprint of their schools and take action to reduce it.

International winners were Abellon Clean Energy in India, who turn crop waste into fuel pellets to replace fossil fuels; the Agha Khan Planning and Building Service in Pakistan, a project to improve health, save trees and make homes warmer by improving wood burning stoves in remote villages; Husk Power Systems which uses rice husks to power electricity production at the village scale in rural India: ToughStuffInternational, whose simple, affordable and robust solar kits are bringing electricity to rural locations in Africa and Gold Medal winners, Toyala Energy, whose fuel efficient charcoal stoves are already meeting the needs of over a million people in West Africa.

The previous day the finalists all met Prince Charles...

In tandem with the awards ceremony was a conference on sustainable energy with forthright speakers like Jonathan Porritt – “Why won’t the government fund a comparison between the cost effectiveness of energy efficiency and generating more power? Why all the lies suggesting nuclear power is cheaper than solar PV?” – and slightly less inspiring speakers such as Greg Barker, Minister of State for Climate Change and Stephen O’Brien, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for International Development.

UK award winners were challenged to explain what they would say to David Cameron and Chris Huhne if trapped in a lift with them for two minutes. We can imagine the relief the award winners would have felt as the lift doors finally opened. However, the prospect of Porritt in the same situation would surely see Cameron and Huhne as by far the most uncomfortable travelers! No wonder that Porritt was kept well away from the ministers who spoke.  Here is a film of this event:

Not that they got off completely. Anna Ford and Kevin McCloud both challenged the government to do more by providing the legislative framework to make things happen.   Among the debates was a discussion about how to increase the uptake of energy saving solutions such as the Green Deal and other grants that are already available. The success of Transition Streets in achieving just this, particularly with low income households, may hold valuable lessons about the role of community involvement as the way forward.

One last thought? When we pat ourselves on the back for installing a kilowatt or two of solar PV, which might meet 25% or less of our needs, lets spare a thought for rural people without electricity. Among the stories told at the Ashden Awards were those of people who walk many hours to charge a mobile phone or children struggling to do their homework by the light of candles or smoking kerosene lamps. Just a few watts of power, costing $10 or less, can transform the lives of these people.

If you are interested in finding out more about Transition Together/Streets or want to start up your own version of the project then please see here.  Thanks to all of the Transition Together/Streets project team for their enthusiasm and dedication, and of course, to all of the households that have participated so far.

Chris Bird is author of ‘Local sustainable homes: how to make them happen in your community’ and is very active in the Transition Town Totnes Building and Housing Group and the Transition Homes initiative.

Receiving my certificate from Brian Harper, one of three Gasketeers who travelled to the Tagore Festival...

On Saturday I did a talk at the Tagore Festival which I hope to get a film of up soon.  Instead of using powerpoint, I told the story of Transition using different objects which different initiatives had sent me.  It went really well, and was a really enjoyable way of doing it.  One of the most substantial ‘props’ was a fully functioning Victorian gas lamp which the Malvern Gasketeers had brought all the way from Malvern that morning.  My thinking had been that the crescendo of my talk would be to invite them onstage and that they would light the lamp for all to see.  However, while setting up we were told that in order to light it we would have needed a licence from the local Council, so it remained unlit, albeit rather beautiful nonetheless. 

My talk at the Tagore Festival, with the gas lamp in pride of place...

After the talk, the three Gasketeers presented me with a beautiful certificate certifying that I will “henceforth be known as a Gasketeer”.  Very lovely of them.  It is an amazing initiative…  They have reduced the costs of maintaining 104 of Malvern’s historic gas lamps (the inspiration for the lamp post in C.S. Lewis’s ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’) from £580 each per year (£130 for gas, £450 for maintenance) to just £70 per year (£20 for gas and £50 for maintenance).  They have made them 10 times brighter than they were before, and they now produce no light pollution at all.  Here’s a short film about them…

The current expense of running the lamps brings them to costing the same as sodium or LED lamps, but they are now working on a scheme to power them with gas produced through anaerobic digestion, which would make them genuinely carbon neutral.  Also, sodium lamps last around 30 years before they need replacing, these last 100 years.  All repairs are done by Lynn Jones, the UK’s first female gas lamp technician, who does her maintenance rounds with everything she needs (including her ladder) on a bicycle trailer.  It really is a wonderful scheme, and my certificate now has pride of place in my house…

The 'Larch House' in Ebbw Vale, Wales.

The ‘holy grail’ in terms of the construction of new sustainable buildings is homes that reach the highest level of energy efficiency, whilst also using as high a proportion of locally sourced materials as possible, what we might call ‘The Local Passivhaus’.  Two buildings, recently completed in Ebbw Vale, known as ‘The Lime House’ and ‘The Larch House’ have moved this concept forward significantly.  As part of an EU-funded project, the Welsh government wanted Wales to take a lead in Passivhaus design, to show what is possible as well as bringing low energy design into the mainstream construction industry.  They ran a competition, and Justin Bere Architects won.  Their proposal was for more than just a house, they saw it as the possibility of kick-starting a radically new approach to housing in Wales.  As Justin Bere told me:

“Instead of a narrow vision to design a house, we want to get people fired up in to doing something much bigger.  I’d just love to see a successful example in Wales that would encourage other people and give them ideas of how they could do their own locally made, affordable, truly low energy buildings, and maybe we could get this sort of thing happening all over the country”.

The chosen site pushed the Passivhaus idea to its limits.  1,000ft up at the head of the valleys, very cold in the winter and misty for much of the year, a climate twice as hard to design for as Innsbruck in Austria.  The project also aimed to build to social housing budgets and to the Passivhaus standard, the first time this has been attempted.  As well as the attention paid to the design, a lot of thought was also paid to the materials used, with a focus on using Welsh materials where possible.  I asked Justin why:

“Local materials matter because they do two things.  They reduce carbon emissions from transportation, and they increase local employment.  Local employment, if it really is local, also requires less carbon emissions and travel from the factory or workshop to the site”.

The final buildings used Welsh timber (used in an innovative way to make up for its poor quality compared to, say, Scandinavian timber), Welsh-made Rockwool insulation, Welsh-made slates, local stone, and UK-made paint and sprinklers.  Things that were harder to source included lime render (a Welsh company but a French lime), and woodfibre insulation, which was imported from Germany but could easily be made in Wales.  The last challenge was the windows, which need to be of very high quality.

For the first house they were made in Germany, for the second house, a Welsh joiner produced them to a passivhaus certified design provided by the Scottish window designer Bill Robertson.  I asked Justin if he had a sense of the local/imported proportions in the materials used.  He said he thought the first house was probably around 80% Welsh, and the second house was closer to 90%.  Did he think, I asked, that, as has been discussed with food, an 80/20% local/imported ratio could work for construction in a powered-down UK?  “I think”, he told me, “that in time people will be forced to do better than 80%!”

I also asked him about what role he saw in the future for more genuinely local materials, such as hemp, straw, cob and so on.  He said that in the two houses built in Ebbw Vale, the original idea had been to use hemp/lime, but the data on its insulation properties wasn’t sufficiently well done to allow them to meet their efficiency targets, and that more research is needed, but in time, they would have a vital, and increasing, role to play.

One of the things that will be central to this shift to the local Passivhaus, he told me, will be a huge reskilling of young people and the creation of a new infrastructure of manufacturing across the UK.  He told me:

“I think we need to start right back at school.  Let me give you an example of Austria.  We employed an assistant here from the Vorarlberg region.  At the age of 14 he moved to a school that did the traditional subjects but alongside timber technology.  By the age of 19 he had a diploma in timber construction and was skilled in using timber with his hands, skilled in using timber with machinery, skilled in drafting, skilled in structural calculations and building low energy technologies.  In the UK by contrast, at the moment we’ve spent years dismissing technical skills as being for those who can’t do anything else, and if a young person is half able to do anything, they’re encouraged to go to university and not waste their life using their hands”.

The Ebbw Vale houses offer us a taste of what might be possible with some vision and some applied effort, and the potential benefits that such an approach would bring in terms of jobs, skills, local economic activity and a return to a more vernacular approach to building, where buildings are rooted in place and the local materials.

And now here, in full, is the interview I did with Justin a couple of months ago…

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?

I’m Justin Bere, I’m an architect, director of Bere Architects.  One of my main interests and specialisms in the practice is low energy building and in particular we’ve found that the Passivhaus methodology and standard gives us the best way of controlling the quality of what we are providing our clients with.

The two houses in Ebbw Vale, how did they come about and what were you trying to achieve?

They came about as a competition, which was the brainchild of Nick Tune of the Building Research Establishment to use European funding as I understand it.  I’m not sure exactly how it works, but it’s European funding to ensure that Wales gets the very latest Passivhaus, low energy thinking into their buildings and encourages developers to follow suit, having shown the way.  There’s a number of houses round there, so Ebbw Vale, or the local authority of Blaenau Gwent worked with BRE and set up a competition and found a partner in United Welsh Housing Association who would use their normal procurement route of contractor and so on to build the buildings – they were basically just given the money to do that.

Part of the exercise was to train an existing supply team and get their feedback on the viability of this.  The hope, before the funding cuts, was that housing associations would have a lot more money to be able to contribute to the 700 new homes in Ebbw Vale.  From our point of view, we entered that competition, and we were told that we had the best grasp of Passivhaus and technically they were confident in us succeeding.  They initially also employed another architectural firm to do the other passivhaus but lost confidence in them at the same time as they got interested in our ideas of making further savings in the future on our first house, nearing completion. So we were asked to produce the second passivhaus which was a great opportunity for us to put into practice our ideas of further cost savings that came out of building the first house.

What were you trying to achieve with those buildings, what was your intent?

To show how we can get the very lowest energy consumption and the greatest comfort in building by concentrating on the fabric of the building, and also showing how we use the techniques to invigorate the Welsh construction industry locally at least.   I described a vision that they all seemed to like, of starting something in Ebbw Vale and the means to that.  They had funding for a skills and training centre in Ebbw Vale which was going to be run by a big commercial outfit with all sorts of funny angles and things, their pictures were about students drinking caffe lattes in foyer areas and I said, “look, this isn’t about skills.  What you really want is a supershed with rectangular classrooms on one side overlooking the shed.”  In the classrooms you have new technologies, timber technologies that are to do with the fundamentals of building timber frame buildings and one production line.

There’s another one which is to do with laminating timber for window frames, there’s a number of technologies there which are tiny production facilities, which the students learn to use – because there aren’t many other opportunities to use these techniques in the UK and these are generally used in Germany and Austria and so on, and get them to learn and perhaps sell those products so it’s a resource to sell to local industry.  Then if production goes up and demand goes up then you perhaps spawn a little kind of science park for timber technology.  Someone comes along and says, “Look you’ve created a business case.  I’m going to take students, I’m going to build a shed, I’m going to buy this equipment and we’ll build a production line.

So there is now, resulting from that, and quite excitingly, Nick Tune at BRE has got so far £6 million of funding committed to building a low carbon technology training centre.  Maybe we will end up getting to be involved in the design of it, but my purpose is really just that it’s exciting.  Instead of a narrow vision to design a house, we want to get people fired up in to doing something much bigger.  I’d just love to see a successful example in Wales that would encourage other people and give them ideas of how they could do their own locally made, affordable, truly low energy buildings, and maybe we could get this sort of thing happening all over the country”.

The houses that were built – why were they significant and how do they move the idea of the passive house forward?

They’re significant because they are designed to be passive even in this extremely inhospitable environment at the head of the valleys.  People tend to think of a building regulations house being a building regulations house – same design – whether it’s in Swansea, Manchester or London.  What we found, or what BRE found for us, was that the weather conditions – because of the real misty conditions of Ebbw Vale, a thousand feet up and cold in the winter, are twice as difficult as Manchester and twice as difficult as Innsbruk in Austria.  That is using what they call the ‘extreme worst case’, they were being quite cautious because they want to make sure that they do work.  We have to make the building passive in that location.

In addition, we were designing for social housing, so they’re the first social housing, passive house prototype in the UK.  One of the primary requirements of the brief was to build them as closely as possible to the housing association average house price for a one off detached house for £1200 per square metre.  We came pretty close to that.  The first one, because it was a very rushed project, before we could really fully understand the cost we had to get on and build the first one, because of the opening date for the Eisteddfod.

The first house was coming out at something like £1700 per square metre.  At that point we realised there were ways of saving money.  We came up with the idea of doing an alternative technical approach, both Passivhaus: one is working on total annual energy consumption and the other is looking at total peak monthly energy consumption.  Normally those end up looking like quite similar buildings but in extreme conditions we end up with one house, the more expensive house, more traditionally passive house design with relatively big windows – because of the low amount of sun they get very big in order to grab every bit of sun that’s available and hold on to it.

The co-heating tests at the moment show that they get a little bit of sun and they hold on to that heat for 5 hours.  That means that in the summer, in order to avoid overheating, you need retractable blinds, another cost.  Our alternative design can be rationalised by saying well, there’s not very much sun so we’ve got super insulated walls, 400mm of insulation, there’s 600mm of insulation in the roof.  These super insulated buildings can make a lot of use of the internal heat gains so we’re not getting much from outside, so let’s not bother much about the outside.  The windows are a bit smaller – they’re still bright interiors with plenty of daylight, but make them smaller than the traditional passive house and because a 400mm thick wall is going to lose less heat than a triple glazed window even.  So we concentrate on holding on to the internal gains from people, their pets, their oven, their TV and so on, to supply a great deal of the warmth in the house.

The significance of the project is that we’ve got one down to about £1300 per square metre on the second option, and I think we can do better still.  We’ve achieved low costs.  Basically it would be about £8000 more for a two bedroom house than a standard building regulations house built over the last ten years.  It’s not bad considering the reduction in energy and the pay back period of about 14 years.

What about the role of local materials in the building – what have you done that’s innovative in that regard?  Why do local materials matter?

Local materials matter because they do two things.  They reduce carbon emissions from transportation, and they increase local employment.  Local employment, if it really is local, also requires less carbon emissions and travel from the factory or workshop to the site.  The factory, the timber workshop that we were employing to build the timber frame, have built the factory on supplying Premier Inns around the country with horrible, cheap 140 mm thick stud walls so because Wales has plenty of these 140 mm sized timber sections.  I should explain that mountain timber in Germany, Austria and Scandinavia can come in larger sections than our fast growing timbers in the UK, because our moist and relatively warm climate means that we end up with less good quality, less dense timber and it tends to twist a bit more and be a bit more sappy and is generally not regarded as being suitable over about 140 mm, that’s the ideal.

At 140mm we have thin, poorly insulated walls zooming off all over the country to Premier Inns.  What we needed was about 400mm of insulation and we wanted to use local materials.  Now the biggest, most reasonably accessible timber grown in Wales is about 215mm as a sawn timber stud.  So 215mm, as your central core of insulation, still requires another 200mm of insulation so we’ve found a reasonably economical way of achieving this.  215mm is in the centre – that gets built up on site – then we put 100 mm stud on the inside of that, the services zone, build that with fibre insulation, get our extra 100 and then 100 mm wood fibre insulation on the outside.

The heart of what we were trying to do was also stimulate and show markets for local timber so we weren’t absolutely having to use local all the time, we didn’t think that was always the best thing to do.  We could, on the inner and outer surfaces, have had that 100mm zone of insulation on the inside and 100mm of insulation on the outside as Welsh Rockwool, or we could have used some horrible oil based foam insulation, or we could have used Warmcell recycled paper but the problem with that is that it’s not energy efficient and we couldn’t get that in 100mm studs so the logical thing to us is to use wood fibre insulation.  It’s really healthy, it’s truly a renewable material and it’s more efficient than Warmcell, so it worked in 100mm zones.

There is no wood fibre insulation made in the UK so we bought it from a UK distributor and it’s made, some in Switzerland, some in Germany.  As part of the exhibition, to say this is what we think a Welsh manufacturer could and perhaps should be making, does anyone have an interest out there?  We were looking for opportunities of growth of Welsh industry.  With the first house, the most reliable Passivhaus windows produced come from Germany and they’ve being doing this for 15, 20 years.  They make windows that last generations that don’t twist that have insulation in the frames so they remains warm, as warm as the triple glazing almost, and they’re well sealed to avoid cold draught leakages.  German houses are quite famous for not having draughts, just as English houses are famous in Europe for having draughts!

We thought we’d play it easy on the first one, we must get a draught free construction – we will be air tested so we don’t want to risk it on the first one, get a British one and find our house is not certified.  So we got the German windows.  But then on the second one we said, “Look, now let’s try and push things.  We know we’ve made it work – we’ve got certification on the first one, it’s not so important on the second one so let’s get a designer I knew who designs passive house windows, learn his trade.”  We designed Passivhaus windows and the front door – got them certified in Germany (which was quite a rushed process) and got a partnership of five or six Welsh joiners together to buy in to this process.

One of the joiners went great guns for it and said, “I’m going to build these”, and imported the insulation from Germany.  Part of our message was that we could be making these in the UK – maybe someone like Kingspan or whoever would be able to do that with relatively small changes to their production lines.  But at the moment anyway it needed to be imported from Germany and then laminated to the wood, made up and installed.  So in the second house we had Welsh windows – the first UK, passive house certified windows; UK designed and made.

Are you able to put a percentage to the amount of local materials in both houses?  Presumably by local, in that context, you mean Welsh?

Yes.  Well I can’t at the moment…do you mean in quantity, volume, cost?  It’s a very difficult, if not impossible question to answer.  I’ve got a list on the two houses of the Welsh sources, which I could quickly read through, scan and send to you.  Some of it’s a bit confusing…

• The timber frame: I’ve listed the company and it’s local
• Roofing:  it’s a local company and they were using Welsh made tiles
• Local plumber, local electrician, local scaffolder, local carpenters
• External blinds:  well it’s a British company that distributes them but they import them from Germany.  We don’t have anyone that does it in the UK – that’s on the larch house.  We don’t have anyone who makes retracting solar blinds in the UK, it’s just incredible really.
• Sprinklers:  a UK company, parts probably from overseas.
• Plaster: a UK plastering company.  The plasterer may be from the UK but half the plaster in the country comes from France
• Flooring:  a UK, local company but who knows where the….well linoleum is British, yes.  Normally they put horrible vinyl down which makes you sick when you walk in and breathe the fumes, and that’s what goes into most social housing Passivhauses.  Well I insisted, for a small amount of extra money that we used linoleums which is made from plant resins and smells lovely – except they put the disgusting vinyl in the kitchen and the bathrooms for some unknown reason
• Stonework – a local company and local stone
• Painting: a local company.  The paint was an Earthborn, British, organic paint
• Wall tiling: a local company though not sure where the tiles came from because the design build company, United Welsh Housing said, “Normally we get rid of the architects at this point.  We don’t want to be told where to get our tiles from, we have our own normal suppliers.”  It was the same with the kitchen which is why they put the vinyl flooring down, “We always use vinyl flooring – we’ll use our local people and do that.”

I remember when I talked to Rob McLeod, he said that he thought the first house was about 80% and the second was about 90%.  But as you say, it’s of what – weight?  Volume?  Price?  Was he getting a bit over excited?

Yeah, I wouldn’t be being completely honest if I said I thought he was absolutely right, put it that way!  Maybe it is 80 and 90, but if you look down the list of names here, they’re all Welsh or British, but hidden behind that, for example there’s a lovely Welsh company doing the render for the Lime House.  Where does the lime come from?  Germany.  In Wales they’re really proud of Tir Mawr lime, but little do they know that a lot of the products come from Germany.  It’s just so frustrating.

The reason, to be completely fair to Tir Mawr, they use Welsh lime on very traditional lime rendering where there’s no external insulation, straight over stonework and it’s quite chunky material, thickly daubed-on stuff.  However, when you’re going to do a low energy building you need wood fibre insulation, or you need an insulation on the outside – it’s much better than inside for all sorts of technical reasons.  Then if you put a lime on, you need a very thin coat of lime.  You can’t use the traditional lime, so we have to develop that technology.

It’s interesting, because I was talking to a guy called Mike Small who works for the Fife Diet up in Scotland where they’re promoting the idea of local food.  They started out saying, “You should eat all local food, all seasonal food,” but then people come and say, “I like the idea of eating local and seasonal but I couldn’t live without chocolate and wine and coffee.”  If people say, “OK, list the things you really couldn’t live without”, they don’t make up more than 10, 15% of the diet so they now say, “90% local food, 20% imported feels like an achievable context.”  It sounds like with construction, you might be able to say that 80 – 20 is a rough target in terms of the target between local and imported materials, if and when we get to a stage where we have all the infrastructure in place to make that possible. Would that be reasonable?

Yes, I think that is reasonable.  I think that in time people will be forced to do better than 80%.  In the food thing, I’m sure you know Professor Tim Lang, and I completely subscribe to his thinking.  My parents ran a small organic farm in their retirement and personally I haven’t been to a supermarket for 10 years or more.  I would only go to the local shop round the corner, the farmers’ market or Mother Earth health food shop.  Mother Earth produce our lunches here and I was a bit concerned because as they winter was coming on they were producing salads with tomatoes.  I went round and had a chat to say, “I’d far rather go to the market – there are some much nicer greens than you’re providing.  Let’s forget about tomatoes.”  They’re nice but they’re importing them all from Italy.

She said she goes to the farmers’ market and she’s been telling her boss she would happily get the greens that come from Cambridge rather than him importing this stuff from the wholesaler.  That’s what she’s now doing and our salads have got much better, they’re much more tasty, they’re fresh…and I think everyone here feels better about that and partly it’s a matter of people understanding what the alternatives are and having some pleasure in doing it without chocolate…..on the other hand one doesn’t want to get the message over that to be green one has to live a dull and sad existence!

If the aspiration, similarly, is that we want the buildings of the future being local, seasonal, organic, far more nutritious houses in that kind of a way – what role do you see in the idea of a local Passivhaus for some of the materials that would be more prevalent in the natural building scene in terms of hemp, straw bale, clay plasters and these kind of things….they would ultimately be much more rooted in the local vernacular of the place, so what role do we have in a rediscovery and a re-embracing of those materials in the context of a Passivhaus?

I think there’s tremendous scope and opportunity.  I know Rob looked at hemp insulation because we were keen to use that instead of the wood fibre, but the U-values claimed by the hemp insulation people Rob discovered were extremely dubious and he was quite shocked at how poor the testing methodology.  He said, “No, we cannot achieve anything better than Warmcell – it may be not as good as that; we can’t rely on it.  We need to be sure our first building are going to work.”  We don’t want to be experimenting so much that all the opportunities to experiment in the future are lost because we blew the first one.

The approach has got to be that we build really successful, true to performance, passive houses, get that recognised as being a really good methodology.  Then I’d love to work with rammed earth technologies, cob and so on and work out how we can use those really local materials, get them well insulated and draught free.  I know that probably sounds controversial to some people.  They’ll say people have lived in cob buildings for generations and they didn’t worry about the odd draught, but unfortunately we were talking about a different mindset – people that didn’t mind putting pullovers on, who got up and went outside and did a lot of manual work.  Even if they were Wordsworth writing poetry, he was also walking the hills, getting exercise and coming home to write poetry.

Now we expect to do no manual work, sit in jeans and Tshirt in front of a computer for 8 hours and feel warm.  Because most people don’t see the energy going into their houses, they’re not carrying logs and buckets of coal, they’re completely obvious to what’s going on.  If they were carrying logs in they’d be shocked at how much needs to be carried in just to keep that lifestyle going.  In an ideal world, yes people would behave like our grandparents did and we wouldn’t need so much insulation, but what we’re trying to do with the Passivhaus is to bring people into a low energy way of living without having to compromise anything.  In fact, they’ll actually have better comfort in the building because they’ll get fresh air through the heat recovery ventilation.

In terms of the hemp, you were saying that the testing wasn’t good enough.  In terms of hemp and straw bale having sufficient data behind them for you to feel confident in using them….where’s that testing going to come from?  Who should be doing it?  Who’s going to move it forward?

I think that could be done by us as architects and inventive clients.  So a client comes to us and says, “We’d like to use cob because it’s a local material and we’re passionate about doing that”, then we would think through the design in order to come up with a solution that dealt with the really positive attributes of cob and part of that would be thermal mass and it does add to insulation.  I don’t know how much insulation it provides, I doubt there’s any data around so we would do some research and see if there’s something in Germany, someone may have done some cob prototypes.

Then we’d look at how to externally insulate the wall appropriately because we’d need more insulation than the cob alone I think, but we’d need to maintain the breathability of it.  That’s one route, I’m not trying to shirk that responsibility but I think the best place for this work is for universities to have some good tutors – some of them do – inspiring them to think in this way and saying, “Let’s build this prototype.”  This is perhaps the one opportunity in their lives when they’re going to be able to dedicate this amount of time to experimenting and research and actually producing something that’s useful at the end of it.  I’m trying to encourage that.

We’ve started the UK Passivhaus conference and the same time we’ve started the UK Passivhaus student conference and that’s been largely run…we did the first two years’ conferences but it’s now been taken over by the Passivhaus Trust, and I’m on the steering committee and we’re trying to positively engage the universities, both in presenting papers and encouraging to do the research in the first place; and hopefully giving them feedback of these sorts of ideas.  At the moment, no-one has said from our group to the universities, “What about research into cob passive houses?”  It’s a great idea but they need guidance and help from the cob experts, from people like myself doing Passivhauses and so on.  The universities being aware of this as an opportunity as well and asking us and getting involved.

The idea of buildings being built to Passivhaus standard but the design starting with what materials are available, so that they’re designed specific to that place, that you could almost have a way of designing Passivhauses rooted in place in terms of the materials and the whole idea scaling up – what do we need to put in place?  What infrastructure do we need?  You talked about the need for the windows to be made here and that kind of training, but presumably you also need woodland being planted and managed properly, you need retraining, young people – what infrastructure do we need to scale this up meaningfully?

I think we need to start right back at school.  Let me give you an example of Austria.  We employed an assistant here from the Vorarlberg region.  At the age of 14 he moved to a school that did the traditional subjects but alongside timber technology.  By the age of 19 he had a diploma in timber construction and was skilled in using timber with his hands, skilled in using timber with machinery, skilled in drafting, skilled in structural calculations and building low energy technologies.  In the UK by contrast, at the moment we’ve spent years dismissing technical skills as being for those who can’t do anything else, and if a young person is half able to do anything, they’re encouraged to go to university and not waste their life using their hands.

If someone is utterly useless and persuaded by other people that they’re utterly useless they’ll think, “Oh, there’s nothing for it, I’ll end up in construction” and it becomes a very negative choice.  We need to start by making practical things: if someone enjoys playing with water and things like that then maybe plumbing’s for them.  If someone enjoys fiddling around with electrics, then maybe an electrician.  We should try and get a more positive approach.  There seems to be from the intake here, and the applications we get, my impression is – and it may just be that they’re finding us more – but my impression is there’s a growing appreciation of what humanity and the planet faces, and what local communities and the UK faces.  People want to do more and I’m sure that a lot of these young people feeling they’d like to do something…..although they realise construction is part of the problem, very few of them think that going off and being a builder with a load of layabouts isn’t really going to get anywhere.

If we can give them a more positive view of the opportunities of working within construction, it could achieve much more.  I think also that this can attract those people that don’t like wearing pullovers and want to sit in an office, to show them that they can also do the Austrian thing, going off and by the age of 19 having a diploma in timber technology.  I’d start right back there and get the really good people coming into the industry.

There are really good people coming in to architecture now but it’s a bit more difficult in other fields.  As architects, I see the role we’re playing as Passivhaus architects, a lot about rebuilding by one, showing appreciation of people’s interests and two, encouraging those interests.  On the Welsh Passivhauses we ended up having a site manager who is now quite knowledgeable, he succeeded in achieving one of the best, or probably the best air tests in the country, having never done that before because we gave him sympathetic designs and training and so on, which we’d learnt in Germany, and he’s really enthusiastic.

Likewise a contractor, a site manager locally here at the Passivhaus community centre, he’s had training in air tight construction, avoiding leaks and draughts and so on.  He’s spent a career in construction, knocking things up any old how and he’s really rising to the challenge of doing this and making comments and alerting us to concerns he has and asking our advice and so on.  You often hear architects saying, “We don’t have the skills, it’s hopeless,” and so on.  We can’t take that attitude – we have to learn those skills ourselves and teach those skills.

It’ll be a slow process but we can do that.  That’s why, as I say with the cob building, I relish that challenge and I regard it as an opportunity to do more research and try and pass this learning on and collaborate with people and get them set on a trajectory that they master themselves and we just help to get it going.  The other really strong thing about local materials is that we start to build local specialist industries and everything from the Japanese electronics industry that thrived because of the density of companies in a locality, in a relatively small nation, around Tokyo or somewhere, that were supporting each other, where anything you needed you could get – to timber where in Germany, they say, “Look, we’ve been around since 16^th 17^th century and we’ve got everyone from the growers to the mills, with their production line geared specifically for us.  They know what we want and they supply us exactly the right materials.  It means that we have faultless products that we can supply to the joinery workshops”.

It’s about building those connections.  If you’ve got an area rich in timber like Wales, relative to the rest of the UK they’ve got 3 times as much wood per hectare as England and twice as much as Scotland – that’s a place to set up that would do well by saying, “Let’s use these resources, let’s go to furniture shows, let’s send people out to find the best furniture designers, bring them back to Wales, to offer them space, to enhance the value of the raw materials that we have, to build an industry to work locally with house builders in timber frame, and gradually you find all the machinery, suppliers, makers, maintenance people move in to the area and you get a whole buzz and the whole thing takes off”.

Vorarlberg region in Austria decided that low energy building was central to its success in achieving its ambition of self-sufficiency.  If someone is building a house using local timber, and burning local timber to keep warm, if they’ve got a very insulated house they won’t use much timber to keep it warm and that means there will be more land available for growing food.  As a result, Vorarlberg has, through this combined vision of wanting to do really high quality, low energy buildings, have got everything – not just timber but they’ve got a really good low energy heating company, really good low energy heat recovery manufacturers, really good insulation people.  All these organisations support each other.

I just think whatever the focus, it’s really good to get a focus in a region and get a vision.  That’s what you’re doing with Transition Towns – you’re getting this shared vision, bringing communities together and saying, “Let’s go in a direction and make a success of this” and then everyone starts supporting this.  And I think local materials can fit into that because around a Devon cob industry that used to be dominant in construction in Devon and is now a niche thing, one could potentially rebuild this and we’ve got all the raw materials, it’s really cheap, we could get young people off the streets, somehow…….people with the enthusiasm and vision that this is an exciting force.

Some people may think that’s a funny thing for the future, that it’s going backwards.  But that’s where I think potentially allying something like cob with passivhaus could actually make people think this is the future – it’s not backward at all.  This is a fantastic new technology, or a new way of working with cob.

If you imagine in 20 years time this has been successful and any new house built in the UK is built using 80% local materials and the structure that has sprung up to support that – can you describe that to us?  How would that be different from now?  What would be our experience of the building industry?  Could you paint a picture of what that would be like?

One would be choosing a house from local companies and there’d be perhaps in one’s locality 5 or 10 smallish companies, each with a proven track record of building wonderful, low energy houses, using local people one knows in the pub or knew at school who are running or working in these organisations and you choose between the pros and cons of the various techniques.  There probably isn’t a great deal between them, and some of one’s choices may be made as a result of who one knows or who is nearest to one’s building plot.

Those organisations or companies are buying raw materials locally that are also employing people in the area, and there’s a tremendous pride in the kind of results that are being produced in that area.  Traditionally, Herefordshire and East Anglia, on opposite sides of the country, have similar technologies in terms of timber frame buildings.  Somewhere else you’d have stone buildings.  We’d be going forward to a new regional interest, attention to detail, producing buildings, results and products for local people.

You’d have a pride in doing something well.  You don’t want it to fall apart and you want to do your best for the people you know and care for.  We get a completely good culture, as I see it, and the same with food.  It’ one of the nice things about going to farmer’s markets – you’re buying from people who are producing and they know who they are selling to each week and they’re going to make sure – they want to produce the best for regular friends that come to the market.  One will want to do that for the local community, whether it’s food, building, whatever and as a result we’ll all have a much more enjoyable, fulfilling lives.  Yes there probably will be some things that are transported around, but hopefully we’ll need so little power going into our buildings that we’ll be able to use some nice big wind generators to generate electricity for vehicles so that when we do have to move things around, it’s done by electrically run vehicles.  It’ll all be low carbon, healthy and rewarding.

Despite George Osborne’s best efforts, the UK will soon be facing huge hikes in the cost of energy supply as falling global production, political unrest in the Arab world, increased demand from India and China and new nervousness about nuclear cause oil prices to soar. Part of the solution to this problem has been obvious for a long time: localise energy supply. In Lewes, East Sussex, the energy services company Ovesco ¹ is teaming up with Harveys, the local brewery, to install the country’s first community-owned solar power station on the roof of Harveys’ warehouse. Ovesco, a non-profit IPS, ² hopes to raise 100% of the £307,000 installation cost from local investment.

The 544 solar PV panels will generate 92 kilowatts peak, an estimated 98,000 kilowatt hours per year. If the installation is completed by August 1st this year, all the power generated will qualify for the top rate feed-in tariff ³ of 34p per kilowatt hour, ensuring returns to investors of 4% per annum over the 25 years of the scheme. Unfortunately two blows have recently fallen since the scheme was first planned: Climate Change Minister Greg Barker has decided to cut the tariff above 50 kilowatts to 19p as of August 1st, and George Osborne has decided to remove EIS tax relief from FIT businesses.

Despite these setbacks Ovesco will go all out to complete the installation by early July.  Lewes Football Club has already expressed interest in hosting a PV array and its south-facing roof is scheduled to be Ovesco’s next site. Other sites are being considered.

Ovesco’s long-term plan is to make Lewes District self-sufficient in renewable energy by 2030. The company already has three years’ experience in managing Lewes District Council’s grant scheme for domestic renewable installations including passive solar, photovoltaic, wood-burning stoves and ground-source heat pumps, and running energy audits on domestic and public buildings. See here for more details.

* * *

¹ OVESCO Limited (FSA registered company No. 30875R)  2 Station Street, Lewes, BN7 2DA. Tel: 01273 472405, E-mail hello@ovesco.co.uk www.ovesco.co.uk.

The Ouse Valley Energy Services Company Ltd was established in 2007 to encourage energy-saving practices in domestic, business and public buildings, and to create local generation of non-polluting energy. In 2010 the company directors founded OVESCo Limited:

• to help individuals reduce their energy bills and their carbon footprint

• to contribute to local and national CO2 reduction targets

• to generate electricity from green sources (solar, wind, etc)

• to make jobs by supporting local firms to gain the benefit of this important new market

• to reduce UK dependence on imported fuels

• to assist local people whose houses are not suited to existing forms of renewable generation to make their homes more energy efficient.

² An Industrial and Provident Society, or IPS, is a recognised and legally structured way to enable people to invest in community assets, and gives all investors equal control over decisions. No payments to Directors or other parties are made, and the shares cannot be traded. Many organisations that generate green energy take this form.

³ The feed-in tariff, paid for each unit of electricity generated and currently guaranteed by government for 25 years, will enable Ovesco to pay dividends to investors.

Initial interest and awareness for the project was raised through an exhibition organised by TL. Using a demo unit as well as promotional literature people could leave their names for future contact.  We have linked the bulk purchasing project to home energy audits and whenever someone was interested in renewable technology we have investigated the suitability of the house with an in depth audit looking at the potential. Issues like boiler type, HW cylinder (dual coil already installed), roof design etc all played a part in the final advice provided. We then created a multipurpose contract “to fit all”. A contract with pre-set prices allowing for variations with up front pricing for extra design features. Householders can choose between a complete installed STH system (choice from three sizes) or a DIY kit for the budding DIY’ers who wanted to save even more money.

As the project grew, we experienced a lot of interest from neighbouring community initiatives to provide assistance with their possible bulk buying projects. Some wanted to hitch on the existing project with us whilst others sought advice on how to embark on a bulk buying project or wanted training from us to train their own staff in how to do it.

The success and positive experience of the STH bulk buying projects have led us to embark on other bulk buying schemes such as photovoltaic panels systems, ground source heat pumps and possibly micro CHP (combined heat and power). We are creating a social enterprise (community interest limited company, Ethical Solutions Scotland Ltd) which can apply potential income generation towards a sustainable group by giving back to the community. So far 3 new jobs have been created between the manufacturer and installer and the bulk buying schemes have the potential to create many more in the years ahead.

This piece was written by Alan Brown for ‘The Transition Companion’ .  Find out more at www.transitionlinlithgow.org.uk.