With CEP Community Energy Plus
will be hosting a drop-in advice clinic at Callington Library to offer guidance on reducing energy bills and information on available support.
Pop along with your questions on Thursday 3rd November 2-4pm or Thursday 1st December 2-4pm.
Lots of useful information on the CEP web site: Reduce your Energy Bills | Community Energy Plus : Independent Energy Experts (cep.org.uk)
Continue readingThis is our plan for the evening:
a. Information Event, open to all. SHARE will be publicising what we’ve been able to do since the last AGM, the status of our ongoing plans and projects, and many of the items that fall under the agenda item “Annual Report”. This will be an informal chat and question event held in the Hall. We’ll be planning to cover: wood projects, hydro, recycling, energy, carbon footprinting and wider “green” issues. The displays and discussions will be manned from 7:30pm.
b. The formal part of the AGM (i.e. that bit we are legally obliged to do) will start at 8:30 in the Main Hall, taking advantage of the new display that the Hall Committee have installed. There we will conduct the formal finance business, table the legally required motions and elect the Directors for the next year. Only full Members are allowed a vote.
This year there is a vacancy for a new Finance Director, as Graham Beven is standing down. His has been an invaluable contribution into the success of SHARE, its projects and its stability. We collectively thank Graham for his help and support, and the guidance he has given us.
We hope that this event will make it easy for everyone to voice their opinions and express their aspirations for SHARE, without the rather formal setting of a big Hall meeting. Non-members are welcome to come and see what we’re all about, and maybe join.
Please come along and bring us your hopes, criticisms and aspirations to prepare SHARE for the next year.
SHARE has published its annual reports on our two solar PV installations in South Hill Parish.
The domestic scale (4kW) system on the roof of the Parish Hall has been in place for 7 years. It is supported by a battery, and works well in conjunction with the Hall’s ground source heat pump. SHARE and the Parish Hall share the Feed In Tariff income between us. Read the report here…
The larger 40kW system, at Church Park South Hill, has been in place for 6 years, providing electricity for the house and business at Church Park and exporting the balance to the grid. The system is financed by investments from SHARE members, and SHARE receives income from the Feed In Tariff and from sales of electricity to Church Park. Read the report here…
On April 24th, volunteers were invited to help plant a sapling hedge alongside the new parish Orchard. Altogether, 15 people turned up to help for varying amounts of time, and we were able to plant more than 420 trees in just over 4 hours. Species included Rowan, Elder, Dog Rose, Crab Apple, Blackthorn and Hazel. Refreshments were provided and, after a damp start, the weather was kind to us.
On April 24th, volunteers were invited to help plant a sapling hedge alongside the new parish Orchard. Altogether, 15 people turned up to help for varying amounts of time, and we were able to plant more than 420 trees in just over 4 hours. Species included Rowan, Elder, Dog Rose, Crab Apple, Blackthorn and Hazel. Refreshments were provided and, after a damp start, the weather was kind to us.
The new hedgerow will form a boundary between the Jubilee Orchard and the new allotments, and a wildlife corridor along the internal boundary of the orchard.
A Grand Opening is planned at the Orchard on June 3rd as part of the South Hill Parish Jubilee Celebrations, with information for the public and entertainments for young and not so young.
Recent events have thrown into sharp relief the reasons why SHARE was formed by a group of concerned residents 7 years ago. Our mission statement, “Powering renewable energy into a secure and sustainable future for all”, set us on a path which saw the installation of 40kW of solar PV panels at Church Park, South Hill. To date this has generated 22.6MWh, saving 4.81tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Unfortunately the abolition of the Feed-in Tariff made further similar installations financially unviable. However, we have high hopes that in the near future it will be possible to have local energy networks, in which power generated locally can benefit local households directly through cheaper tariffs. Totnes Renewable Energy Society (Tresoc) are on track to deliver this in Totnes, and we are watching with interest.
Meanwhile, what can we as individuals do to reduce our energy usage (to save both money and CO2 emissions)? A recent post by Martin Lewis, the Money Saving Expert outlined ‘90 Ways to Survive The Cost of Living Crisis’, which includes many hints and tips for energy saving. The Consumers Association website, which.co.uk is also a good source of advice e.g. ‘Ease the squeeze: how to save on your energy bills’
More recently, regulars will have read about our attempts to measure the generating potential of a small river in the parish. It seems we’re not the only ones to have our hopes dashed by the regulations and fees imposed by the Environment Agency. Tresoc have recently had to abandon their hopes for a hydro scheme on the River Dart, a much more promising project than ours, at a location which had historically generated electricity for the Dartington Estate in the 1930s. You can read about it here…
To quote Rupert Armstrong Evans of Evans Engineering (Water and Power engineers since 1810), “Decades of environmental legislation designed to protect rivers have inadvertently caught small domestic scale waterpower and watermills in their web and will kill them off in a few years if nothing changes.” Rupert’s home, Trecarrell Mill, a working mill for around 500 years, was one of the first to feed ‘green electricity’ into the National Grid. Rupert was upgrading it to produce enough electricity for around 30 homes when the EA imposed new conditions that rendered the project unviable. Trecarrell is only one of many historic water mills across the UK with the potential to become sources of renewable energy.
100 editions of the newsletter – what an achievement! SHARE is proud to be a regular contributor to the Connection since our early days in 2015. We registered as a Community Benefit Society that year, and together with the Parish Council, installed our first solar PV array on the Parish Hall roof. This continues to supply power for the Hall and will do so for years to come.
Regular readers will remember earlier articles describing our initial investigations into the potential of water turbines. For the benefit of newer readers, those investigations involved installing a measurement weir structure, however this unfortunately came to a premature end when the Environment Agency took an active interest. Temporary measurement weirs are permitted, however in this instance the EA considered that expensive licences would be needed, and that special provisions would have to be put in place to enable eels and migrating fish to move upstream unhindered. To our knowledge, eels and migrating fish haven’t been seen in this tributary of the Lynher in living memory, however the possibility that Samantha Salmon might take a wrong turn and find her path obstructed was enough to keep the good folk at the EA awake at night. Also, the required licences were unaffordable, and so the measurement weir had to go. Continue reading
As well as the on line newsletter we also offer a print copy which can be delivered to you within the parish. We love your feedback and articles email to editor@south-hill or call Ali on 07305 044049.
You can follow us on our South Hill Parish FACEBOOK Group Where you can share posts of interest, lost cats and dogs, for sale or wanted items…
THANK YOU, AND ENJOY READING THE NEWSLETTER.
From The Connection Team
Archived newsletters (all of them!)
can be found in our public Google Drive folder – here…
Business advertisers can be found on our Local Business page
First of all, we’d like to thank our Cornwall Councillor Sharon Daw for a recent grant from her “Community Chest” fund. We’re having hi-visibility vests made, with our logo on the back, for volunteers. This will help reduce any risk to our regular volunteers collecting recycling (see below) in various locations; also planting trees, and helping with the firewood project.
The project continues to grow, thanks to our enthusiastic volunteers that help monitor collection bins, pick up, sort into boxes and send the vast amount of items to Terracycle every month. By saving these otherwise hard to recycle items from being incinerated, we are generating funds for charities.
Continue reading