Category Archives: Wind Turbine

A huge thank you to all who voted for us on Energyshare.com – we won, beat­ing com­pet­i­tion from nearly 1,000 other com­munity renew­ables pro­jects from around the UK! And thanks also to those who passed the mes­sage round their net­works encour­aging oth­ers to vote.

The prize is fund­ing to com­plete feas­ib­il­ity and site invest­ig­a­tion work for a community-owned wind tur­bine on land at Seafield Waste Water Treatment Works.  The fund­ing is very wel­come but just as valu­able is the demon­stra­tion of massive sup­port from local people for the project.

With best wishes,

PEDAL and Greener Leith

A short plea by video from volun­teer and tur­bine pro­ject stal­wart Chas Booth on why you should vote for the Porty & Leith Community Wind Energy Project:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zGKjgL6fjI

Chas was speak­ing from the Energyshare final vot­ing event in London today.

Thanks for rep­res­ent­ing, Chas!

You can vote for us (before 5PM) at www.energyshare.com/voting

Today, Rob Gibson, MSP for Caithness, Sutherland and Ross (Scottish National Party) placed the fol­low­ing motion in the Scottish Parliament:

Motion S4M-01448 — Rob Gibson (Caithness, Sutherland and Ross) (Scottish National Party) : Vote, Vote, Vote for Strathpeffer, Portobello and Leith

That the Parliament con­grat­u­lates Strathpeffer Community Centre in Ross-shire and Portobello and Leith Community Wind Energy Project in Edinburgh for mak­ing it through to the final round of vot­ing in the Energyshare.com con­test to receive fund­ing toward com­ple­tion of their com­munity renew­ables and energy sav­ing pro­jects; notes that they are the only Scottish pro­jects to make it through to the final round and con­grat­u­lates them on what it sees as their drive and tenacity in pur­su­ing their pro­jects to this stage; notes that they have chosen St Andrew’s Day, Scotland’s national day, to launch a cam­paign for Scots to sup­port their two pro­jects; notes that both pro­jects have engaged with the local com­munity in the pro­mo­tion of renew­able energy and energy  sav­ing; con­siders that community-owned renew­ables and energy sav­ing can make an import­ant con­tri­bu­tion to tack­ling cli­mate change and redu­cing fuel bills, and encour­ages all those who sup­port community-owned renew­ables and energy sav­ing to register their sup­port for these pro­jects on the energyshare.com web­site by 3 December 2011.

Supported by: Sandra White, Annabelle Ewing, Angus MacDonald, David Torrance, John Finnie, Dennis Robertson

You can also view this motion on the Scottish Parliament web­site.

Two Scottish com­munity renew­able energy pro­jects have teamed up to
make a St. Andrew’s Day appeal for sup­port. The two pro­jects – one
from Edinburgh and the other from Strathpeffer in the Highlands – have
chosen Scotland’s national day to appeal for online votes to help them
win fund­ing from the Energyshare fund.

River Cottage and Scottish Gas are put­ting power in the hands of the
people from across Scotland by encour­aging them to vote in their
Energyshare Fund, a new green ini­ti­at­ive giv­ing the pub­lic a say on
where hun­dreds of thou­sands of pounds should be spent to help local
com­munity energy projects.

The energy­share fund will enable com­munit­ies to gen­er­ate renew­able
energy which will cre­ate an income stream to sup­port a vari­ety of
com­munity activities.

Strathpeffer Community Centre in Ross-shire and Portobello & Leith
Community Wind Energy Project in Edinburgh are two loc­ally run
com­munity pro­jects from Scotland who have made it through to the last
19 schemes (out of nearly 1000) in a bid to win the funding.

Portobello & Leith Community Wind Energy Project

Portobello & Leith Community Wind Energy Project would see a
community-owned wind tur­bine built at Seafield in Edinburgh. In 2010,
PEDAL – Portobello Transition Town and Greener Leith, star­ted work­ing
together to explore the feas­ib­il­ity of a wind tur­bine on land at
Seafield Waste Water Treatment Works in Edinburgh. If suc­cess­ful, this
will be the first community-owned large scale wind pro­ject in a UK
city.

Charlotte Encombe, Chair of Greener Leith said: “Portobello & Leith
Community Wind Energy Project has the poten­tial to make a big
dif­fer­ence to car­bon emis­sions and gen­er­ate sub­stan­tial fund­ing for
the next 25 years for local sus­tain­able devel­op­ment pro­jects which in
the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate simply would not be con­sidered
afford­able. If we are suc­cess­ful, the fund­ing will be a big step
towards real­ity for a pro­ject that could reduce CO2 emis­sions from
elec­tri­city gen­er­a­tion by between 400 and 2000 tonnes per year over
the life­time of the install­a­tion. We’d like as many Scots as pos­sible
to show their sup­port on this St. Andrew’s Day and vote for Portobello
& Leith Community Wind Energy Project by vis­it­ing
energyshare.com/voting.

Eva Schonveld, Chair of PEDAL – Portobello Transition Town said: “We
are delighted to have got this far in the Energyshare com­pet­i­tion, but
if we are to turn our renew­able vis­ion into real­ity, we really need
Scots the world over to sup­port our pro­ject on St. Andrew’s Day.”

Strathpeffer

Locally run, Strathpeffer Community Centre is open to all the
com­munity. Despite being only 10 years old, the centre is not energy
effi­cient. The centre wants to be more effi­cient and reduce costs so
that the money the char­ity raises can go on activ­it­ies for the
com­munity and not on keep­ing the centre heated. They are con­cen­trat­ing
on installing prac­tical energy sav­ing meas­ures includ­ing auto­matic
entrance doors, motion sens­ing light switches and loft insulation.

Clara Hickey, Strathpeffer Community Centre Manager said: “We are
delighted to be in the final nine­teen com­munity groups selec­ted by
Scottish Gas and River Cottage to win the energy­share prize.  We are
call­ing on people from across Scotland to vote for us as our pro­ject
is based on the prac­tical things we can do to the centre to make it
more effi­cient and so save money on our elec­tri­city bill, small
changes will mean a lot to us and our com­munity. We have had a great
deal of sup­port from our vil­lage but need the whole of Scotland to now
get behind us and vote for us. We hope as many people cast their vote
for Strathpeffer by vis­it­ing energyshare.com/voting.”

River Cottage’s Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall said:“We have already seen
at energyshare.com com­munit­ies who through either sav­ing money on
their energy bills or cre­at­ing income though energy gen­er­a­tion have
rein­vig­or­ated key com­munity facil­it­ies. The fund­ing avail­able is not
simply about tur­bines or solar PV, it’s about enabling people to make
their com­munit­ies more sus­tain­able – both envir­on­ment­ally and
economically.”

Gearoid Lane, Managing Director of British Gas New Markets, said:
“We’re see­ing a genu­ine groundswell of interest around the coun­try
from com­munit­ies want­ing to gen­er­ate their own clean, green energy.
Energyshare is the first ini­ti­at­ive of its kind that allows people to
have their say in how com­munit­ies save and gen­er­ate their own energy.”

There will be four recip­i­ents of fund­ing, decided entirely by the
pub­lic via a vote that is tak­ing place at energyshare.com/voting.
There are three cat­egor­ies: small, medium and large and people can
vote once in each category.

Strathpeffer is within the small cat­egory and Portobello and Leith
Community Wind Energy Project is within the medium cat­egory. They are
the only groups that have reached this final stage from Scotland.So
they hope to gain as much local sup­port as they can in addi­tion to
inspir­ing oth­ers across Britain with their excit­ing plans.

The pub­lic vote opened on 15 November and the win­ners will be
announced on 3^rd December.

Anyone vot­ing can become a win­ner too — River Cottage is giv­ing away 5
books every day to voters.  Plus, for the energy­share Group who gets
the most sup­port­ers vot­ing, they can scoop a £1,000 cash prize.

Get involved now at energyshare.com/voting

Out of nearly 1,000 par­ti­cip­at­ing pro­jects from across the UK, PEDAL and Greener Leith’s pro­posal for a com­munity wind tur­bine at Seafield Waste Water Treatment Works is in the final 19 that might win fund­ing from Energyshare!   We are in the medium pro­jects cat­egory and so stand to win up to £80,000 towards the project.

Vote for us HERE 

Please note you only get one vote per pro­ject cat­egory.

If you are already a sup­porter of our pro­ject on the Energyshare web­site, please note this is not the same as vot­ing! All sup­port­ers will still need to place their votes if they want us to win the fund­ing. Winning pro­jects will only be judged on num­bers of votes, not num­bers of supporters.

We have pro­duced an updated set of Frequently Asked Questions for those who are inter­ested in find­ing out ore about the pro­ject and how it is progressing.

Spread the word

Please ask your friends, col­leagues and neigh­bours if they can sup­port us, by for­ward­ing this mail, adding the Energyshare vot­ing wid­get (avail­able on the right of this web­site or on the EnergyShare web­site) to your web­site site and/or Facebook page, or through Twitter - ask­ing them to vote for Portobello & Leith Community Wind Energy Project. Pleas note you can sign up to Energyshare using your Facebook account if you prefer this to using your e-mail account.

Thank you

A huge thanks you to all our sup­port­ers. We’re really pleased to have got this far, and clearly we couldn’t have done it without your help.

Support for tur­bine flyer — vote for us

Fintry Development Trust has today released a short doc­u­ment­ary that shows how com­munit­ies can bene­fit from invest­ing in renew­able energy. The vil­lage of Fintry in Stirlingshire is a primary example of a com­munity that has embraced renew­able energy – and benefited greatly.

The short doc­u­ment­ary film Wind of Change has been released online.  It shows how Fintry, with its 300 house­holds, became the first vil­lage in the UK to enter a joint-venture agree­ment with a wind farm developer. Instead of fight­ing the plans for the 14-turbine devel­op­ment, they con­vinced the renew­able developers to add an addi­tional tur­bine for the vil­lage to the pro­posed wind farm. Fintry now receives an aver­age of approx­im­ately £30,000-£50,000 a year in rev­enue from the wind tur­bine and is invest­ing the money to the bene­fit of the entire com­munity. Fintry Development Trust man­age the income stream from the tur­bine and has provided free insu­la­tion to more than half of the house­holds in the vil­lage and is now embark­ing on new ambi­tious pro­jects to even­tu­ally make Fintry a sus­tain­able, zero waste and zero car­bon community.

Wind of Change fol­lows the Fintry com­munity as it car­ries out a num­ber of these pro­jects such as installing micro-renewable heat­ing sys­tems, plant­ing a com­munity orch­ard and open­ing a wood­land area for the local primary school. The 15-minute doc­u­ment­ary was pro­duced by Edinburgh-based film­maker Cornelia Reetz. It premiered at the UK Green Film Festival in Leeds and Glasgow and will be broad­cast on the Community Channel in a few weeks time. You now have a chance to watch the film online on the fol­low­ing web­site: http://windofchangefilm.wordpress.com/.