It is spring. The leaves have just come out on the branches that hang gently over the narrow and muddy gravel road that leads to Decarbonised Living Project in Farmers Village (pseudonyms), deep in the countryside of south-west England. We pass custom-made signs with elaborate names of various sized estates behind closed entry gates. A mix of farmers, relatively rich landowners and people with summer houses live here. We get closer to the location where we are to meet a group of pensioners and a farmer who have got together with the ambition to decarbonise their village. After parking the car we walk slowly up the road to take some photos on the way. The first thing we encounter is a road sign in the shape of a snail, warning drivers to reduce their speed on account of the children who, during the week, attend a small, alternative school in a little round house, just in front of the old, renovated farm building where our meeting is to be held. The farm is used as a venue for parties, such as weddings and corporate team-building events. There are at least forty pairs of wellies, some hung on a wall and some spread on the floor, for guests to use in case there is an activity arranged in the muddy fields. We are guided around the property in the warm, soothing spring sun before being offered coffee and raw milk on the first floor of the damp and chilly stone barn. It is freezing indoors, and therefore hard to enjoy the conversation fully. Our hosts try their best to make us feel very welcome, and we are informed that the raw milk can only be given away as a gift, since the local farmer, who is part of the voluntary group, does not yet have a licence to sell it. They start to chat with us immediately about their life decisions and how they have come together to keep busy, make friends and belong, and as one of them enthusiastically summarizes:
Well, what happened, I mean, we were interested in renewable energy straight away and we’d have people talk to us about wind turbines. Community Energy Network certainly came and talked to us about, you know, wind turbines. And I remember going down to meetings at Community Energy Plus with Thomas and probably Peter, where they also talked to a wider audience, because they were keen on getting wind turbines started up here. And then, in late 2009, the government set up a challenge called the Decarbonised Living Challenge. And they were offering the people, or the communities that applied, half a million pounds, and there were, I think, twenty-four villages that, you know, got this.
So, I think, yeah, it was probably Thomas that said ‘Well, yeah, we’ll do this’, so even though it seemed a bit … yeah, you know, as a transition town movement that started in 2008 we hadn’t been involved for that long. But we were able to say that, you know, we have been engaged in the whole exercise through some energy surveys, and we were able to put down enough things. But anyway, Community Energy Plus were keen, because you had to do it through an organisation, like Community Energy Network.
So we then had to put the bid in, so it was all a very rushed job of getting, you know, people who would be interested in having solar panels on their house and you know, other things. I think the idea was that it would be an example of all the different types of renewable energy installation available at the time. So, ground source, air source, hot water panels, PV, turbines. And one of the conditions was that all the work had to be done by the end of the financial year. So everything had to be done by March 31st. We had to get all the solar panels on the roofs, we had to get the wind turbine bought. We had to have bought all and have the wind turbine on site I think, even if it wasn’t erected. And we had to get planning permission!
But we didn’t manage to do all the installation we intended to do, because the people, we had people quote for this and well, I think they’d have to quote before we put the whole scheme in, so that we could say we could do it for half a million. And we had people rushing around here, you know, whole groups of contractors turned up mob-handed. I mean, one of the places to end up with a solar panel was my place, which is a converted barn. We had about five groups of people turning up there, because they’re competing with each other to get the business anyway, you know.
We were going to take all the feed-in tariffs and renewable heat incentives, if they ever came, and use those to do further installations. So, that was the whole concept. The model that we adopted was to actually give these solar panels to the people, so that they took ownership and they wrote a contract with us, and our liability was to keep them maintained, in return for all the feed-in-tariffs coming back to us. Because we took the income, we could then roll it over into more insulation. So it is, I think, nearly unique in the community, and was pretty complex from a legal point of view. I think this is why we are unique, yeah, the fact that we’ve got a revenue stream, we are able to go well beyond what a lot of the transition groups have become, which is just talk shops. We’re able to action initiatives on the ground; I think that’s been key to probably the reason why you’re here talking to us today.
