Towards a Sustainable Cumbria
A new hydroelectric scheme proposed for the River Weaver in Cheshire has smashed expectations and met its £635,000 fund-raising target in just over 48 hours. Developers Hydrosense Renewables and Triodos Bank, which is running the scheme’s corporate finance, announced yesterday that the crowdfunding round raised the cash in just 51 hours.
German discount supermarket chain Aldi has announced it will install 96,000 solar panels across more than 50 UK stores by the end of 2017. The panels will be added to the 85,000 units already installed across 275 stores and all nine of Aldi’s regional distribution centres, which generate more than 17,500MWh of electricity a year. The installations will take Aldi’s total store investment in solar to almost £17m, and will enable the retail giant to produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of more than 6,200 households.
Repowering London plans to create 40 energy gardens on the Overground network by October this year. The gardens will grow food and flowers, host bees and birds and clean the air on the platforms, where particulate matter from breaking trains is hazardous for humans to breathe. The next step is to raise money to instal solar panels on the roof of an overpass at Highbury & Islington station. The panels will generate money from the feed-in tariff that energy suppliers pay to those putting energy into the system. The plan is to distribute the tariff revenue across the Energy Garden group to fund a volunteer coordinator at each station. TfL did not respond to requests for comment.
More than 7,400 cities and local councils have signed up to a ‘Global Covenant of Mayors’ to fight climate change, galvanised by Donald Trump’s dismissal of scientists’ concerns for the future. “What President Trump has done is he has – unintentionally as he does with so many things – organised and focussed people who have been doing a number of good things in hundreds of different places. “Now mayors are communicating and working in a fashion that I have not seen during my seven years in office. Mr Reed said Atlanta had committed to be powered by 100 per cent renewable energy by 2035, among a raft of other measures designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And he said, regardless of Mr Trump’s policies, American cities had the power to meet the carbon targets laid out in the Paris Agreement, which was ratified by Barack Obama.
Bristol Energy Cooperative is seeking to crowdfund more than £1 million which will help to pay for its maiden battery storage investment. Earlier this week the community energy group announced its intention to raise a total of £1.15 million, the proceeds of which will help repay previous loans and invest in a Tesla Powerpack installation planned for a community housing scheme in Winchester. The bulk of the planned raising will however go towards the repayment of short-term loans from Close Brothers and Bristol City Council which it used to complete solar PV projects prior to reductions in the feed-in tariff.