Future Energy Landscapes

At the end of March NCE hosted a rather lively event at the Hinton Hall. Billed as an exercise to explore the community’s views about potential sites for small solar farms and/or wind turbines in our local area, the Future Energy Landscapes workshop certainly sparked a diversity of views – not to say, set many hares running – among the highly energised participants in the packed room.

The organisers, a pair of experienced workshop leaders from the Centre for Sustainable Energy, had prepared maps of locations where conditions might be feasible according to various criteria such as orientation and visibility for solar, and elevation and distance from habitation for wind, in the four parishes of Tisbury, West Tisbury, Hindon and Fonthill Gifford.

Those of us taking part were invited to first consider places we each considered ‘special to us personally’, and places ‘not so special’. ‘Special’ could mean whatever we liked. This was an icebreaker, and we were asked to put coloured stickies on a huge wall-map. Then, in tables of about six, we got down to the nitty gritty of discussing the pros and cons of potential ground-mounted solar and wind sites – not easy in our beautiful corner of rural Wiltshire.

It’s fair to say the room was abuzz with controversy, pitting the need for renewables and home-grown energy security against the potential eyesores and hazards (proven and unproven) of turbines and solar panels. The wall-map was soon plastered with a rich tapestry of colourful opinion, which will doubtless be quite a challenge for the CSE team to summarise. Their report is awaited with eager anticipation.

The workshop was just the first step in an ongoing process involving a survey, further analyses and events, not just in our area, but also in five other parts of Wiltshire in conjunction with Wiltshire Council. Tisbury was specifically chosen for being in a National Landscape area. The conclusions will not be binding in any way, but it’s hoped that the Council environmental team will be better able to understand the attitudes and feelings of the different communities in Wiltshire as we all go forward over the next decade or so towards net zero.

Local Power Plan

Another element of this important journey is the government’s recently announced Local Power Plan – a major boost for local and community-owned clean energy nationwide. The plan sets out how communities like ours in and around Tisbury will be able to directly benefit from the energy they help to produce. As ever, the crucial ingredient is money, and the government has pledged to provide ‘up to £1 billion of funding’, hands-on support, better business models and policy ambition and regulatory reform so that local projects can be developed at scale across the UK.

We, at NCE, intend to make the best of this opportunity, perhaps by developing a local energy generation and purchasing network in which local households and businesses can ‘plug into’ cheaper greener power generated by a whole variety of community-owned mainly rooftop solar installations within our local electricity substation area.

Hopefully, we can make a start this summer – so watch this space.

 

Alan Maryon-Davis, Chair, NCE

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