Low Carbon Gordano and Lockleaze Neighbourhood Trust have been invited to work up a project plan by Power To Change Trust, which will hopefully lead to a £100,000 grant from the Next Generation energy award scheme.
This starts with a funded R&D phase with the Centre for Sustainable Energy, Bristol Energy Company and Zero Carbon Bristol to develop plans for a proposed rooftop solar farm in Lockleaze that will place a megawatt of solar panels on around 300 domestic roofs. The solar energy generated will provide electricity at a discount to householders who have the solar panels on their roofs, with any surplus being shared with neighbours as well. The scheme will also provide energy efficiency improvements for households. This is a pilot project with potential for wider replication across the city as part of Bristol City Leap, and Bristol’s plans to decarbonise by 2030.
The solar map was presented in prototype form at the Our Data Bristol event on February 18, and successfully integrates solar rooftop potential information with indices of fuel poverty and the like, and aggregates the data at postcode, LSOA, street and ward levels. This was done by a group of geographic information system experts with an award of £1500. The user interface is not yet street ready, but was be the topic for a second Bristol Open Data Jam / Hackathon on March 23-24.
The first presentation on the project was made at the community forum in Lockleaze on Saturday March 30, from 3-5pm
Come and find out more at the next BEN Open Meeting during EU Sustainable Energy Week on Wednesday 19th June 6.30 – 9 hosted by Lockleaze Neighbourhood Trust and Low Carbon Gordano.
Interested in community solar? BEN will also be running a “Spotlight on Solar” session in June to bring together all the solar expertise across the city and find out how sunlight from roofs across Bristol could be harvested by your community project. Watch this space for more details!