Keeping It Local – Scotland Loans £4million to Renewable Energy Schemes

 

Image by Nomadic Lass

 

When it comes to promoting renewable energy, Scotland is ahead of the game with well over £750million invested in Scottish renewable energy projects last year alone. Now, they have just launched a brand new scheme aimed at bringing awareness of renewable energy and its benefits down to a local level thanks to almost £4million loaned to local communities and businesses for ‘green’ energy projects.

The loans are going towards funding 42 renewable projects across Scotland, of which 29 are community owned, one is owned by a rural business and the remaining 12 were in fact proposed by Scottish farmers. Wind turbines seem to be the trend of the day, making up 32 of the 42 projects. There are also 9 hydro schemes in the making and one rather unusual anaerobic digestion plant project.

The anaerobic digestion plant is being set up by Barony College in Dumfries and is receiving one of the largest loans, £135,000, despite only offering to produce 0.5MegaWatts (MW) of generating capacity. At the other end of the spectrum is a wind project in Stirling that is expected to produce the same capacity for a much smaller £14,000 loan. Two farmers in Highland are getting the lion’s share of the loans, receiving £150,000 each for two wind projects, each predicted to produce a pretty respectable 4.6MW of capacity.

 Image by amandabhslater

 

In total, these locally owned projects will produce 56MW of generating capacity which is a significant step towards Scotland’s target of producing 500MW of renewable energy through community and locally-owned projects by 2020. The Scottish government has further renewable projects in the pipeline that are expected to create 17GigaWatts (GW) of generating capacity, more than enough to cover the 16GW of energy that the country uses each year, meaning that by 2020 it is not totally out of the question that Scotland may be powered entirely by renewable energy sources.

These loans are being provided by CARES (Community and Renewable Energy Scheme) following the scrapping of a similar grants scheme. The idea behind swapping to loans is that the same money will benefit many, many communities as it is paid back, with interest, and then lent out again for new projects. All community schemes borrowing loans will be pouring 100% of their profits back into the community, whilst projects run by businesses must give at least 20% of their pre-tax profits to their local community, so that everyone benefits from it. Overall, it seems like a win-win situation to me.

A recent government report stated that as a whole, the UK may source 35% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. So if Scotland may well be running entirely off green energy by that point, is England really doing enough towards creating a renewable future or should we be more inspired by our northern counterparts to create similar projects in our own communities? I’d love to hear your thoughts...