Community Energy Co-operative for Dundee?

Solar Panels on Davidson Mains Primary School, Edinburgh
pic Edinburgh Community Solar Co-operative

I support calls for a Community Solar Energy Co-operative for Dundee.  I recently attended a meeting with around twenty other interested people to look at a way forward.  The meeting was facilitated by Energy for All, an umbrella charity that looks at promoting community renewable energy co-operatives.  The idea is a similar to an idea which has been supported by the City of Edinburgh Council, the Edinburgh Community Solar Co-operative.

I am keen that we do everything that we can to protect and improve the environment in Dundee.  We all have our part to play and I think promoting community energy renewables would be a way of doing that in Dundee.  In Edinburgh the City Council facilitated the creation of Edinburgh Community Solar Co-operative which generates electricity from solar panels on the roofs of public buildings.  I was delighted to join a number of like-minded individuals recently to discuss a way forward for a similar plan for Dundee.

There was clearly interest in doing something on this and Energy for All are prepared to support attempts to set up a co-operative.  Dundee is Scotland's sunniest city and I am sure that we should find a way of using that solar energy to heat the homes of Dundee.  I think that we should be looking to do this because it will be good for the environment but I also think that it could be a way of dealing with the scourge of fuel poverty in our city.  I think that Edinburgh and rural communities across Scotland have shown the way that people should get together to form a co-operative to help themselves and their community to produce green energy and perhaps even a return on their investment.

I also think that as part of Dundee's role as an UNESCO City of Design we should be saying to architects across the city design energy efficiency and design community renewables into your plans.  Dundee boasts a lot of new school buildings and not enough was done to ensure that they had solar panels on their roofs, even south facing flat roofs do not have solar panels.

These proposals are at a very early stage and we are looking for people who are interested to express an interest at this stage. Hopefully though, this is an idea which could make a difference to Dundee.

If you are interested in this idea, you can like the Facebook page.