Blog | Co-ops

Community Energy Birmingham has best year for solar output

February 7, 2021

A brief look back from our Treasurer as to the impact that CEB has had.

Treasurer John Newson recently wrote the below about Community Energy Birmingham’s 2020

“CEB added another solar array in 2020, helping to further the decarbonise the electricity supply in Birmingham. We put 30 kilowatts of panels onto the Castle Vale Stadium, which mostly exported to the local grid, since the pandemic meant the building had to be closed.

All the 6 buildings together in 2020 generated 74, 654 kilowatt hours of zero carbon electricity. This is 70% more electricity than CEB was generating in 2018, before the Castle Vale arrays.

The cumulative total since the first array in 2012 has been 300,500 kwh or 300 megawatt hours.

Looking at carbon dioxide savings, the current grid average is 231 grams/ kwh, so we can calculate that at least 69 tonnes of carbon dioxide has been saved since 2012.

We expect our panels to last at least 20 years, probably more…”

I went to visit the Castle Vale Stadium Array earlier this year. It was a proud moment to see the results of all of our hard work from Community Energy Birmingham. A big thank you to all of our member investors for trusting us with their money to put the Solar Array on Vale Stadium. 2020 was a difficult period for some of the building users that use the electricity provided by our Solar Arrays. This meant that our income from the building users was below projections. The CEB board decided to reduce our rate of return to our member shareholders to 2%, which our Member/ Shareholders understood and accepted.

It was very pleasing to see the above figures produced by our Treasurer, which shows the quantifiable difference that Community Energy Co-ops like ourselves can make. The Board of Community Energy Birmingham are currently working through the Strategy for 2021 and we are starting to implement our plans for the year. When I can, I will provide an update. There are some new exciting ideas in the pipeline!

If you’d like to learn more about Community Energy Birmingham please have a look at our website, and if you have any ideas that could be useful to CEB, then please get in touch.