Community-owned Pomona Solar Co-op, established in 2015, has just celebrated 10 years of generating clean solar power for four local businesses and the surrounding area, while raising funds to support local causes. Read more about the recent event held at Almeley village hall, whose new solar roof and battery storage were funded in part by Pomona’s community fund, in this post.

During this event, Pomona directors presented the key milestones and achievements of the Co-op over the last 10 years. Read about them in the slides presented below.

Community-owned Pomona Solar Co-op, established in 2015, has just celebrated 10 years of generating clean solar power for four local businesses and the surrounding area, while raising funds to support local causes.

To mark the achievement, the volunteer directors and members were joined on 25 July by local MP Ellie Chowns and a range of other guests, in a celebration of Pomona and other community energy initiatives. The venue? Almeley village hall, whose new solar roof and battery storage were funded in part by Pomona’s community fund – two of the Almeley team described the hurdles of putting that in place. The gathering also heard about plans from Big Solar Co-op and from Shropshire and Telford Community Energy’s. wind and heat network.

Pomona’s site near Tarrington is fairly small by modern standards, with a generating capacity of 300 kilowatts – about the same as 80 domestic rooftops of solar PV. Over the past 10 years Pomona has generated 2900 megawatt hours (the amount that about 105 homes would use over the course of 10 years). If this amount of electricity had come from a gas-fired power station, it would have produced 15,000 tons of CO2, so there’s been a climate benefit too.

Pomona Co-op’s almost 100 members are mostly local people, who raised funds for the solar installation by making various-sized investments 10 years ago. Some of the electricity generated is bought by local businesses, and what they don’t need is sold via the grid. Each year the co-op members receive an interest payment, and the co-op puts funds aside to support community projects in Herefordshire. So far, almost £12,000 has been donated, to support low-energy lighting (Courtyard Theatre), an energy survey (Llanwarne Village Hall), to support particularly vulnerable people with energy bills (Macmillan Cancer Support), work with local environment groups (Herefordshire Green Network), a scheme to encourage more community energy (Power to the People) along with funding about 50% of the Almeley scheme. The scheme was built by, and is maintained by Herefordshire firms.

“Community energy schemes like this have so many benefits”, says one of the volunteer directors, Chris Boote. “Mind you, it hasn’t all been plain sailing. But we’re looking forward to the next 10 years of solar generation from the site, and to being able to support more local projects. And we’d love to see more community energy schemes take shape across the county”.

In line with other community energy groups, Pomona has a small fund to support local community initiatives, ideally ones in line with our objectives of reducing carbon emissions and increasing social cohesion. During the summer and autumn of 2020 the Directors approved two applications – one to pay for an energy audit for Llanwarne Village Hall – enabling it to help unlock further funding for an energy retrofit – and one to support paid admin for Herefordshire Green Network, which does valuable work connecting and supporting low carbon/environmental actions across the county. Like many organisations, it has found that regular funding sources have been diverted to Covid emergency, and funding to simply keep going has been hard to come by. (N.b. two Pomona Solar directors are on the Steering Group of HGN so made declarations of interest when the latter application was made.)

The Directors welcome applications from other suitable projects in Herefordshire.

Want to know more about what’s happening with community energy? Download the latest report from the Community Energy England website.

All members should have heard from Sharenergy that we’re running our 2020 AGM on Zoom. Do join in – no need to travel. (Sorry, we’ll all have to supply our own drinks and snacks this year – but we hope to see you all for our famous buffet next time!) But if you can’t take part, PLEASE DO SEND IN YOUR VOTES as we do want to know we have your support – thanks.

284,198 kWh of beautiful clean electricity generated during 2019!

This year’s AGM takes place on Tuesday 18 July. Join us for a site visit at 5,30pm, buffet+drinks at 6.30pm – with a talk on Herefordshire’s clean energy strategy and the AGM itself at 7.15pm.

More information HERE

generated at the Pomona site in 2016!

This year’s AGM will take place in the early evening of TUESDAY 18 JULY 2017, at the same venue as last year, the Lady Emily Hall, Tarrington – further information to follow in due course but please make a note in your diaries. We would love to see as many Pomona members and other interested local people as possible.