MaidEnergy Co-Operative | Clean Energy, Locally Owned

SHARE OFFER CLOSED – £260,000 RAISED

MaidEnergy’s share offer closed on 22 July 2019, succeeding in raising over £260,000 of investment from over 70 investors.

We’re enormously grateful to each one of our new and old members who bought shares. We’d particularly like to thank the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead who invested £10,000 to help decarbonise their borough at the launch of our share offer.

We’ve raised enough to go ahead with the first wave of solar panel installations and we’re looking forward to getting started on them, fighting climate change and helping community groups with lower bills and cleaner air.

Karl Fenwick, Director of Thames Valley Athletics Centre (TVAC), says: “We were delighted to be selected as one of the sites for a solar PV installation by MaidEnergy. The support of local people has always been important to us and ourcommunity has stepped up to invest in solar because they recognise that it will help us to ‘go green’ and reduce our bills. We love it that the people who use our centre now also have a stake in our energy generation.”

This year is the last chance to claim the feed-in tariff, the guaranteed 20-year government payments for generating solar. We’re putting that to good use.

Please do register your interest in future share offers at maidenergy@outlook.com or by phone on 01628 260 130, or on the contact form at the bottom of this page.

NEW SHARE OFFER OUT NOW

shareoffer.maidenergy.coop

Our share offer launched on Tuesday 18 June and closes on Monday 22 July!

We’ve registered 10 new sites and we’re seeking £350,000 of investment to install solar on them all. The minimum investment is only £100 to enable as many people as possible to be part of it. We’re aiming to pay 5% interest for 20 years, as well as returning investors’ capital by the end of that time.

The closing date is 22 July, or when we reach £350,000, whichever is sooner.

The government are ending the feed-in tariff, the old system of support for solar, and this year is our last chance to claim it. Community energy co-ops like MaidEnergy have until March 2020 to install solar and connect it to the grid. So we’re working with 10 community buildings in the Maidenhead and Windsor area to take the opportunity.

Our vision is clean energy, locally owned. We’re a members’ co-op, we fight climate change by installing solar panels, we pay a decent return to investors, and we serve our community by cutting local community groups’ electricity bills.

2019 is a big year for the climate, and for us. If you’re interested in being part of it, go to our share offer site

URGENTLY SEEKING ROOFTOPS

MaidEnergy is urgently looking for charities and schools local to the Maidenhead, Windsor, Ascot and Egham area which own a large roof space (80-100m²). We want to use this space to generate energy from solar PV panels, long term. Our members will pay for the panels and retain ownership of them, and in return, the solar PV will help protect the charity or school against rising energy prices and C02 emissions.

Community and charity buildings are our preferred partner, as opposed to commercial buildings, as we’d like the savings to benefit our local community. We are already generating energy through almost 100kWp on the roof of Norden Farm Arts Centre in Maidenhead, and The Magna Carta School in Egham – in the past 12 months alone, we’ve produced almost 90,000 kWh!

The reason for the approach now is that the government has announced its intention to end the ‘generation tariff’ for renewable energy on 31/3/19, and is consulting on plans to end the ‘export tariff’ as well – so to benefit, we need to get in before it ends. A solar installation over 50kw capacity will qualify for ‘ROOFIT‘ procedure, which would give MaidEnergy 12 months to build and commission installations before the opportunity is gone.

A reasonable estimate on say 50kWh installed, could mean a saving of c.£40k in energy costs over 20 years. We would also gift the building owner a small amount of shares as per paying investors, so they would make a small profit of c.4%.

We are available to talk this through over Christmas and in early Jan.

Best wishes for a sustainable Christmas!

Nicola Davidson – Director, MaidEnergy Community Benefit Society – maidenergy@outlook.com

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED – 1

It’s been a very busy year for MaidEnergy and we’ve come a very long way! A big thank you to all our investors, Our first share offer raised £130,000, enough for our first site, Norden Farm Arts Centre in Maidenhead.

Norden Farm have a great café and artistic programme, as well as the fine sight of the solar rooftop in action. So if you’re local go and visit, catch a play, have a coffee and admire the panels.

We’ve been generating away very nicely for a year now. We recently received our first payment from Good Energy. It’s generated over 33,000 kwh (kilowatt hours) so far, which is enough to power 10 houses for a year.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED – 2

The first share offer also raised enough for our second, larger, site on the main block at The Magna Carta School in Egham, and in August we installed it (during a heatwave – we proved it’s certainly a good site catching the full power of the sun with absolutely no shade at all).

We had hoped to be able to do this in the Easter rather than the summer school holidays, but as we discovered, Magna’s status as an academy meant we needed an extra permission from the EFA, the government body which oversees the buildings and assets of academy schools, which was a long process. In the first two months it generated over 6,000 kwh.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED – 3

Our second share offer raised another £40,000 for a separate smaller site at The Magna Carta School, on S block, leaving some funds for another site. We installed that one in September and both are working well.

Thanks to a grant from E.ON we have a display unit in the school canteen to demonstrate to the school community and visitors how much renewable power they’re generating and carbon they’re saving.

Check out our Be Part of It page to see what we’re doing next….