Solar panels – update

Like all Scout organisations, Romsey District Scouts is a charity working to actively engage and support young people in their personal development, empowering them to make a positive contribution to society.  As part of that ethos, we always look to make a positive contribution as an organisation, too.  One of the ways we believe we can do that is to explore sustainable energy options whenever possible.  It tends to fit in with our desire to spend our charity’s money wisely, as well.

As we reported previously, this was the motivation behind the launch of our sustainable energy project, early in 2022, exploring options for our District Headquarters building, the Dr Peter Centre in Romsey.  The two parts of our sustainable energy project focused on Solar PV panels and replacing flourescent tubes with LED bulbs, which were priced in total at about £50,000. Matched-funding from Test Valley Borough Council and grants from The National Lottery Community Fund and the National Grid Community Grant Programme, and a private donation from Tony Trowsdale meant that installation work on the solar panels by renewable energy experts, Your Energy, Your Way, started on 13th September 2023 and was completed within a couple of weeks.  The panels were up and generating and the new bulbs were installed by early October.

Now almost a year on, our panels have already generated 10,724Kwh of electricity for our building; enough energy to make over 320,000 cups of tea, apparently!   We are also in the process of agreeing a pay-back tariff so, if we don’t need it and our battery is full, we can generate some income by sending our surplus to the National Grid.

Very soon, we will be able to compare a full year’s worth of reduced lighting costs and solar generation with previous years’ performance: we already think there will be a fantastic cost saving.  Not to mention it being a very positive message to share with our young people, of course.