Humshaugh village community solar farm gets backing
A village group is looking for investors after its plan to build a solar farm were approved.Residents in Humshaugh, near Hexham, have been granted planning permission to install about 2,000 solar panels to generate energy for the community. They received the support of Hexham MP Joe Morris, who brought a bill to Parliament in January asking the energy secretary to conduct a review of help available to community energy projects. David Still, a member of Humshaugh Net Zero, said villagers wanted to "use our land to create our energy".
"This project here will generate about half of the electricity we currently use in the village," Mr Still said.Planning permission for the farm was granted by Northumberland County Council.
Nick Hayward of the net zero group, said the fund had so far received £100,000 in pledges. "The profits from selling the electricity will go into a community fund," he said."We're going to use it to give grants to residents in the parish to adopt low-carbon technologies like solar panels and electric vehicle chargers." In January Morris highlighted the efforts of the village group in Parliament as part of a Ten Minute Rule Bill.
He asked the energy secretary to review the potential of community energy plans and provide more support. "It's about making sure we can decentralise our power supply and our decision making."This is so local communities like Humshaugh with genuine community buy-in, can get the infrastructure in place so they can get producing energy locally," Morris said."This could have a potentially transformative effect on communities."We need to make sure we have a system which encourages community energy rather than stall it, which I think has been the case for too long." BBC Politics North is at 10:00 GMT on Sunday and on BBCiPlayer.
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