Competitive Bedford Borough Council is aiming to have more residents sign up to a group-buying scheme for solar panels and battery storage than its Bedfordshire partners, and has already claimed a victory with the first photo opportunity.
Yesterday, Bedford Borough, Central Bedfordshire and Luton Borough Councils launched Solar Together Bedfordshire, a solar photovoltaic (PV) group-buying scheme to offer residents, local businesses and community groups an “easy, good-value route to solar PV installations”.
At yesterday’s Climate Change Committee (Monday, May 9), Paul Pace, chief officer environment, thanked Bedford mayor, Dave Hodgson, for his help with the council’s press release.
“I know you ran around this morning to try and get a photo opportunity to do the press release,” he said.
“I don’t think Luton or Central Beds have done that, so that’s one in our cap.”
Gemma Drake, environment officer (carbon reduction), told the committee that it’s free to register for Solar Together Bedfordshire.
“It’s not just solar panels that the residents can get, they can also opt to add a battery storage pack or an EV charge point to their quote.
“And for those who already have solar panels they can apply to retrofit battery storage to get the most from their renewable energy.
“There’s no obligation to go ahead with the quote once you’ve received it,” she said.
Ms Drake explained that when the registration closes (in six weeks) there’ll be an auction with pre-approved solar panel suppliers vying to offer a competitive price.
“So they’ll bid each other down for the whole group, and then once the auction is over the installer will send out quotes to all of the registered households.
“And you’ll have a specific amount of time to either accept or reject the quote.
“After that they’ll then come and do a survey to make sure that the quote is accurate and then installation will take place,” she added.
Mr Pace said: “The bidding will be by a large group, and that’s the beauty of it, because the suppliers will actually prefer to go for something of a bigger nature rather than individual [smaller] ones.”
Councillor Lucy Bywater (Green, Castle Ward) said that this is a “really great project”. But she was concerned about the capacity for timely installations, as it has been reported that there is a national shortage of trained installers.
Ms Drake replied: “I think there have been small delays due to a supply issue with another council.
“[But] it’s more likely that suppliers are going to go with a bulk order rather than individual households,” she said.
Mr Pace said: “Obviously, we are quite competitive, so we certainly want to get more [sign ups] than Central Beds or Luton.
“We’ve already had 60 people pre-register their interest,” he added.
Mayor Hodgson said: “It would be really nice in a couple of climate change [meetings] time to know that we’ve had thousands of people applying, that would be good news.”
More information on the scheme can be found here.
by John Guinn
Local Democracy Reporter
