Bristol's forthcoming solar-powered film studio will be driven by the biggest star of them all

Christopher Walken being filmed at Bottle Yard Studios, Bristol

Great, imagination-catching solar energy scheme, as reported by Positive News. Extract below:

A film studio in Bristol, England, has launched one of the largest community-powered rooftop solar arrays in the UK. Is it a sign that grassroots energy is finally coming of age?

Poring over Google Earth images of a defunct industrial building on the southern fringe of Bristol, Will Houghton spied opportunity. 

In its sprawling, 7,000 sq metre rooftop, Houghton – project developer with community energy nonprofit Bristol Energy Cooperative (BEC) – saw potential for a flagship, people-powered solar scheme.

That plans were afoot to turn the former engineering works into a second site for The Bottle Yard Studios, a council-owned film and TV studio, was all the better.

Now when TBY2, as the facility has been christened, flicks on its studio lights later this year, it will be predominantly powered by a vast array of 2,000 solar PV panels generating a combined 1MW of electricity, enough to fuel the equivalent of 250 homes.

Catalysed by the twin pressures of climate breakdown and a deepening energy crisis – and in a post-subsidy era starved of lucrative feed-in tariff (Fit) payments – grassroots energy is having to grow up and think big. All of a sudden, it seems, size matters.

“There’s so much decarbonisation to be done,” says Houghton. “We’ve made an active decision to try and maximise the size of our projects, to try and get as much solar installed as possible.”

BEC has been around for 11 years, fixing smaller arrays to the roofs of community-owned buildings in the greater Bristol area. They’ve built solar farms in the Lawrence Weston area of the city and at Puriton, near the town of Bridgwater.

They’ve also created the UK’s first domestic housing microgrid with battery storage, sinking surplus power into a Tesla battery.

Projects are funded through community share offers, with backers netting a modest annual return for their pledge. BEC has raised £15m since 2011, and reinvests all profits locally by awarding grants to community groups for carbon-saving initiatives. 

But BEC’s partnership with The Bottle Yard’s state-of-the-art expansion project rewrites the script. 

The co-op brought its funding expertise to the table to plug a city council budget shortfall, raising £1m in the process. Without it, the local authority would have realised a solar project just a third of the size.

Instead, the council takes a meaningful step towards its 2030 net zero ambition, and benefits from the surety of BEC’s solar-generated electricity, fixed at a competitive price free of the current, runaway market volatility.

By linking council buildings together under a contractual arrangement called ‘sleeving’, it is intended that surplus electricity will be used to power its other properties.

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