I'm gonna get straight on to the next speaker. So, Ali Abbas, Um, if from there is the director of Greater Manchester Community renewables, I'll hand over to you. What are you doing? My name is Ali and as I mentioned, the director of Greater Manchester Community Renewables, which is a community energy scheme we set up about eight years ago to help fund solar panels on local schools and community centres. So first, I haven't done this kind of event for about three years so sorry if I am a bit rusty. There's great to see so many people here and some people online as well. So thanks for joining. I'm going to speak a bit about why community energy is important and a bit about how it works in practise, what we've achieved as GMCR and how you can get involved. So why community energy? First of all, it brings people together to do something positive in their local communities and also gives them a sense of agency in the face of such a big challenge, like climate change. Clearly, these kind of projects helps reduce carbon emissions and cut energy bills, either by generating more renewable energy or by helping individuals and businesses to cut their energy use. It's also an opportunity for local ethical investment, for people out there who have got money sitting in bank accounts that like do something positive with their local communities. We also want to aim to support the local economy. So we always try and use local supplies where we can as well and making sure those benefits go back into the local community. And hopefully, projects like this will inspire others to take action by showing real life examples of what we can do to help tackle climate change. So how does it work in practise? it all starts in the community with a group of people coming together who got a shared interest and want to make a difference, either set up a new group or join an existing group. One of the first things to think about is what should your focus be? because the many sorts of projects, as I mentioned from generating energy to working on energy efficiency and that's about the skills and interests of your team that you build and also about the opportunities that are in your community. So in a rural environment it might be opportunities for wind or hydro, in an urban environment pretty more likely solar or energy efficiency. Once you've chosen what you want to do, the next step is to find some partners and potential sides to work with you and again as many ways of doing that. It's all about making contact with people, having conversations and thinking about not just who uses the site but who the building owner is and who need to get commissions from. As part of the process you need to develop a business plan and a financial model. So that's thinking about how you're going to raise the funds, how you are going to generate income to keep the project going and thinking about potential risks in the ways of mitigating those risks. Once you have done all that hard work, you can then start raising funds, There's different ways of doing that, you can apply for grants, you can maybe do some crowdfunding. For us, we chose community shares, which means that people in the community can invest into the project, gets more return on that investment, and we can use that money to help deliver the project. We thought that was a way of raising bigger sums and potentially through donations and crowdfunding, but you also do a mixture of those two, so it's really up to you about the kind of project that you want to do. Once you raised our funds will then use that money to install solar panels on school roofs. That's quite straightforward process. Luckily, we've got a great installer, NPR Solar, who are based in Oldham. They delivered all our projects on time and to cost, and have been really great supporting us through the projects. Once those pounds are up there, they start generating clean electricity and that electricity gets used by the sites. So if there operating during the day, will start using energy from the panels, that means that they can start saving money on their bills. We love to get that money that interest away for free, but unfortunately doesn't work out from a financial point of view, so we have to charge them flat electricity. Some community energy projects offer a fixed price, which increases with RPI. We decided to offer a fixed discount, so we said, we'll give you 25% off whatever you're paying your main supplier, and that guarantees you are saving wherever your energy prices go. Any surplus that types don't use get sold to the grid and that gives us another small income stream. Other countries are very generous for that. All that income that we generate from sales and from exports covers our running costs an organisation, and also enables enables us to pay back the investments that are members made. As well as giving some share interest, thank you for their investments and his circuses in the projects going to a community fund and that can also help support the project in the local community around carbon reduction and environmental education. So our story so far were founded in 2014, and we incorporated the Community Benefit Society in 2015. Since then, they have raised over £350,000 and that's funded solar panels on nine sites over 1200 panels. So it's aids primary schools and one community centre across Greater Manchester, not in Stockport yet but hopefully sometime soon, there's some pictures of the the solar arrays that we've we've installed. I got to admit though it's not all been plain sailing and it is quite hard work, so just to be realistic about that, it does take a lot of time and effort to get these projects off the ground. So one of the key challenges is volunteer capacity, we all do have . volunteers at the moment. So it's important to build a really strong team of volunteers who are dedicated and they can commit the time to making these projects happen. One of the other challenges is around development finance those very steps you have to go through before you can start raising funds to deliver the projects, things like feasibility or structural surveys or legal agreements. So that involves a bit of finance upfront. We were looking to get a grant from the government for that when we first started out, but those grants are unavailable now, but hopefully there are some funding available from organisations like the Stockport Council through the Stockport CAN fund. It's also been a challenge around finding suitable sites. So for solar panels, it's quite easy to find lots of great big groups facing south, It's not just about that about finding the right partners who are willing to commit to a 28 year project, and the reason why the 20 year project is we have to raise the money back to get payback are investors. So it's having that commitment to give us access to that roof space for 20 years it's a bit of a challenge, and the legal negotiations are part of that. So we have to make sure we've got a legal agreement with this building owner to have access to that room for 20 years. As soon as you get lawyers involved, that costs a lot of money, so trying to get those through is both time consuming and expensive at times. As we've heard we in a period, as we know in a period of economic uncertainty right now. So we've seen that as a result of Brexit and as a result of covid supply chain issues, we've seen increases in store costs recently, even though historical trends is for prices of installs to come down. We've also seen the current challenges around energy prices and inflation. Which means that it makes it quite hard for us to model in the future and predict what's going to happen to develop our financial models, maybe it be worth all the work when you look at what we've achieved. So we have generated, as of now over 1.1 million kilowatt hours of clean electricity which is enough to make 60 million cups of tea, It saved our partners £35,000 in their bills, and it's paid £18,000 for community fund. And that's also prevented the emissions of over 70 tonnes of Co2. It's not just about carbon emissions and about bill savings, it about changing hearts and minds. I just let you read this quote from one of our schools from Ann at Fiddles Lane. Okay, So as you can see this project in more than just about panels on roofs, it about changing the way people think and changing the way they work, and making a real difference in their communities. So what's next for us? Well, we can see that energy prices and fuel poverty are on the rise, so we started exploring energy efficiency by partnering Electrician Northwest through a grant, to deliver an energy savings projects, working with residents in local communities around the school to provide free energy advice for them. And we know we have a climate emergency, We've heard about that, and time's running out, so we need to do more faster. So let's work together to bring some more community energy to Stockport, that could be in a number of ways, it could be through us supporting you to develop your own community energy your schemes where you are. Well, it could be you working with those to find sites in Stockport that we can help deliver. So thanks very much for listening, and you want to get in touch to find out more there's our contact details. Thank you.