The closing date for the Hydro Scheme has come and gone and it has been an exciting few days as the total accelerated to just short of £100,000 from 103 investors. It has been a remarkable experience as a potential “family” has been created, from not only Stockport but from all over the UK and two from France, to nurture this project to produce clean energy. The response has surpassed virtually all if not all other Community schemes.
Unfortunately the news is not all good due to other developments over recent weeks and that now leaves us with options and opportunities, which we will explain. All things being equal, we think that the money raised would have enabled us to go ahead with the Otterspool Scheme, albeit borrowing more from the very supportive bank. But like the salmon, we have a number of weirs to leap.
Firstly we have now successfully negotiated Planning Consent. We now have full planning permission for both schemes, granted on 10th June by Stockport’s full Planning.
Secondly, at Otterspool, during the detailed work of negotiating the lease agreement, we discovered that a small part of the land that the Council (our prospective landlord) thought it owned is indeterminate. This needed the formality of a Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) which the Council was making. However, the CPO has been delayed by an unexpected objection concerning access to the riverbank by the Stockport and District Angler’s Federation. We had previously thought we had agreed sufficient provision with the fishermen but this unexpected objection means that further discussions have to take place to agree the nature of the CPO. These discussions and the resulting CPO process will take time.
In addition, the recent General Election process has been somewhat of a hindrance in that we had to cancel the official launch at the Town Hall which was planned well before the Election was called. We eventually held a well attended open-evening on the 19th May. However, just before election day we heard that the North West Development Agency (NWDA) were unable to give clarity about an apparent change in policy. Some time back we had made our submission to the NWDA for a grant of £100,000 and supplied our business plan based on obtaining a government Feed-In-Tariff (FiT) for the green electricity. Out of the blue we were getting messages from the NWDA saying that the then government might be implying that any scheme can have either the grant or the tariff, but not both as we have assumed in our financial modelling. With the change of government Ben spoke to his MP face-to-face who then wrote directly to the Minister responsible. We await clarification but we guess that this may become a detail in the Emergency Budget on 22 June
The reality of these two issues is that we have missed this year’s window of opportunity for construction as this has, broadly speaking, to take place at the end of summer and before winter.
We have asked ourselves the question whether we should simply give up (that’s easy!) or use our determination to achieve our goals next year?
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To do so we would need know that you would be happy to continue with your financial support. Your support would be a very solid base from which to raise more money, even if the Grant / FiT situation does not work in our favour, as we will by then have all of the regulatory permissions required (the Environment Agency permission is expected soon).
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It would give time for the issues about the CPO and FiT to be resolved.
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It would allow us to tender more widely for the Civil Engineering work, bringing down costs, as does the better rate we get for the Euro (we import the Archimedean screw and various other elements of the hydro system)
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The money would be securely deposited in the bank and none would be spent unless and until the full scheme approval was back on track and all the required funds raised.
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Your continued support would mean that the only barrier to construction next year is the raising of sufficient finance – something we believe we can overcome.
We consider every one of our investors as part of a family and at this point, before we make any decision, we would like “to ask the family” to hear what your thoughts and suggestions are.
To help us sift through your responses, could we ask you to indicate a simple 'yes' or 'no' to the question of whether you wish to maintain your financial support. If 'no', we will send you back your cheque. If 'yes' we will cash your cheque and hold it, as mentioned above, in a secure deposit account.
We firmly believe we can still achieve our aim of constructing two hydro sites and we need your support to help us do so.
If you have any questions, please write them also in your email response and we'll answer them as quickly as possible. Please send all your responses to...
Steve.welsh@h2ope.co.uk
07964 106037
Steve Welsh; Doug Everard; Ben Alexander
Founding Directors
Steve Welsh
Water Power Enterprises (h2oPE)
07964 106037
01706 813663
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