Phil comes from an oil and marine engineering career; recent roles have including project management. He has extensively studied Environmental Science and renewable energy generation and realised if we don’t drastically reduce carbon emissions in a few decades we and most life on earth will be extinct. In the past 18 years he has been involved in various roles in about 100 community energy projects. Phil believes there is a significant role for community sized renewable energy in the post fossil fuel era ahead. Community sized is a plant too small for the commercial companies to operate, but too big for the private individual to afford. Ideally, they should be owned by and benefit the local community. Phil has developed a scheme for village halls to benefit from renewable energy, by using an innovative community loans scheme. These allow the scheme to be funded and provide low-cost power to the hall. So they can concentrate on delivering vitally needed services like mums and toddlers, food banks and heat hubs. Our pellet boiler in Wellington Baptist Community Centre allowed the first heat hub in the country to be set up. He has immense experience of the technical, financial, and the social dimensions to these projects, as well as experience of actually “making them work”. The community benefit from these schemes is in the region of £1/2m a year.
