
Thames Travel becomes first project in innovative smart trial
A new 50 kWp solar PV scheme on the Thames Travel bus depot roof in Didcot is now live. It is providing the company with green electricity at a discount rate and is helping cut our county’s carbon emissions by saving almost 20 tonnes of CO2 being emitted each year.
Thames Travel joins 36 other Oxfordshire schools, businesses, and community organisations as hosts of a Low Carbon Hub (LCH) renewable energy project. The solar panels were funded by the LCH’s most recent share offer, the Community Energy Fund, in which local investors put their savings to work to support community energy.
This new solar PV project will also form part of Project LEO or Local Energy Oxfordshire, which is hailed as being ‘one of the most ambitious, wide-ranging, innovative, and holistic smart grid trials ever conducted in the UK’. UK’s electricity system is changing. The increase in small-scale renewables and low-carbon technologies is creating opportunities for consumers to generate and sell electricity, store electricity using batteries, and even for electric vehicles (EVs) to alleviate demand on the electricity system by charging at periods of low demand.
Project LEO seeks to create the conditions that replicate the electricity system of the future to better understand these relationships, and grow an evidence base that can inform how we manage the transition to a smarter electricity system.
Photo and some text from http://bit.ly/33vwcRv. Other text from https://project-leo.co.uk/