Pay someone’s electricity bill, and you keep their lights on for another month. Pay for their solar panels, and they’ve got cheaper electricity for a decade or two. I risk echoing that cliche about teaching proverbial men to fish here, but solar has a way of multiplying its impact over time. A church near me spent a £40,000 legacy on solar panels recently. Over the lifetime of the panels that will be worth £300,000 in free electricity. It is in the truest sense a gift that keeps on going.
This is an opportunity that the grant-making Linbury Trust has spotted too. Over the last couple of years they have funded a whole series of organisations to reduce their energy use and install low carbon technologies. The list, which runs to almost 30, includes homeless shelters, hospices and arts organisations such as theatres, galleries and museums.
Funding energy efficiency cuts carbon emissions, and it also saves those organisations money on their energy bills. This supports their core funding, turning that one-off grant into a long term funding boost. As an example, Leeds-based Northern Ballet reduced their monthly energy costs from £30,000 to £12,500 a month. The trust’s grant of £49,400 ends up being worth half a million within three years.
This is a win for the organisations, who can reduce their overheads and put more of their money into their work. And it’s a win for the Linbury Trust, who can make their money go further and meet social and environmental objectives with one donation.
This principle is true of taxpayer’s money too, and so we should do this with everything, right? Solar on every school, community and healthcare facility, on all social housing, and all public buildings. All of them would save money and be more resilient to energy price shocks, while reducing our use of fossil fuels and the carbon emissions they cause.
Here’s a video from the Linbury Trust showing some of the groups they have supported, and the difference energy efficiency grants have made:
(If the video above doesn’t work for you, it’s also here)
The Linbury Trust is part of a wider family of organisations that includes Ashden, and my colleagues at Ashden have been facilitating the energy learning network that gets the organisations mentioned above to share their learning as they fit low carbon technologies.
The Earthbound Report 