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Lawrence Weston is a community of several thousand residents in the city of Bristol, in the west of England, and one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the region. 

Between 2014 and 2023 a group of determined residents and supporters led a successful campaign to build an onshore wind turbine in the area through their community action group Ambition Lawrence Weston and subsequent sister group Ambition Community Energy. 

They did so overcoming great difficulties including a government-imposed, de-facto ban on onshore wind power in England that the UK’s new centre-left Labour government finally ended several weeks ago. 

The resulting turbine — a 4.2MW EP115 EP3 unit supplied by German manufacturer Enercon — began producing electricity last year and is already generating money for Ambition Community Energy and the residents of Lawrence Weston. 

Now the people behind the project hope to see it replicated elsewhere. 

Two of the project's key proponents — David Tudgey and Charles Gamble — believe they have created a model that can be replicated beyond Lawrence Weston. 

“A lot of people will say this is a one-off, that it won’t happen again. But they don’t understand me and Charles. We didn’t do it for eight years just for one demonstration turbine [and] what we have codified is the Sustainable Innovative Financial Foundations for Turbines (SIFFFT),” Tudgey, the project development director at Community Power Solutions, told “uåX˜äŠÊ˜·³Ç. 

The pair’s SIFFFT model seeks to build on the solutions they and others came up with to overcome the major challenges they faced with the Lawrence Weston turbine. 

Funding challenge 

Chief among those challenges was the difficulty of funding a high-risk, community-owned wind turbine, which can be much less attractive to investors than a larger, commercial-scale wind farm. Additionally, the impact of the de-facto ban on onshore wind was compounded by the removal of government-backed PPAs and incentives, meaning output needed to be sold on the open market. 

British wind power pioneer Andrew Garrad, who became heavily involved in developing the Lawrence Weston turbine, described how the team navigated these difficulties. 

“We had been in discussion with several banks, which were all being very helpful but were all saying, 'Well, unless you have some means of paying us back, we can’t lend you the money,' which was not unreasonable!” Garrad – the founder of renewable energy consultancy Garrad Hassan (now part of DNV) – said. 

“Then we managed to get together bits and pieces of debt. We had one grant from the West of England Combined Authority (WECA), otherwise we collected bits and pieces of debt from all sorts of organisations in Bristol, including Bristol and Bath Regional Capital, whose job it is to lend money on this sort of project. They were very helpful and were prepared to take a risk on us which was absolutely essential. Had they not been around, the thing would have fallen through. When we had pieced together all these bits of funding we were able to secure the senior debt from Thrive Renewables who were prepared to take a risk on us,”  he added.  

The SIFFFT model targets the problem of funding smaller projects by mapping the most suitable areas for community wind turbines, using a range of the key criteria from wind speeds to local flora and fauna, thereby giving assurances on the viability of a project long before it gets built. 

“We’ve now got some fairly smart algorithms which will predict locations [and] exclude the areas where you can’t put a turbine… Our model looks at turbine sites for all feasible machines from sub MW upwards, at all tower heights and appropriate wind classes, and understands the setbacks, the topple distances, the necessary distances from all the infrastructure and where [the local wildlife] are… that’s the mechanism,” Gamble, the director of Community Power Solutions, explained.  

He added: “This process gives us quite a good understanding of the necessary finances. We’ve got a robust financial model, which, given a location and a wind speed, selects a turbine and selects a site, predicts everything you need to know and allows you to stress test that financial model through development, construction and delivery of 25 years of energy to an offtaker with the correct levels of funding anticipated for rental, community benefit funding and to service the debts… we can apply that to any particular site.”  

Gamble and Tudgey first targeted south Gloucestershire, an area to the north of Lawrence Weston, with the SIFFFT model. The pair were so encouraged by the results, they now believe it can be applied far beyond the confines of western England, provided other criteria like robust community ownership are also met. 

Community support

Grassroots support for community-owned renewable energy proved essential for getting the Lawrence Weston wind turbine built. Indeed, local opposition to wind farms has long been an obstacle to the wind power industry, with local pushback resulting in projects being scrapped in Australia and Colombia, and – in the US – even ordered to be torn down. Meanwhile, industry experts have warned that without sufficient community engagement, .

Consequently, community engagement is in the first of SIFFFT’s five stages for community turbine development, which also include site assessments, applying for access to the grid, appplying for permitting approval, and securing financing and signing supplier contracts.

As others involved in the Lawrence Weston project point out, all of these steps were major milestones in building the area’s community wind turbine, not least the winning of support from residents — which swayed the local authority against a council-appointed planning officer’s recommendation to refuse permitting approval for the turbine. 

“It’s fortunate for us that the wind turbine went to a [permitting] decision a couple of weeks before local elections… I think that swayed a lot of people to go against the planning officer’s recommendations of refusal, and side with the residents. We knew that and we made sure we had good resident representation,” said Mark Pepper, a local resident of Lawrence Weston and the development manager at Ambition Lawrence Weston. 

“I think you need to have the social infrastructure set up correctly to attract investment to be able to do what we’ve done… I think that the attraction was that we were a community neighbourhood, not a community interest group. It doesn’t cut the same as the grassroots community neighbourhood,” he said. 

Ambition 

The ‘Ambition’ in the name of Lawrence’s Weston’s community energy group describes the mentality Tudgey and Gamble have when it comes to rolling out their SIFFFT model for community-owned wind power beyond Bristol and the west of England. 

“We really believe in this message that there should be a community energy model internationally… the fundamental thing is we are transferring ownership to communities. If we can see community support for the energy transition like we’ve seen in Lawrence Weston, just think about what we could achieve across the rest of the UK,” Tudgey said. 

Time will tell how far the SIFFFT model can help build other community-owned wind turbines, but Tudgey and Gamble's hard work has already been rewarded with a WECA grant of £1.5 million (€1.7 million) to build on the success of the Lawrence Weston turbine. 

“This isn’t just about building turbines. It’s about building communities, building biodversity net gain. So all of those things that a private developer might pay lip service to are being done properly through this process and that’s why we see this as a regeneration exercise and a change of ownership,” Tudgey said.