Energy efficiency
Announcements prior to September 2017, including this announcement, occurred under previous ownership.
17 February 2015
Today the UK Business Secretary Vince Cable announced a new investment of £60m by the UK Green Investment Bank (GIB) and the Strathclyde Pension Fund (SPF) in UK community-scale renewable energy projects, through Albion Community Power plc (ACP).
ACP is a power generation company that builds, controls and operates community-scale renewable energy projects across the UK. It has already identified a substantial project pipeline and will invest the capital on behalf of GIB and SPF.
GIB has committed to provide up to £50m with SPF investing a further £10m. ACP is working to attract a further £40m from additional co-investors to take the total sum of investable capital to £100m.
The finance will be used to provide equity funding of between £1m and £10m for a broad range of community-scale renewable construction projects including run-of-river hydro-power, onshore wind on brownfield sites such as industrial estates, and biogas projects including anaerobic digestion and landfill gas.
The pipeline will be built in partnership with project developers such as Infinite Renewables, based in Bridgend, Wales, and Green Highland Renewables, based in Perth, Scotland.
The first project to be announced from this new investment – to be developed by Green Highland Renewables (GHR) – is a 2 MW run-of-river hydro-power project on the River Allt Coire Chaorach near Crianlarich, approximately 10 miles north of Loch Lomond. The £8.5m project will generate 8 GWh of electricity per year, equivalent to the power requirements of about 1,900 homes.
Run-of-river hydro projects use the natural river flow to generate renewable electrical energy.
Across the UK capacity exists for an additional 800 MW of new hydro-power projects, enough to power over 500,000 homes with renewable energy. Building-out this capacity would see an investment of over £3bn in remote rural communities. Around 80% of this capacity is in Scotland with the remainder split between England and Wales.
This is the first investment in hydro-power from GIB and SPF.
Vince Cable
Business Secretary
Lord Smith of Kelvin
Chair of UK Green Investment Bank
Councillor Paul Rooney
Chair of Strathclyde Pension Fund
Volker Beckers
Chair of Albion Community Power
Richard Round
Chief Executive Officer of Green Highland Renewables
Media enquiries
About Albion Community Power
ACP builds, owns and operates renewable energy plants across the UK. ACP receives executive support, advisory and administrative services from Albion Ventures, which has a strong track record in renewable energy projects. To date Albion has invested or committed £60m in renewable energy projects and, of this, £35m is now producing energy. http://www.albioncommunitypower.co.uk/
About Strathclyde Pension Fund
The £14bn Strathclyde Pension Fund is one of the UK’s largest, providing services to around 200,000 people across the public, private and third sectors. It is part of the Scottish Local Government Pension Scheme and is administered by Glasgow City Council. http://www.spfo.org.uk/
About Green Highland Renewables
Green Highland Renewables specialises in the development of small scale hydro-electric schemes. Since 2007, GHR has worked on a wide range of run-of-river schemes at every phase of the development process, from initial concept through to consent, construction and operation, as well as providing remedial works and scheme optimisation. http://www.greenhighland.co.uk/