Our story
South East London Community Energy (Selce) was born in 2014, when a group of people living in Greenwich & Lewisham became so concerned about climate change that they decided to come up with a formula that would help to create a clean and just energy future.
We began by increasing South-East London's capacity for solar energy generation. To date we have installed community, member-owned solar panels on 11 schools, community buildings, churches and even a local hotel. Supplying power to the buildings they sit on, each year the arrays collectively generate 487,326 kilowatt-hours of clean electricity. Over the 20-year lifetime of our project these installations will prevent nearly 7 million metric tons of carbon emissions and save the site owners more than £300,000.
For the past seven years we have used the surplus funds from our solar sites to support local communities that are experiencing fuel poverty. We do this through energy advice, energy debt management, advocacy and education including:
-running free energy advice phone, home visits and drop-in café services;
-helping households access grant funding for home energy improvements;
-organising workshops with voluntary sector organisations and carers;
-training 'energy champions' to help empower their communities to make their homes more energy-efficient and understand the wider energy sector; and,
-delivering time-limited, needs-based, projects in partnership with local authorities and organisations.
More recently, we have developed our expertise to help households, organisations and businesses make their homes more energy efficient through behaviour change, raising awareness of different available technologies and supporting their installation of solar arrays. We run three main programmes that respond to this need: LED-ing the way! and Future-Fit Homes programmes.
As an award-winning member of Community Energy England, Selce is proud to be part of a national network of community energy groups that are paving the way for a cleaner, fairer, brighter future.
Our advice
First Steps and Key Relationships: At the start, we needed to decide on our identity and then our rules. This was a very important first step because it's essential to be very clear about your parameters. This has been so useful ever since because when we’ve had a dialogue about a particular issue, we’ve always been able to refer back to what we agreed. That has resolved any crunch points and allowed us to move forward.
The Importance of Fuel Poverty Work: Our vision is to try and build bridges to a more sustainable future: a future that’s fairer, as well as greener. We need to think about things in a different way and also recognise that you can’t leave people behind when you’re moving towards sustainability. Fuel poverty is one of those central issues that can make everything worse. So we really have to tackle that as a core issue if we’re going to take the present situation and turn it into a sustainable future.
Building Reputation Through Trust: From the very beginning, we were clear that we wanted to build our reputation through community trust. It wasn’t about getting glossy advertisements or some clever PR company to come in and do a bit of spin for us. We were trying to show that we could provide real value to the community. By supporting the community and showing them the value that we can provide, we trusted people would talk to their neighbours and friends and family and build up trust that way.
The Biggest Lesson Learned Along the Way: So many people sit around in their front rooms talking about things. We haven’t got time to do that anymore. We’ve got to get together and realise all those ambitions, realise the visions of the kind of future we want to see. That’s the transition that we need to make now – from our screens to the street and into our communities. Community and people power are the magic ingredients for a sustainable future!
Our Changeprint
Our Changeprint can be measured by the renewable energy generated (2,234MWh of electricity across our 11 community sites); carbon emissions saved (550 metric tonnes); support to community organisations and homeowners to reduce energy costs and carbon footprint; and the help to over 4,000 people in South-East London who are struggling to pay their energy bills (funded by surpluses from the community sites).
