Community Power for local residents

The Parish Council is looking into the feasibility of a setting up a "Community Power" scheme for residents of Audlem and surrounding areas. This has already been successfully done by South Lakeland Council (SLDC) which, working alongside a specialist organisation, arranged for a group of over 500 residents to switch their energy supplier and make savings of between £200 and £750 each for the year on their energy bill.

The way that the scheme works is:

• individual residents register their interest in joining the scheme, but with no obligation;
• once the closing date has passed the specialist organisation holds an "auction" with energy suppliers to determine the lowest suitable price;
• once the preferred supplier is chosen, the residents receive a letter stating the price and then decide whether or not to enter a 12-month fixed-price contract;
• the specialist organisation then arranges for all those that have joined the scheme to switch to the new energy supplier.

Claire Feeney-Johnson, the Deputy Leader of SLDC, told me that the scheme ran very smoothly and successfully – in fact, so much so that another one is currently being run. Because of the nature of the scheme it is more attractive to the small energy suppliers that don't have large marketing budgets and the successful supplier was OVO Energy. Not only do residents save money on their bills, they also receive 3% interest on any credit balance that they have on their direct debits!

The idea will be discussed further at the next Parish Council meeting..

You can see more about the South Lakeland scheme here.

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.