Funded Energy Redress Projects

The project will work with health practitioners, local authorities, and other partners to provide advice and support to vulnerable residents in Merseyside, aimed at reducing the detriment they face trying to keep affordably warm at home. Building on and aligning previous Energy Redress funded projects and recent NHS Cheshire and Merseyside Fuel Poverty Pilots, their qualified, specialist Energy Advisors will provide personalised in-depth advice to residents referred directly from clinical teams and their broader community network and referral partner organisations.

The project aims to provide detailed, high-quality telephone and face to face energy advice as well as delivering in-home energy advice sessions, highlighting practical ways to reduce energy demand and costs, including better use of existing heating controls, alternative tariffs, and behavioural changes to energy use. They will also support with referrals to other schemes supporting access to Energy Company Obligation and home updgrade grants.

This project is building on the successful delivery of a previous Energy Redress funded project. The project will continue to help householders lower bills, reduce energy use, provide small energy saving items, challenge incorrect billing and access grants and schemes to help with arrears and property improvements.  They will also refer people to specialist colleagues within their organisation to tackle additional benefits, housing and debt issues, helping in an holistic way to address the ongoing cost of living crisis.

Energy Advisors will support their Perthshire Energy Support Network to reach the elderly, families, single parents and those living rurally. They will also inform and educate local partners, ensuring they are aware of the help the project can provide and how people can access their support. 

The project aims to address energy-related challenges faced by Somali and other BAME families in West London. This project will provide tailored, culturally relevant energy advice to help these communities reduce energy consumption and lower their energy bills. By engaging 150 households, they aim to deliver comprehensive advice sessions on energy efficiency, grants, and sustainable practices. The project includes outreach sessions in community centres and mosques, distributing bilingual educational materials, and providing one-to-one advice through an advice line and drop-in centre. Home energy audits will identify areas for improvement, and they will assist households in applying for grants and subsidies for energy-efficient upgrades. 

The project refines a business model design for virtual microgrids, allowing a community energy group to sell electricity at lower prices to local consumers. To achieve this a community would need to be able to access the Balancing and Settlement system, via a Balancing Responsible Party; to design and correctly size generation and storage assets; and to operate control systems. The project will manage these aspects on behalf of the community, alongside ongoing support with the paperwork and administration of implementing and managing this solution. 

This will allow the community to set their own rates for purchasing excess energy spilled to the grid from local renewable energy assets, and selling energy back to local consumers. The project aims to provide local consumers with lower rates for their energy, whilst still generating profit for community benefit (e.g. through a local funding pot).

Warmer Homes West Midlands Phase 3 will to continue to build on the work of previous projects, providing an energy advice service for the fuel poor across the West Midlands Combined Authority area, that has already supported over 25,000 individual households across the region. 

Advice will be offered through a team of fully qualified energy advisors, community outreach workers, pathway sector specialists and trainers, over the telephone, through home visits, training sessions, events, clinics and surgeries. They will use innovative technology; driving and stimulating community capacity particularly in excluded and underrepresented groups.

This support will enable more confident, empowered and resourceful consumers regarding their energy use; lowering energy consumption and saving money through changing energy related behaviours.

The project will build on a previous funded project, and continue to support vulnerable people experiencing fuel poverty in the most deprived areas of Blackburn with Darwen, by giving them the tools and resources they need to save energy, stay warm, reduce their bills, manage debt and access benefits and grants. 

The project will focus exclusively on supporting people who are missing out on vital savings and opportunities because they either have English as a second language and struggle to understand important information, or are older and socially and digitally excluded from accessing the same important information. 

Energy Advisors will deliver 1:1 advice sessions in community drop-ins across nine key locations, making home visits to the most vulnerable community members, providing a regular telephone support service and running monthly community-awareness events packed with vital practical information.

This project will test the financial and operational sustainability of generating carbon-negative electricity and supplying it to Bromford Housing at below market rates, tackling both climate change and fuel poverty. Pyrolysis allows carbon in organic feedstocks (such as woody biomass, sewage sludge or arboreal risings) to be sequestered, thereby resulting in carbon negative heat. This project will be a first-of-a-kind system in the UK and will demonstrate how waste heat energy can be converted to electricity and exported to the grid in a cost-effective manner. 

The project will purchase the capital equipment necessary to run the trial period to prove the concept. Optimising the running of the plant with reduced associated costs, exploring combined models of electricity output, carbon credits, and biochar sales. Alongside this they will run a research study to design the legal structures for the distribution of the energy to fuel poor households.

The project will provide tailored energy advice to vulnerable energy consumers over the age of 50 within the South Lakeland area who are facing difficulty paying energy bills, those who are at risk of, or already in, fuel poverty, and those who are less able to make informed and effective choices with regards to their energy usage and costs.  

As a result of the in-depth energy advice relating to their lived situation and home environment, the project will lower the number of local older people living in fuel poverty, reduce their fuel bills, increase the energy efficiency of their home and ensure that older people feel more able to manage their home environment independently into the future.