Asher Valley villagers club together to buy their own wind turbine

A single wind turbine on the ridge above Holloway has become the most talked-about investment in the Asher Valley. The 2.3-megawatt machine, which started generating at the end of the summer, is owned outright by a cooperative of 640 local members who raised €3.1 million between them, the bulk of it in stakes of less than €2,000.

Shares were offered at €250 each, with a cap of 40 per person to stop any single investor taking control. Every member gets one vote at the annual meeting regardless of how much they put in. The cooperative expects to pay a return of around 4 per cent a year once start-up loans are cleared, and has pledged a further €35,000 annually to a fund for insulating homes in Holloway, Netherby and Bramley Cross.

Rosalind Teague, a retired surveyor who chairs the cooperative, said the idea grew out of a public meeting called after a commercial developer withdrew plans for a larger wind farm on the same ridge. Residents, she said, had not objected to turbines so much as to the money leaving the valley.

People were happy to look at a turbine. They just wanted it to be theirs.

A model spreading along the coast

The Holloway scheme is the third community energy project to open in the region in two years, and at least five more are at the planning stage. Advisers at the Wrenhaven Chamber of Commerce say the share-offer model has become easier to copy because template rules and grid connection guidance are now shared freely between groups. The twin town of Velde, which has run a community solar array for a decade, sent two of its board members to help draft the cooperative's articles.

Getting the turbine built took almost four years. The cooperative spent more than a year securing a grid connection, and its planning application drew 41 objections, mostly about noise and the view from the Greyling Hills walking routes. A regional bank lent €1.4 million against the expected income, and two farmers on the ridge agreed to lease the land in return for a fixed annual payment and free membership.

Not everyone is convinced. Peter Lindgren, an energy economist at the University of Wrenhaven, warned that returns depend heavily on wholesale power prices and on how often the turbine is switched off when the local grid is congested. The cooperative says it has budgeted for curtailment of up to 6 per cent of output. Its turbine produced enough electricity for roughly 1,700 homes in its first full month.