Egni Coop has announced that it has extended its Share Offer to £2m, having just reached its previous £1.5m target.

Rosie Gillam, Director, said “Our installers are working across Wales putting solar panels on sites as we speak. In the past 3 weeks, we’ve installed more than 1MW and we expect to triple that before the end of March. All of our sites installed so far can be seen here.”

Dan McCallum MBE, Director, said “This is tremendous news that people across the UK are so keen to invest and support renewable energy.

We have decided to keep the annual interest rate for our Share Offer @4% – we have secured a loan from the Development Bank of Wales. But we’d prefer not to draw all that down as it’s at a 5% interest rate. So we can increase the amount of educational work in schools if we’re able to finance more of our remaining installs from Share Offer funds. The Development Bank has been great and there are no additional charges for us not drawing down our full loan facility or paying it back early.

The Development Banks’s funds come from Welsh Government which is extremely supportive of community energy projects – so if we’re able to reduce the amount we need to borrow from the Bank, it means there is a more available for other community energy projects. There are some great projects in development across Wales now including community wind turbines by Community Energy Pembrokeshire and Cwm Arian and a very exciting battery storage project with Gower Power. Groups across Wales are working on community energy projects – the scale of the work can be seen on the Community Energy Wales website.

Wales is now really leading the way at a UK level in terms of public engagement in renewables – there are some great new shared ownership wind energy projects as well taking shape which involve Joint Ventures between community organisations and commercial companies. Welsh Government has developed a new policy to encourage this. We need as much engagement as possible, on different levels, to tackle climate change.”