WHO WE ARE
Belltown Power is an established clean energy company at the leading edge of project development in the UK.
Founded in 2013 by a team of highly experienced renewable energy professionals, we have successfully delivered over 200MW of now operating wind, solar, and hydropower capacity across Scotland, Wales, and England.
We are committed to playing our part in enabling the energy transition and combating the climate emergency. We already have an expanding pipeline of over 1GW of unsubsidised UK wind and solar projects under development and are actively pursuing further opportunities in green hydrogen production.
Communities, Education and the Environment are at the heart of everything we do.
Community
At Belltown Power we believe that renewable energy projects should benefit the communities that host them, be valuable learning resources for children and adults alike, and enhance the environments in which they are situated.
Community Benefit
Belltown Power’s existing projects have already provided over £1.5m of community benefit towards local community initiatives across the UK and this is expected to reach over £6m over their operational lifetimes. This includes an upfront grant of £500,000 from the Tirgwynt Wind Farm to support the construction of a brand-new primary school building for Ysgol Carno in Powys, Wales. Whether projects are subsidised or unsubsidised we will continue to ensure that communities receive tangible value from hosting them.
Community Engagement
We believe strongly in early and open community engagement. We look to keep local communities and stakeholders informed with the development plans and the development process. We encourage community engagement and listen to all feedback as part of the development process.
Community Ownership
Belltown Power wants to go beyond simply offering the opportunity for local investment into our projects and actually take demonstrable steps to enable the uptake of community ownership in a way that benefits everyone. For this reason, we are offering 5% of all of our projects for purchase at cost by local communities once they become operational. To even more actively encourage community ownership uptake on our onshore wind projects we are going one step further and giving away the first 1% to communities for free. We want to build deeper links between communities and their renewable energy projects and are committed to finding new and inventive ways to do this.
Education
The Belltown Power Education Programme already supports 15 schools local to our sites and we have ambitions to grow this as new projects come on-line. Across the lifetime of just these existing projects we expect to provide school visits to the sites, in-classroom activities, and bespoke educational resources to over 10,000 children, aiming to inspire the next generation of engineers, scientists and climate emergency tacklers. In addition, Gatehouse ACE Academy in Dawlish, Devon, now has a solar rooftop array thanks to a donation from our Sawmills solar farm. Not only do these panels help the school save on their energy bills, they also inspire the children, bringing the topics of renewable energy and the environment a lot closer to home. We also work with higher education institutes on research projects, including into the benefits to biodiversity of renewable energy projects.
Environment
In addition to powering over 100,000 homes and displacing over 170,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year, our sites have also won awards for their quality, biodiversity, and good practice within the industry. This includes the UK’s first construction wildlife award from the Wildlife Trusts for the high standard of environmental management and commitment to protecting and enhancing the wildlife on the Frodsham Wind Farm in Cheshire, which is home to Cheshire’s only pair of successfully breeding marsh harriers. We propose and implement a comprehensive and tailored Ecological Management Plan for our projects in order to protect and enhance the specific local biodiversity and ecology of both the site and the surrounding area. So far this action has shown great ecological success; for example, we have recorded 23 different red and amber listed bird species on our solar sites, including the black redstart at Verwood, Dorset, which number fewer than 500 overwintering in the UK.