Batteries key to actor’s campaign to bring green power to his Cotswold village
Actor Robert Llewellyn’s two-year campaign to persuade residents of his idyllic Cotswold village to generate more power from renewables led him to Moixa smart home batteries.
In The Great Village Green Campaign, broadcast on BBC Four on Thursday June 1st, he is filmed visiting Rose Hill, Oxford where he talks to residents involved in a project pioneering the use of batteries to cut community energy bills.
Our award-winning battery project in Oxford creates a smart local energy grid linking solar panels and smart batteries in 82 homes, a school and community centre. It is designed to ensure that the maximum amount of solar power generated within Rose Hill is used in the community.
Robert, who played the robot Kryten in the sci-fi comedy series Red Dwarf, set out to explore how the villagers of Temple Guiting could club together to invest in renewables.
“I just thought we could save a lot of money, help the environment and work together if we committed ourselves to a long-term green energy project,” he writes in The Telegraph. “It would take only a couple of years, but potentially last decades.”
The documentary shows Robert investigating hydro-electric power, wind turbines and solar. When he discovers that the local electricity grid cannot absorb the extra load from a renewable project, he turns to batteries as a solution. Moixa is pioneering the use of batteries to release stress on the grid in a ground-breaking trial with Northern Powergrid.
The village now hopes to install solar panels on a local barn, store the power in batteries and sell it to a local farmer.
“It shouldn’t be long before that power earns around £1,500 per annum for the local community, a figure that ought to rise over the next 15 years. It’s a long-term scheme that’ll only get better,” he writes.
“Temple Guiting, I have always said, is in many ways a microcosm of the rest of the country. Now, I hope, we will inspire other villages all over Britain.”
ENDS