Bill Payers Fund Ed Davey’s New Job

By Paul Homewood

h/t Mark Rogers

Drayton Manor Farm, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

As I noted earlier, Ed Davey is part-time of Chairman of Mongoose Energy, for which he is paid £20,000 a year, equivalent to £1666/day.

Mongoose own several solar farms, and have recently taken the Drayton Manor project, which has been operating since March 2016, under its belt:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 7 August 2017 (Stratford-Upon-Avon): The UK’s leading community energy developer Mongoose Energy has announced at the end of July that it has successfully completed financing of the UK’s biggest community energy project near Stratford-Upon-Avon in Warwickshire. The community energy company to be created will be the largest in the UK by generating capacity, enough to power around 4,500 UK homes.

The site has been designed, built and will be maintained by Anesco, the UK’s leading renewable energy developer, utilising the company’s extensive experience in energy storage and large-scale solar development. The combined 75-acre, 14.7MW solar farm will feature co-located batteries that are accredited for subsidy-backed revenue streams including FITs and ROCs. The new financing deal for Drayton Manor will deliver £4.8m in local community benefits over the project’s 20-year lifetime.

Mongoose Energy secured funding for three UK solar farms at Drayton Manor on 27 July with bridge financing provided by Social & Sustainable Capital (SASC) and senior debt provided by Close Brothers.

Mongoose Energy will start to repay the bridge finance from SASC via a series of community share and bond offers in the Autumn, to be hosted on Mongoose’s proprietary crowdfunding platform Mongoose Crowd and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Once this bond financing is complete, Mongoose Energy will transfer the sites into full community ownership. The new crowdfunding platform launched in June and has already raised over £1 million for green energy projects in the UK by enabling crowd-funders to buy bonds within an innovative finance Individual Savings Account (IF ISA) wrapper and via a transfer of existing lifetime ISA portfolios. Typically, investors have received 4.5-7% return on their investments depending on the performance of their project.

Robert Rabinowitz, Head of Generation at Mongoose Energy, said: “This transaction is just the beginning of a process to maximise the community benefit that we can achieve from these assets. We are also keen to acquire more community interest company (CIC) solar sites and urge commercial owners of such sites to get in contact so that we can help them to put such assets where they belong, into community ownership.”

The Drayton Manor deal means Mongoose Energy now has over 80MW of solar assets under management – over half (50 per cent) of the total of community-owned renewable energy assets in England and Wales. Its community energy portfolio can generate enough electricity to power over 22,000 homes*.

To date, Mongoose has raised over £90 million to put renewable assets into community ownership, including over £22 million raised through community share and bond offers. Its UK community energy projects combine financial returns with lower environmental impacts and positive social dividends.

Mongoose Energy works with community groups, commercial project developers and investors to identify, develop, finance, build and manage community-owned renewable energy installations. The organisation is majority-owned by the community energy groups it works with and actively encourages new Community Benefit Societies to join.

http://ift.tt/2hh0vFd

The basic idea is that Mongoose will sell bonds via crowdfunding, typically earning up to 5% interest.

What’s not to like?

Well, unfortunately if you happen to be the bill payer, it is electricity consumers who are paying for Ed Davey’s salary and those generous bond yields.

According to the Variable Pitch website, which logs data from 8866 renewable energy stations, Drayton Manor has generated 15.9 GWh in the last 12 months, for which it has earned subsidies of £989,000, via the Renewable Obligation scheme, at the current price ROC of £47.85. This equates to £62.20/MWh (allowance is 1.3 ROCs per MWh).

This is worth much more then the value of the electricity produced, which averaged £41.38/MWh. (Because the bulk of solar output comes in summer when electricity prices are low, it earns less than the average wholesale price across the year as a whole – essentially solar power is worth less to the market).

Of course, it means that the poor old bill payer ends up paying £103.58/MWh.

It’s easy to be generous with other people’s money!