Green Nation News

Community benefit society Mendip Renewables Ltd launched a bond offer on 27 April using the Triodos Bank crowdfunding platform, in order to raise money to repay its original shareholders and reduce debt servicing costs.

The offer reached its maximum uptake of £900,000 on 11 May.

Bond certificates have now been issued to subscribers and the proceeds used to repay the original shareholders in Mendip Renewables and to partially repay an underwriting facility taken out in 2018 at the time of a previous bond offer.

The net result will be a decrease in Mendip Renewables’ financing costs and therefore an increase in funds available for its community purpose.

Green Nation was the original developer of Mendip Renewables’ solar farm in Somerset, and continues to manage it. Green Nation also managed the bond raising exercise on behalf of Mendip Renewables, working with the Triodos Corporate Finance Team.

Mendip Renewables owns and operates the 5 MW Whitelake Solar farm in Somerset. The solar farm, which is located on low grade agricultural land used for sheep grazing, has generated more than 25 million kWh of clean energy since it became operational in December 2015.

As a community benefit society, Mendip Renewables distributes profits to charitable organisations in Somerset through a community benefit fund. To date £49,000 has been distributed to Somerset based charity Key4Lifewhich delivers rehabilitation programmes for young offenders and those at risk of going to prison.

More background information about the now closed bond offer and on Key4Life’s work can be found in our press release of 28 April 2021.

Community benefit society Mendip Renewables Ltd has launched a follow-up bond offer to its 2018 offer, in order to raise money to repay its original shareholders and reduce debt servicing costs.

Mendip Renewables

Mendip Renewables owns and operates the 5 MW Whitelake Solar farm in Somerset. The solar farm, which is located on low grade agricultural land used for sheep grazing, has generated more than 25 million kWh of clean energy since it became operational in December 2015.

Green Nation was the original developer of the solar farm and continues to manage it.

As a community benefit society, Mendip Renewables distributes profits to charitable organisations in Somerset through a community benefit fund. To date £49,000 has been distributed to Somerset based charity Key4Life which delivers rehabilitation programmes for young offenders and those at risk of going to prison.

As Key4Life says: “We are enormously grateful to Mendip Renewables for their invaluable support over the last four years. Our work in the South West, specifically in Somerset and Bristol, has worked with over 40 disaffected young men, many of whom have spent much of their early years in prison and have struggled to gain employment. In our last programme, we had 13 young men with a zero reoffending rate and 72% went into meaningful occupation and employment, despite the challenges that Covid-19 has placed on all of us. Some of the companies who have taken this cohort on placement or employment include Bristol Trade Windows, Wilmott Dixon, Bouygues, Yeo Valley, Montgomery Cheese and Sir Robert McAlpine. None of the above would have been possible if it were not for the generous donation and support of Mendip Renewables.”

Key4Life Trainee Jamie and horse

It is anticipated that at least £1.4 million will be contributed to the community benefit fund over the 25-year life of the project.

The bond offer

The society raised £1.8 million through a bond offer in spring 2018, allowing it to repay existing loans which were taken out in 2015 to build the solar farm.

Mendip Renewables has now launched a follow-up offer to raise a minimum of £500,000. It will use the proceeds to buy back shares issued in 2015 as part of the financing effort for the build of the solar farm and to partially repay an underwriting facility provided by Triodos Bank at the time of the 2018 bond offer. The interest rate on the new bonds will be lower than those of the underwriting bonds, reducing the society’s future interest costs.

The bond offer is promoted by Triodos Bank on their crowdfunding platform, which enables eligible bondholders to hold their bonds in an Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA).

Mendip Renewables’ existing bondholders have a two-week exclusivity period, after which the offer will be opened to registered users of the crowdfunding platform. If there is sufficient demand, the Directors may increase the number of bonds offered to a maximum of £900,000.

For more information, visit the Triodos Bank crowdfunding platform here. As with all investments, your capital is at risk.

“Greenest electricity grid record smashed on Easter Monday” was a rather catchy headline reported in the press after the holiday weekend this year. And it might not seem like it – but it is an important one.

The story, reported in many publications, is that at 1pm on Easter bank holiday, the UK’s electricity grid operated at its lowest ever recorded carbon-intensity. 80% of power came from renewables or nuclear, and an average 39g of CO₂was emitted for every kilowatt hour of energy. Compare that to an average 198g for the whole of 2019, and 446g for every kWh generated from fossil fuels.

Solar contributed to that record by generating 21% of all electricity during the period in question, and as a solar power company, we’re very happy to see that.

So, as developers and managers of solar power generating assets, do the numbers above mean that it’s time to put our feet up from developing and just manage?

Not just yet. The headlines above refer to a sunny and windy moment when electricity demand in the UK was particularly low and renewables generation was particularly high.

In 2019 as a whole, solar electricity generated in the UK accounted for 4% of all electricity used here. Over the next 30 years, electricity consumption is set to grow, as the rise of the Electric Vehicle and the move away from the use of gas for heating will outweigh any efficiency gains.

Solar will have a big role to play in the challenge to achieve the UK government’s commitment to achieve a 68% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030 and net zero by 2050: it’s increasingly cheap, predictable and there is scope to build a lot more of it. And that’s what we’ll be doing, on the ground and on rooftops. We predict that in the UK we could end up with five to ten times more solar capacity than we have now.

As we build that capacity, one of the other predictable things about solar energy is that we will produce more than we need at 1pm (especially on a bank holiday Monday) and not enough at either end of the day. Green Nation is working on battery storage projects to allow some of that middle of the day electricity to be used when it’s most needed, so we’re now a solar and battery company!

Another predictable thing is that we will eventually have more solar electricity than we need in the middle of summer and not enough in winter. At some point, but not this year, we will work with a technology to transfer energy captured in summer to the winter months, and we may become a solar, battery and hydrogen company.

A couple more numbers and predictions to finish with: for solar to generate all the electricity used by the UK in 2019, it would need to cover 0.6% of the surface area of the UK (about the size of Greater London). That won’t happen, but it’s only half the area that would have been needed 10 years ago, and we predict that that number will continue to fall as solar technology develops. Watch this space.