Buy local: the case for Distributed Energy

Graham Hygate of Fine Energy Limited has been invited to speak at Science Capital’s Low Carbon event on 13 June at Maple House, Birmingham.

“The thinking behind Distributed Energy is to complement centrally generated energy, not to replace it”, he said. “We produce energy as close as possible to where it is used, thereby reducing losses and avoiding additional load on the national grid transmission network which is expensive to maintain and controversial to upgrade. The more electricity we generate in this way, the less we have to generate using fossil fuels and nuclear.”

Fine Energy was established in Birmingham in July 2010 as a developer of small-scale renewable energy projects, primarily in wind energy. The company now employs 12 people in Birmingham and Edinburgh. They rent small parcels of land for 20 years from businesses and agricultural landowners and use the land to site individual wind turbines. Unlike large wind farms, these single-turbine developments are quiet and have low visual impact, so are more acceptable to local communities.