Consultations for rural energy hubs lacking responses
A FEASIBILITY study for rural energy hubs has seen low engagement from Shetlanders this week.
This comes after the council, in partnership with Community Energy Scotland and Aquatera, received a grant of £52,648 from Innovate UK to carry out the study.
The team were in Brae and Scalloway earlier this week and shall be in the Mid Yell Hall today (Thursday) from 2pm to 7pm.
There is also an online survey that can be completed by anyone from any part of Shetland.
Due to lack of engagement at the consultations this week Peter Long, Project Manager at Community Energy Scotland, is keen for people to fill out the survey.
“We’ve not so far seen as many people as we would’ve liked here,” he told Shetland News in Scalloway yesterday.
“We’ve had good responses from the survey, nearly up to 200 responses, but we certainly would like to get a bit more.”
The main aim of the proposed hubs is to reduce carbon emissions whilst benefitting local communities.
They would achieve this by providing a variety of possible services including bike rental, electric vehicle charging, district heating and office space.
Long said: “The idea of the rural energy and transport hubs is hopefully to test the concept of one route to help the community decarbonize.
“If you have these hubs spread across Shetland there might be electric vehicle chargers, car club cars that you can rent by the hour, e-bikes or bikes storage, have wind turbines or solar panels in the building that could help charge these.”
Now the project is seeking input from Shetlanders to find out what they would like to see from the potential hubs.
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“We’ve had a period of flagging up all the ideas that were possible and now we want the community to tell us which they would like, which are feasible,” Long said.
Long emphasised that there’s no “one size fits all” for the parishes.
“The priorities highlighted in Yell will be different from the priorities highlighted in Brae,” he said.
“Certainly somebody like myself from Orkney, it’s not my job to say what’s suitable [for Shetland].”
Once the consultation phase is completed in June, the team will compile a report and apply again to Innovate for the next round of funding.
Long continued: “We would like to have responses in for the end of May as much as possible.
“Then that gives us the whole of June to write up [the report], but depending on where we are, we’ll be keeping the survey open longer.”
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