Borders Energy Agency - has its time come?

by DOUGLAS SHEPHERD

It was set up six years ago "to lead the drive towards a more resilient, low carbon economy to help Borders businesses and communities adapt to and benefit from renewable energy generation, energy efficiency and waste reduction".

But despite strong backing from Scottish Borders Council and the Southern Uplands Partnership (SUP), the Borders Energy Agency (BEA) has been forced to spend years in so-called hibernation due to a complete lack of funding. All of the concerted efforts in 2012 to attract financial backing from public agencies and sponsorship from private business ended in abject failure.

By 2014 a gloomy report from the SUP revealed: "Our efforts to promote community-scale renewable energy have continued to be frustrated by the fact that the BEA which we helped to set up has not been able to attract any funding. The BEA is currently hibernating in the hope that circumstances change".

Yet councillors had been told just two years earlier by their own senior officers that the Scottish Borders was aiming to be "the market leader in sustainable energy".

The vision was that renewable energy companies would locate to the region and a re-skilled workforce would have better employment opportunities. At the same time communities would become more self sufficient and sustainable.

It was a vision which did not appear to be shared outwith the area. The attempts to attract funding for the agency included approaches to major energy companies. Talks also took place with two banks specialising in renewables and bids were planned to secure cash from the Climate Challenge Fund and various European Union programmes.

In their annual report for the year ended March 2017 the BEA trustees wrote: "The board met a number of times during the year. We have continued to seek opportunities to secure funding to allow our objectives to be progressed but without success. With no resources we have been unable to make progress. The BEA has received no funds during the year, and has spent nothing. It currently has £3 in the bank".

But by August 2017 a corner appeared to be turned. An item in the SUP's newsletter said the struggling Agency had been given a small grant to help it run a series of free events.

A Borders Energy Agency gathering in Hawick in May this year looked at the opportunities the planned £35 million Hawick Flood Defence Project might offer to the town to enable it to generate more of its own energy. 

Those present were told of the chances for towns like Hawick, which in the past were largely powered by the local river. Dozens of local textile mills were once powered by the Teviot.

The modern day possibilities include installing Archimedean Screw technology, heat pumps or tapping into the heat that is currently discarded via the sewers. It was argued that the flood protection scheme needed to be built in a way that did not make future energy schemes difficult or impossible. 

It is also being claimed that renewable energy generation could have an important role to play in the future prosperity of the Borders. Here is another issue which the South of Scotland Enterprise Agency (SOSEA) seems certain to get its teeth into once it is up and running.

In a submission to the Scottish Government about the role of SOSEA, the BEA says investment should focus on low-carbon sectors such as renewable energy generation, energy efficiency and energy storage, manufacture of products from recycled material, facilities for sharing equipment/vehicles, low-carbon forestry and farming, eco-tourism, among others.

BEA's submission adds:"The Agency (SOSEA) should support the development of an energy master plan for the area, identifying strategic opportunities and local facilitation of energy generation and management initiatives; support for the renewable energy sector, investing in a wide of technologies in addition to on shore wind. 

"The benefits offered by heat pumps – water, air and ground source – are increasingly seen as a highly practical, cost effective and straightforward option for many homes and businesses, as are heat recovery ventilation systems, and lend themselves well to rural locations as well as more urban situations. These options could have substantial benefit to the many off gas grid communities in the short term, especially for fuel poor households."

It seems that despite its financial problems the BEA is very much alive and may be poised to play a much bigger role in future.