Home Energy Service

Our good friends at Llangattock Green Valleys have invited us to collaborate with them on their excellent Home Energy Service. It offers a range of help from thermal imaging surveys, borrowing a DIY kit for measuring your home energy consumption up to a £80 ‘Home Walk and Talk’ visit with an independent, Trustmark endorsed Energy Retrofit Assessor. This service is now open to all residents in our Talybont district area. For more information or to book a kit or a home visit, click here https://www.llangattockgreenvalleys.org/your-energy-saving-service-yess/  Llangattock badly need volunteers for a 1 day training course in operating their thermal camera to assist with such surveys. Could you help?

Engagement with local schools through Energy Sparks

We are supporting two local schools with their subscriptions to the Energy Sparks platform, which promotes a range of energy saving and learning activities for pupils, and enables schools to access their energy meter data and keep track of how they are saving energy.  Llangynidr community primary school have also had an energy audit carried out by a trained assessor from Energy Sparks.  Currently they are in 8th place on the Wales Energy Sparks scoreboard and 87th place nationally! We are looking for ways to build on the relationships formed.

Student projects

Summer 2026 – Applications for this summer are now closed and 3 local students have been selected for funding. The projects range from researching the experience of local homes who have installed Heat Pumps to activities to learn skills in creating, repairing and modifying clothes and other consumables in order to save energy. costs and reduce material waste.

Micro wind research project – Report (March 2026)

This research project set out to explore the feasibility, acceptability and ROI of single pole wind turbines on farms and other upland businesses in the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park.

We had 2 goals: (i) to identify the critical characteristics necessary for a successful micro wind turbine installation and (ii) to use an emerging case study to motivate and inform further such installations from the perspective of both a potential property owner and a National Park policy perspective. 

In summary, we learned a great deal about the critical characteristics and challenges for a successful installation (outlined in the research report) but haven’t managed (at least so far) to generate a viable case study for others to follow. 

The research report (in full) is available for download here.

The Rewear Project (Summer 2025)

As a result of the first clothes swap and repair event held in August 2025, two enthusiastic Crickhowell students picked up the baton and have run 2 further successful events and have plans for more.

Summer Student Energy Project 2024

Posted onJuly 8, 2024byAlison Kidd

We are delighted to have awarded Luc James our student energy project funding for this summer. Luc lives in Scethrog and is curently studying Aeronautical Engineering at Imperial College London. Luc’s winning proposal is to research possibilities for micro wind turbines in our area for generating energy for domestic properties or small businesses. This will include exploring challenges to small turbines from ecological, social, locational and planning perspectives and researching different turbine designs and mechanisms and their comparative generation efficiency. We will enjoy working with him on his project.

We were also delighted to hear that Billy Merrill-Glover (our 2023 summer student) has been awarded a PhD place at Manchester University studing carbon capture.

Last summer (2023), we ran our first summer student project where we fund a local person (aged 18-25) to suggest and run a 4 week project which researches or develops an idea which could either reduce our community’s energy or generate new energy from a sustainable source. Projects can be in any of the following areas: domestic heating, food, transport, material consumption, waste or leisure activities/tourism.

Billy Merrill-Glover won the 2023 competition and carried out a fun and very useful feasibility study for a Water Source Heat Pump on the Monmouthshire and Brecon canal which runs through our villages.

An invite to our community groups…….

(May 2024) Talybont Energy is planning a series of informal meet ups with any of our wide diversity of community groups or village businesses who would like to explore ideas of how to reduce their energy or increase sustainability in the activities they run or the facilities they manage. We can then look to help fund any ideas or projects which emerge. 

This might involve chatting together about :-

• current energy use & costs – ways to reduce them
• consumption of resources like tools, materials, food
• possibilities of sharing resources or energy
• how to convert to more renewable sources of energy or more sustainable practices
• ways to generate renewable energy
• recycling, sharing or re-use of materials, 
• skills training 

Projects might involve heating, lighting, insulation, transport, consumables (food or materials) or activities/events of any kind for our community or our visitors. 

If your group, organisation or community based business would be interested in meeting up with us for an hour sometime to chat through ideas informally, then do contact us at info@talybontenergy.co.uk