In April 2023, we finally restarted our hydro after a 7 year stoppage due to work on the Talybont Reservoir dam and ongoing restructuring of Welsh Water systems. Sadly, we had to put community projects on hold as our income disappeared and we needed to keep covering our turbine maintenance and other running costs.
You can find our list of past projects in the drop down menu on the home page.
We now are slowly rebuilding our financial resources as we sell the electricity we are now happily and thankfully generating. This is allowing us some space to explore possible activities and projects for the future to either reduce our community energy and/or switch more of it to sustainable sources. As volunteers with either full-time jobs or other major commitments, this takes us time.
We advertised locally for local young people to propose a summer project to address these community energy aims which we would fund for 20 days this summer. We have awarded a local resident who is a student at Manchester University for his proposed feasibility study on using our Mon&Brec canal for a water source heat pump. We will be publishing the outcome of that study on here at the end of the summer.
We are looking into what we might be able to do to help support households in our community in both reducing their heating energy and getting good advice on what their options are for heating their homes more sustainably. Again, this will take us time.
We are slowly picking up the threads of the education packages we put together some years ago and which were enthusiastically received by local schools and the scouts. That will take us some time.
Talybont-on-Usk Energy 