Project summary
The Linskill and North Tyneside Community Development Trust is a charity established in July 2003 to facilitate the community asset transfer of the Linskill Centre, North Shields, from North Tyneside Council. The Trust has successfully developed it into a thriving community facility serving the communities of North Tyneside.
This organisation has been developing and delivering a programme of energy-saving projects for their site for several years, including Solar PV, Electric Vehicle Charging and Air Source Heat Pumps. BEST provided them with energy advice and support to review opportunities for further improvements, including Solar PV and heating. They received a grant contribution towards a Solar PV project, which was completed in December 2024.
We spoke to Simeon Ripley, Chief Executive, to hear about his experience of working with BEST.
Simeon said: “We’d always wanted to try to reduce the environmental impact of our venues and pre covid we had plans to finance this work ourselves to reduce our energy consumption.
Covid delayed these plans, and in 2022-23, our energy bills doubled from £70k a year to 140K, so reducing our energy costs became more of a priority.
We started searching for new opportunities to finance renewable options for the business and came across the BEST website.
Speaking about the support they received, Simeon said: “We had started doing some of the work already, such as surveys, but we found it helpful for the BEST consultant to look at the report we had commissioned and confirm it was correct.
The BEST team also helped us to prioritise what measures to install in terms of return on investment and recommended Solar PV and heat pumps as the best investments for us.
The BEST consultant conducted a site visit, reviewed our plans, and provided reassurance that these plans were accurate. This was useful for me to take to the board for the investment to be signed off.
Our consultant also signed and posted us to other funding opportunities – unfortunately, we didn’t qualify for these, but it was useful to check.
Speaking about the improvement the BEST grant supported, Simeon said: “The BEST grant paid 40% towards the project (£21k), which saw the installation of 120 solar panels. This should save us around £14k per year and reduce our environmental impact.
The key benefit from the solar panels will be a reduction in our energy bills and we can become more financially sustainable and environment friendly.
We find that as we grow as a business there are less grants that we are eligible for, so it is important for us to make changes that give us more control over our overheads. The Solar PV is helping us do this with our energy consumption.
Simeon said of their experience: “It was useful to have one point of contact, and we found that our consultant was really flexible and understood our challenges.
I would like to say thank you to the team for their support. The whole process was really straightforward, and it was a good funding journey to go through. I would recommend other business to investigate if it could help them.”