Urjaa Samadhan is a collaborative project that commenced in April 2014, and aspires to contribute... more Urjaa Samadhan is a collaborative project that commenced in April 2014, and aspires to contribute to the resilience of rural offgrid renewable energy ecosystems in Orissa, India. This paper aims to summarise the delivery rather than research aspects. Broadly speaking, Urjaa Samadhan aims to empower communities in Orissa to take control and ownership of renewables infrastructure by leveraging the latent potential of local and regional technical and supply chain capacity. It seeks to do this by facilitating engagement between end-users on the one hand, and relevant ‘providers’ – parts and service suppliers and NGO's – on the other. Specifically, our project seeks to pilot a unified messaging platform service with a web-map interface designed to achieve a step change in end-user – provider engagement in the fledgling off-grid renewables sphere in Orissa. The Urjaa Samadhan Gateway will be designed to facilitate user requests and supplier provision for parts and services, and will a...
There is growing policy interest in increasing the share of community-owned renewable energy gene... more There is growing policy interest in increasing the share of community-owned renewable energy generation. This study explores why and how the costs of community-owned projects differ from commercially-owned projects by examining the case of onshore wind in the UK. Based on cross-sectoral literature on the challenges of community ownership, cost differences are attributed to six facets of an organisation or project: internal processes, internal knowledge and skills, perceived local legitimacy of the project, perceived external legitimacy of the organisation, investor motivation and expectations, and finally, project scale. These facets impact not only development costs but also project development times and the probability that projects pass certain critical stages in the development process. Using survey-based and secondary cost data on community and commercial projects in the UK, a model is developed to show the overall impact of cost, time and risk differences on the value of a hypothetical 500 kW onshore wind project. The results show that the main factors accounting for differences are higher pre-planning costs and additional risks born by community projects, and suggest that policy interventions may be required to place community-owned projects on a level playing field with commercial projects.
Urjaa Samadhan is a collaborative project that commenced in April 2014, and aspires to contribute... more Urjaa Samadhan is a collaborative project that commenced in April 2014, and aspires to contribute to the resilience of rural offgrid renewable energy ecosystems in Orissa, India. This paper aims to summarise the delivery rather than research aspects. Broadly speaking, Urjaa Samadhan aims to empower communities in Orissa to take control and ownership of renewables infrastructure by leveraging the latent potential of local and regional technical and supply chain capacity. It seeks to do this by facilitating engagement between end-users on the one hand, and relevant ‘providers’ – parts and service suppliers and NGO's – on the other. Specifically, our project seeks to pilot a unified messaging platform service with a web-map interface designed to achieve a step change in end-user – provider engagement in the fledgling off-grid renewables sphere in Orissa. The Urjaa Samadhan Gateway will be designed to facilitate user requests and supplier provision for parts and services, and will a...
There is growing policy interest in increasing the share of community-owned renewable energy gene... more There is growing policy interest in increasing the share of community-owned renewable energy generation. This study explores why and how the costs of community-owned projects differ from commercially-owned projects by examining the case of onshore wind in the UK. Based on cross-sectoral literature on the challenges of community ownership, cost differences are attributed to six facets of an organisation or project: internal processes, internal knowledge and skills, perceived local legitimacy of the project, perceived external legitimacy of the organisation, investor motivation and expectations, and finally, project scale. These facets impact not only development costs but also project development times and the probability that projects pass certain critical stages in the development process. Using survey-based and secondary cost data on community and commercial projects in the UK, a model is developed to show the overall impact of cost, time and risk differences on the value of a hypothetical 500 kW onshore wind project. The results show that the main factors accounting for differences are higher pre-planning costs and additional risks born by community projects, and suggest that policy interventions may be required to place community-owned projects on a level playing field with commercial projects.
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Papers by Anna L Berka