By Dave Hampton – the carbon coach

The Transition Town Marlow 100 Solar project is, essentially, a buyers’ club.  In late 2009, three members of TTM were looking to install PV and solar thermal panels for their own homes.  Philip Ditchfield and Willi Moore took the lead in researching the market, with the idea of forming a buying club. We wanted to find one high quality and ethical supplier, to share any advantage from doing several installations in the same place, at the same time. 

After much investigation we chose Freesource, not least because they are Good Energy’s chosen home generation partner.  Philip negotiated an excellent framework agreement: participants get a rebate cheque for a percentage of the total installation cost, with the percentage rising as more Marlow homes join the scheme by certain fixed dates.

We've some way to go to get 100 installations, but have already triggered a healthy discount step of 12%, bringing the price of a £10k solar PV installation down to £8,800 for anyone looking to install now.

Equally importantly, the Marlow scheme has attracted lots of publicity, and may have acted as a catalyst for many other transition towns across the UK to start their own buyers’ clubs.

Sometimes, what is needed to ‘press the go button’ is simply a line in the ground – a ‘decision time’.  One of these is coming up fast now, a March deadline after which the 12% Marlow rebate cannot be guaranteed.  People within a seven-mile radius of Marlow are welcome to join us, and will get the same rebate as if they had joined on day one.  No one in Marlow is making a penny from this project, but we are all very glad to have done it.