DistGen Rogershill: Meet the developer
It is an exciting project for us, as it is the first remanufactured wind turbine we are offering for investment to you. The 500kW Vestas V39 has spent the past 17 years in Sweden before being bought by DistGen, who refurbished and installed it in Dorset in November 2012.
DistGen Ltd was set up in 2005 and since then the team has installed four turbines, of which the Rogershill turbine was their second project. They have a strong track record of existing projects, as well as an exciting pipeline of future projects across the length of breadth of the UK — you can see them all here.
With the Rogershill turbine having been given a totally new lease of life and now operating for coming up to 2 years, they feel the time is right to re-finance it and raise capital for more remanufactured wind turbine projects.
To celebrate this new project and the great work DistGen are doing, we interviewed co-founder John Zamick about all things renewable, refurbished, crowdfunding and the future.
John Zamick, Managing Director of DistGen
1. Where did your interest in renewable energy come from?
In 2004 I became aware of various authors and activists suggesting there were significant problems with fossil fuel resource depletion, which triggered me to make my own in depth investigation. This led me to conclude that something needed to be done and with a long-term career in high tech, I thought renewables were an obvious choice as something I could ‘get my head around.’
2. What was the inspiration or motivation behind setting up DistGen?
DistGen was conceived as a way of attempting to bridge the conventional business approach to wind turbine development with the community led model. The concept was to shorten the multi-year timescales prevalent in community led projects by combining pro-active leadership with local engagement to improve understanding and therefore support for the project.
3. What skills and knowledge did each of the founders bring to DistGen, and how has this made things easier for you in the transition to becoming wind turbine developers, owners and operators?
DistGen’s four founders come from fairly diverse backgrounds, although we have worked together over many years so knew we would make good business partners. Mal (Malcolm Ashworth, in charge of commissioning and maintenance) and I have years of experience in property development. Since wind turbine development is basically another form of this, our skills have been invaluable. Adding to this Mal’s experience in construction and contracting has made rolling out our projects relatively smooth. As modern wind turbines are computer controlled, Darran’s (Darran Potter, in charge of planning and support) experience in complex computer system support has been a real help. And finally, my experience in various start-ups across numerous business sectors and technologies meant wind turbines were just a new set of challenges to be understood and overcome.
4. You use remanufactured wind turbines in your projects. What are the advantages of doing this from your perspective?
Remanufactured wind turbines come with most of the same attributes of new turbines with the primary exception that they are lower in cost. In DistGen’s case this has facilitated the development of double or more the number or projects with the same limited start up capital we had available. Basically we have been able to do more with less.
5. How exactly does the Distgen model work?
DistGen’s business model is that we do ‘all of the heavy lifting.’ What this means is that we deal with the challenges of wind turbine development on behalf of the landlord, investors and local community, allowing them to enjoy the process in as simple a way as possible.
6. Why are you choosing to go down the alternative finance route rather than more traditional forms of finance?
From the start, our broader mission has been to try to enhance the way people understand and relate to their energy supply, with the hope that local communities near our turbines will eventually share in the financial returns. Partnering with Abundance simplifies this process for us, as they deal with all the issues inherent in dealing with large groups of potential investors. Abundance’s broader goals are also very similar to ours, making it very much a natural fit.
7. What has the response been from locals to the turbine at Rogershill?
What has been interesting to see is how the response changed over time — at the beginning reactions were a bit mixed as the unknown is often worrying. However as time went on and people were able to experience first hand the fundamentally benign nature of the reality, reactions have become overwhelmingly positive — to the point where the turbine is now seen as something of a local landmark. Honouring our promises to make community contributions to the Bere Regis parish council is also proving helpful in building strong support there.
8. How has the community fund benefitted local response? Do you see this and/or community participation as the future of energy in the UK?
As the wider community has become aware of the positive outcomes of the community fund contributions, there has certainly been an increase in positive local response.
Of course, community participation and benefits are still relatively novel in the UK but this isn’t the case in European countries which, un-coincidentally, have less opposition to onshore wind. That’s why from the start it has been our mission to maximise the potential for community participation at our sites and we hope to see this become the norm — not only as we expand and build the DistGen brand, but as the UK progresses towards its renewable energy targets.
9. If you could do just one thing to make the benefits of renewable energy clear to as many people as possible, what would it be?
We would like people to be able to experience for themselves just how consistently productive renewable generators actually are. If people saw how much of the time they are producing worthwhile outputs and combined it with the knowledge that there are no imported fossil fuels required, no CO2 emissions and no need to frack the countryside we think their popularity would only increase.
10. Finally, where do you see DistGen in 10 years time? Do you think you would operate outside the UK at some point?
Our hope is that over the coming years DistGen will manage to install many more wind turbines. Beyond wind turbines we have aspirations to other renewable generation technologies, in particular micro-tidal which seems to hold such fantastic potential for a country with 10+ metre tides in many places.
The biggest factor in any decision we might make to operate outside the UK would be the outcome of the next election and the attitude of the next parliament to onshore wind. That said, we aren’t planning overseas projects any time soon and think there is reason to be positive. After all, with so much public support for wind and a lot to be done here at home, it will be a while before we can say ‘job done’!
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