npower

Our community hubs will train and employ local people to install, charge and maintain home solar systems. The batteries will be charged at a central community solar hub called the Powerline nano grid, run by a trained employee. There aren't many opportunities for skilled employment in these communities, so there's a lot of excitement and energy about the hubs. At the moment, rural communities in Kenya use dangerous kerosene lamps to light their homes. These lamps are beer cans with a smoking wick and can be really smoky - the same as smoking two packs of cigarettes every single day. Mwezi is a social enterprise working to change this! Here's how it will work. When a new customer signs up for a Powerline system, we'll install the system ready for use. Powerline is a powerful, low maintenance system that can grow with the community's needs. After around three days, we'll swap out the discharged power pack for a fully charged pack. The customer makes a small payment, about £1.30, each time the power pack is swapped. The power packs will be charged locally at the community hub run by the local employee. After ten months of small rental payments, the customers own the systems and understand how to work them. There's a two month warranty so customers can get support from the hub if they need it. Best of all, they no longer have to pay for kerosene that risks their families' health. By recycling their payments, we'll turn five community hubs into ten hubs within a year! At first, we will deploy 200 systems in the areas that most need them. This number will double within twelve months as we expand the network to reach more people and light more homes safely. This will allow the grid to become sustainable and scalable so we can create lots of jobs and improve as many families' health, wealth and environmental impact as possible. This project will empower us to help more households become sustainable and smoke-free. We are really focused on making a positive change and do what we can to help. We donate solar light libraries to local schools so children can borrow them to do their homework in the evenings. We also install the systems in orphanages for free so they can light lots of rooms at once. We make sure to maintain these lights as time goes on because occasionally the young people rush around and break them (you know what kids are like!) With the community hubs, we'll be able to expand the Powerline nano grid and do even more in the communities where we work.

We'd love to install solar panels on the roof at our school, Roundhay St Johns Primary School. This will save us money that we will put towards our after school clubs and create more activities that engage people across the community. Plus, we will use the solar panels project to enhance learning and teach pupils about saving energy. Our school has plenty of suitable roof space - in fact, npower have carried out an initial feasibility study and recommended that our school is an ideal site to install solar panels. It can hold a 50KW system of 209 panels that will save the school £5,500 per year in energy costs! This project will create such a buzz within the school among the pupils and staff. There is already a real culture of sustainability in our school community - we have teams who keep an eye on recycling and litter and a school council who decide new ideas for making the school more sustainable. Our pupils are already excited about learning how the solar panels work and following the project from start to finish - they really will make the most out of this opportunity. We'll make the solar panels project a major part of the curriculum. The panels will enhance children's learning in Science, Geography, PSHE and Maths at all levels. Pupils will learn about the importance of energy saving and renewable forms of energy. They'll get lots of exciting opportunities to discover how we as a community can all make a significant difference by changing the way we do things. Children will also learn about the financial aspects of the project and the savings that can be made, exploring their knowledge of maths in a fun, fascinating and relatable context. The savings we make from this project will go towards projects that help our school and wider communities. This is really important - our school has very little pupil premium grant as many families do not qualify under the criteria, but are working families surviving on a low income. These families and children desperately need the support of the local community school. We have a fantastic opportunity to renovate a building within the school campus for the benefit of pupils and the community. For example, our breakfast and after school club could really do with more space. It's so important that we welcome as many children as possible to the club, so they can get a healthy start and a fun and sociable end to the school day. It will be great to create more exciting activities to bring our pupils and local communities together. At the moment, we run lively Summer and Christmas fairs, carol singing for the whole community, a friendly mother's day coffee morning and some energetic quiz nights! We support families by running parent forums, parenting classes, and play and stay sessions for pre-nursery age children. We'd love to do even more for local families, and the solar panel project would empower us to make this possible.

We will help re-build a micro hydro power scheme so that a remote community in Nepal has access to affordable, renewable energy using water to generate electricity. We will not only repair the earthquake damage, we will make the newly rebuilt hydro power schemes resilient to future earthquakes. Following last year's devastating earthquake in Nepal, many communities suffered terrible loss, both of lives and infrastructure. In the District of Gorkha, seven micro-hydro power schemes were damaged and stopped working. As a result, more than 2200 households and 25 businesses have lost their electricity supply and must travel 4-5 hours even to recharge their mobile phones. This has caused huge loss to the community. We have a fantastic opportunity to rebuild the damaged micro hydro schemes to make them earthquake resilient and restore electricity to households, small businesses, health centres and schools. We are working with the local community so they understand how to develop and run the schemes sustainably. This includes establishing reconstruction committees to oversee the rebuilding plans and securing the community's commitment to provide in-kind contributions for the project, such as labour and local materials. Alongside the local community, we will build back the hydro power scheme even better than before. This will bring electricity back to homes and community buildings.