King’s Lodge, in the English county of Wiltshire, has 96 solar panels producing around 20,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year. The school is one of 19 in the UK that joined a project which attracted 770-thousand-euros of crowdfunding

EU Green Week is urging us to think about the environment, as governments face pressure to boost renewable energy sources.

With state subsidies falling, crowdfunding platforms are increasingly stepping in to help make green power projects a reality. For individual investors, injecting anything from a few euros to hundreds of thousands, they are a tangiable alternative to banks – offering attractive returns, while helping the environment.

One platform, London-based Abundance Investment, raised around 760,000 euros to help fund solar power systems at 19 schools in the UK. It’s collaborating with the European CrowdFundRES project, which aims to put crowdfunding at the heart of the energy transition.

By Damon Embling

29 May 2017