Utility Week Live 2024

West Sussex County Council is a local catalyst for the energy transition and the net zero agenda.

We work with neighbouring councils, communities, and regional and national energy bodies, to deliver lasting and transformative change to the energy system.

Our approach to Local Area Energy Planning focuses on innovation and collaboration – building and testing scenarios, supporting the development of Local Energy Communities, and working to strengthen the local energy market.

The County Council is shaping the local energy market by helping business and residential communities to generate, store and share clean energy by setting up Local Energy Communities (LECs).

Re-Energise Manor Royal, a LEC serving one of the southeast’s largest business districts near Gatwick Airport, is an award-winning community led and operated by businesses. It’s developing new renewable energy projects at scale, including solar PV and storage. The County Council is also supporting a residential community on the south coast to develop a similar model.

The LEC approach enables the whole community to benefit, including residents and businesses that are unable to invest in renewable energy themselves. This supports a more equitable energy transition.

For individual residents that want to install their own renewables, we run Solar Together Sussex – a group purchasing scheme for high quality and competitively-priced solar PV systems, batteries and EV chargers. The scheme has installed more than 2,500 systems with a combined 11MW generation capacity since 2020.

Since 2015 we have developed our own generation assets on council land. Tangmere (5MW) and Westhampnett (7.4MW) near Chichester generate more than 12,750 MWh of clean electricity each year and provide vital income for the council.

Tangmere solar farm paid back the original capital investment in less than eight years. You can find out more about our solar farms here. In this film we produced with our partners at nPower Business Solutions.

We are continuing to invest in grid-scale battery storage where there is a strong business case.

Our battery system at Westhampnett solar farm support the local electricity grid and generates income and we have a further large, standalone battery storage site under development.

Using funding from the government’s Low Carbon Skills Fund (LCSF) and Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme (PSDS), the County Council has a rolling programme to move premises from heating systems run on fossil fuels to lower carbon alternatives, such as heat pumps.

This is supported by a complementary programme of solar PV and battery storage installations in corporate buildings and schools as well as other energy upgrades, including insulation and low energy lighting, using Salix and other funding.

This work builds on the success of a previous schools solar PV programme which installed 74 systems.

With local authority partners and Connected Kerb, we are establishing one of the largest council-led electric vehicle charger networks in the country.  

The chargers, installed in locations that work best for residents, will underpin the transition to electric vehicles in the years ahead. The County Council is also working on the transition to EV for its own fleet.