‘With Ashden Award money, we can start planning and opening new production and training centres in other African countries right away. I see Toyola being very big in the next few years.’

Suraj Wahab, Founder, Toyola

Government is setting ambitious targets for renewable energy, heat and energy savings. To achieve these targets, a significant step change will be needed in the way we heat our homes and offices and take up energy savings measures.

The Ashden Awards has been working alongside a wide range of stakeholders and the Department for Energy and Climate Change who are now working with households and communities, businesses and the public sector to work up options for delivering 'the big shift'. There are many options that are being tested from financial ones such as feed-in tariffs to establishing community wide areas projects to legislative sticks such as the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) set out in the Climate Change Bill.

Earlier this week the Ashden Awards participated in the public sector stakeholder event which brought together public sector organisations as wide as primary care trusts, local authorities, government department or schools. The mood of the event reflected the urgency that is increasingly being felt by Government to deliver against carbon reduction targets and highlighted a number of key issues that are blocking the action needed in the public sector. These include skills and capacity issues such as the need for strong leadership and energy champions within organisation, supply chain issues such as developing the capacity of delivery organisations and helping them to scale up to meet demand and strategic issues such as whether there is a need to extending zero emissions targets to existing public building stock.

Of course there are already shining beacons in the UK whether they be local authorities, schools, charities or businesses already delivering effective sustainable energy solutions; they are called Ashden Award winners. So we were there to share winners’ success stories and to demonstrate the some are already leading the way.

In 2007, Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha won an Ashden Award for their work with boats using solar power to provide education, healthcare, lighting and other services to people in Bangladesh.

Now, the Sundance Institute is producing a film about them, called Easy Like Water. Here's a trailer they have released:


You can also watch the Ashden Awards film from 2007:

JUST ENERGY
a not-for-profit social enterprise working with low-income communities

Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

Location: South Africa
Salary: circa £42,000 net (c. £60,000 gross) depending on experience
Reports to: Just Energy Board Chair

Just Energy is a not-for-profit social enterprise that works with low-income communities to maximise community revenues from medium sized renewable energy businesses. Just Energy was founded and launched as an independent business by Oxfam GB and draws on the technical and financial collaboration of a diverse range of private sector, NGO and academic partners.

As energy prices rise and technology costs fall, renewable energy is becoming an increasingly viable option for meeting the rapidly rising energy demands in developing countries. These changes in energy markets provide an income generating, skills development and job creation opportunity for low-income communities if they can overcome a range of technical and financial barriers to their involvement.

Just Energy will jointly develop renewable energy projects with communities, helping to overcome these barriers by: