The Community Shares Unit (CSU) have produced a hugely insightful report on some of facts and figures surrounding community share offers. This is of interest to Power Up North London as we plan to issue shares to our community for the community energy solar projects that we are developing. Keep your eyes peeled to this website for further information on this over the coming months!

Anyway, I thought it would be useful to summarise some of the key takeaways in the Report from PUNL’s perspective:

• Community energy is the fastest growing sector in terms of community share offers. The number of offers almost doubled from 2013 (17) to 2014 (30)
• A measly 5% of share offers across all sectors happened in London over 2009-2014, suggesting that it is a largely untapped market
• Community energy companies look to be financially healthy, with an average annual surplus of £31,315
• Most share offers are offering an interest rate to investors of 0-5%
• Most share offers have a minimum shareholding of £250 or below
• The majority of investors are investing money ‘they would otherwise save’
• Around a third of investors helped to promote the campaign and more than a third provided no additional support besides financial investment
• The ‘ease of the invesment process’ is important or very important to more than half of shareholders
• The chief aim of investment is to ‘do social or environmental good’ (see below)

For those that want to read the full report, it can be found here. A massive thanks to CSU for producing this – it will certainly help organisations like ours to tailor their share offers appropriately as we look to continue to grow this valuable sector and deliver real positive change for our environment and our community.

We’d love to hear from our community on this – what useful information do you think the Report provides? Did anything surpise you? And of course – if you want to get involved with PUNL then please drop us an email at: powerupnorthlondon@gmail.com – we’re getting new members joining us all the time, adding a wonderful range of skills and vibrancy.