Shellworth Council are wanting to plan the deployment of solar PV on domestic properties in their area. This is to meet their climate emergency aspirations to be a carbon neutral borough and will also support their communities with keeping energy costs low and reducing fuel poverty.

To achieve their aim, Shellworth Council need to gather data, insights and feedback on the following:

Shellworth Council currently hold data as to where solar PV has been deployed through their previous Solar Together schemes. This paints part of a picture, but they don’t yet know where solar PV has been deployed through other means, which will be necessary to establish a baseline. This baseline will allow them to focus on properties that do not yet have solar PV installed.

This is also an opportunity to understand how much renewable energy is generated by the domestic solar PV across the Shellworth Council region. This knowledge will help the Council toward their aspiration of generating enough renewable energy to cover demand.

LENZA’s stakeholder engagement tools can assist with this.

The Data Stories feature in LENZA allows users to build out narratives to share with the public, which can include data, maps, projects, custom content, and survey questions. Shellworth Council can create a data story explaining their plans and why they are seeking to understand the location of existing solar PV in the area.

They can include supporting data from within LENZA to further contextualise their plans and aims. Then, they can add survey questions asking residents to input whether they have solar PV, and if so, to provide their address and the array size of their setup.

Figure 1: The Domestic Rooftop PV Potential dataset in LENZA, displaying which properties are likely suitable for rooftop PV installation.

Once they’ve shared this story with the public and collected their responses, the Council can export this data out of LENZA and create a local dataset of properties with existing PV, strengthening their existing intelligence. The new data will showcase a comprehensive view of solar PV across Shellworth, as well as a relatively accurate estimation of how much energy is being renewably generated. This data can then be added to LENZA to inform where they should place new solar across the region.

Through LENZA, officers have already established which properties are suitable for solar PV and the modelled array size. They have also started modelling a high-level phasing plan based on the socio-demographic data held in LENZA, conservation and listed building data and utility network data.

Officers at Shellworth Council now need to understand what the barriers are to adoption and where the opportunities are in order to create a roadmap for deployment.

LENZA’s stakeholder engagement tools can assist with this.

Through the same Data Story mentioned above, the council can collect feedback to understand what challenges or barriers the community faces regarding installing solar PV, where there may be financial constraints, and who would be interested at the initial stage.

Alongside these questions, they can provide important supplementary information, such as the ‘Low Carbon Technology Costs’ dataset to display the estimated cost of solar PV, and further information on procurement and installation.

Here are a few of the survey questions that the council could include in their Data Story:

Now that Shellworth Council has collected community insights to shape their roadmap, they need stakeholder buy-in for the solutions they propose.

LENZA’s stakeholder engagement tools can assist with this.

Using the insights collected from residents, alongside existing data within LENZA, the Council can use LENZA’s Project modeller to plan the deployment of solar PV across Shellworth, at building-level. Once they’ve created a Project (or a few) detailing their plans, they can share this with stakeholders to generate buy-in.

Shellworth Council can create a Data Story and add a range of background information about their project, including the importance of the initiative, a summary of their previous efforts to engage with the community, and data displaying their findings. Then, they can add their Project(s) to the story, allowing stakeholders to view their plans in an interactive format, including the estimated carbon savings of the Project over time.

Figure 2: Shellworth Council shares their solar project in a Data Story, alongside custom survey questions.

From there, Shellworth Council can solicit feedback and expressions of interest on these plans from stakeholders. Keeping stakeholders informed and considering their feedback will generate trust and buy-in within the community.