Category: News

Deputy mayor opens Walney’s first electric vehicle chargepoint

The newest electric vehicle (EV) chargepoint in our project with Charge My Street has been installed in Barrow and charged its maiden car, this week.

West Point House is now the first place on Walney Island and one of the first in Barrow to be equipped with EV chargepoints. A double socket has been installed with the hope of increasing charging opportunities for locals and the 40 residents of West Point House.

Deputy mayor of Barrow Helen Wall officially opened the chargepoint as it gave its first charge this week. Helen said: “I was very thrilled to take part in launching the chargepoint today. We in Barrow are proud to have a low carbon committee and all our members are extremely passionate about low carbon issues. This chargepoint represents a great step forward for Walney”.

The installation was part of an ongoing project to establish 100 new publicly accessible EV chargepoints across Cumbria and Lancashire. Charge My Street are still looking for sites that are eligible for further installations.

Heather Cockett Phillips, joint owner of West Point House said:
“We are truly delighted that we are able to offer our residents and the wider community the opportunity to go green and use an electric car. Recent weeks where people have had to stay at home and not travel in their cars has shown a reduction in pollution levels -wouldn’t it be great if we could keep this going to reduce the damage humans do to the earth!”

Will Maden of Charge My Street said: “The level on enthusiasm for more sustainable ways of living we’ve seen on Walney has been brilliant to see. We are looking for sites where landowners have a desire to see more EVs on the roads and a sense of benefit to their community and we have certainly found that at West Point House”.

Charge My Street will be hosting a webinar on Tuesday 30th June about their project to install 100 EV chargepoints. Anyone who would like to discover more about the project or attend the webinar should register.

25 June 2020
Cumbrians’ concern about climate revealed in CAfS survey

Cumbrians are very concerned about climate change and are already taking action in their own lives to tackle it. That’s according to the results of the first-ever county-wide climate survey run by CAfS at the end of last year.

More than a thousand people shared their views on the seriousness of climate change and what the government and individuals could do to tackle it.

The survey respondents were more concerned about climate change than the national average, with 91 per cent saying they are either very concerned or fairly concerned, compared to 76 per cent in the latest national government survey by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

“We expected that respondents who are in touch with CAfS would have a higher level of concern, but about a third of the respondents hadn’t heard of CAfS before, and concern among them was still above average, at nearly 84 per cent,” said Jaki Bell, CAfS’ marketing manager, who organised the survey.

Nearly ninety per cent of respondents think we’re already feeling the effects of climate change in Britain, and that it’s caused mainly by human activities. Eighty per cent feel Britain’s target for zero carbon should be sooner than 2050, with ten per cent thinking 2050 is about right.

We then asked people what action they’d be in favour of the government taking to tackle climate change. They were very keen to see support for public transport, and help for people to replace oil and gas heating, and with draughtproofing and insulating their homes. There was also wide support for making producers and supermarkets pay for dealing with packaging waste, and helping businesses to use less energy.

Respondents were less keen to see the government supporting nuclear power, discouraging flying and encouraging people to eat less meat and dairy products.

The majority of people supported the use of renewable energy, with the strongest support for solar, off-shore wind and wave or tidal power. Interestingly, people were more ambivalent about biomass energy.

We then delved into the actions that people can take in their own lives to tackle the causes of climate change.

“Food and drink make up around a quarter of the average person’s carbon footprint – the biggest single chunk – so we were keen to know about any barrierspreventing Cumbrians from reducing this,” Jaki said. “When it comes to eating less meat and dairy, which have a high carbon footprint, the biggest barrier was that people didn’t think it was necessary. About 15 per cent felt this way about meat, and 22 per cent for dairy. The survey also showed that people felt it would be too difficult to move away from dairy, in particular. It perhaps shows that there’s a need for more awareness about the carbon footprint of these foods, and how to reduce them in our diets.”

Buying more food from local producers was viewed as too difficult by many respondents, with cost and lack of time being barriers as well.

When it came to changes in the home to reduce energy use, the biggest barrier for most changes was cost, followed by difficulty.

Difficulty was also the main issue for most low-carbon travel options, and cost was an added problem for electric vehicles and public transport. Flights is a big source of emissions, but the majority of respondents said they already do fly less.

We asked people about their efforts to buy fewer goods and to reduce waste. Most are already taking a variety of actions. For those who don’t already buy secondhand goods, people felt it wasn’t necessary or worthwhile, and repairing was seen by some as too difficult, too costly and they don’t know how to do it.

“The survey gives us a really good snapshot of people’s views on different ways to reduce carbon emissions, and how much action they’re already taking themselves,” Jaki said. “It’s extremely useful for us to see what the main barriers are for people to reduce their carbon footprint. We will look at how we can help Cumbrians to overcome those, when we’re planning future projects.”

The survey was carried out as part of the Rebuilding Together project to help Cumbria to adapt for future flooding and other extreme weather, funded by the National Lottery Community Fund.

10 June 2020
The green road to recovery – Message from our CEO

It has been 10 weeks since we were last in touch. I hope you and yours have stayed safe and well during this challenging time.

In the last few months, we have experienced changes to our lives that we probably never thought possible. Sadly, the pandemic has highlighted that, as with the impacts of climate change, the disadvantaged are the most badly affected – from the keyworkers at risk of illness to people in fuel poverty hit by higher energy bills from staying at home. It has also highlighted the link between fossil fuels, air pollution and public health.

Despite the depth of changes to economic activity, the best estimate by analysts is that global carbon emissions will have reduced by only eight per cent this year. It is sobering to know that that scale of drop is needed each year for ten years in order to keep climate change to 1.5 degrees C. It’s a big challenge but we now know that fast and comprehensive changes, informed by science, are possible to tackle a recognised threat. In April, a global IPSOS Mori poll showed 71 per cent of people agree that climate change is as big a threat as Covid-19.

As the lockdown eases, increasingly the ‘recovery’ is dominating thoughts. That same poll found 65 per cent of people support a green economic recovery from C19 and there is growing momentum behind #BuildBackBetter. In the last few weeks alone, we have seen 200 businesses nationally calling for the Government to deliver a recovery plan that prioritises the environment. The Progressive Policy Think Tank has convened a new Environmental Justice Commission, which has published a vision for a clean, healthy and environmentally rich economy. A group of experts from universities in the UK, which are part of the COP26 Universities Network (30 institutions so far and growing), have identified for policymakers ten fiscal recovery policies that would enable the UK to meet its target of zero carbon by 2050.

Closer to home, many local authorities in Cumbria declared climate emergencies last year and now have the opportunity to put zero-carbon targets at the heart of their Covid-19 recovery plans. A green recovery in Cumbria could give us more safe cycle routes, a decarbonised and improved public transport system, energy-efficient housing that is warm and cosy, more community-owned renewable-energy generation and electric-vehicle charging points, connectivity for efficient homeworking, a localised sustainable economy, skills training for new low-carbon jobs, such as housing retrofit for energy efficiency, and more.

CAfS has already been working on many of the kinds of activities that could be part of a green recovery. With most of our staff now back in action, working from home, we will continue to do all we can to drive the shift towards a zero-carbon Cumbria, with a determination to see our county #BuildBackBetter.

Karen Mitchell
CAfS Chief Executive

10 June 2020
Funding target reached and EV webinar!

Despite pressures from the national response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the community share offer from Charge My Street has succeeded in raising £130,000 to install 100 electric vehicle (EV) chargepoints across Cumbria and Lancashire.

Charge My Street and CAfS would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who put forward their own investment and to those who helped get the word out about the share offer. Investors included those who have been driving EVs for years and some who have not yet made the switch but could see the benefit of preparing our region for wide scale uptake. The money will be used to get communities in the North West ready for the EV revolution and a more sustainable tomorrow.

With the target now met, the focus of Charge My Street will turn to the identification of the very best sites throughout the two counties at which to locate brand new chargepoints.

On the 30th of June, CAfS and Charge My Street will host a free webinar intended to provide the public with any information they need to decide whether they would like to apply to be a chargepoint host. We’ll be discussing the difficulties of charging your EV if you live in the North of England as well as the benefits and opportunities of EV driving more generally.

The online talk will also feature speakers from Carlisle City Council and Renault UK discussing why they are supporting Charge My Street and further EV uptake. At the very least, it’s an opportunity to see some new smiling faces and we could all do with that at the moment!

The webinar will take place on Tuesday 30 June from 4pm to 5.45pm and will include talks from six speakers as well as a Q&A section with the attendees.
If you would like to register for the webinar, you can do so here.

Potential chargepoint hosts include any site with space for at least two EVs with strong mobile data signal or open broadband. The site must also be accessible to the public overnight, through the day or both.

For more information on becoming a chargepoint host, visit Charge My Street’s website.

5 June 2020
A message from our chief executive

How the world has changed in a short space of time. In these unprecedented times, we hope that you and your families are safe and well. We’re very much thinking about all of our supporters, as you deal with the impacts of the Coronavirus pandemic on every aspect of your lives – not least economically and socially.

Even in dark times, there are some positive things to celebrate. Across Cumbria, we’ve seen individuals and communities coming together to support each other, with overwhelming responses to appeals for volunteers. People are innovating and embracing technology to stay connected with each other and keep services going as far as possible. We are seeing government working with scientists to help chart a way through.

All of these things show that it is possible for society and systems to adapt to a global challenge collectively. It shows that people can understand and buy into action on big issues. We must ensure that the lessons we learn and the capabilities and insights we gain from tackling this pandemic are also brought to bear in preventing climate change.

For now, however, it is understandable that climate change simply isn’t the priority we would want and need it to be. We have had to take the decision to pause many of our projects for the next few months. Much of our work involves community engagement, which can’t continue at the moment.

We are still here, however, and working behind the scenes, albeit with temporarily reduced staffing. This is a difficult time for CAfS, as it is for many organisations, as we navigate through the implications of the pandemic for our funding and reshape our approach so that CAfS survives this extraordinary period, in order to carry on the fight against climate change when life starts to return to normal.

Our staff capacity will be limited for a couple of months so we need to make a few changes to our communications. We will pause our newsletter for now, and we’ll instead share any important updates with you on our social media, so please do follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Regrettably, we will not be able to respond to general enquiries during this time. If you do have an essential enquiry, please use our [email protected] email address and we will reply if we can.

Many of you may want to help with Cumbria’s response to Coronavirus. As we mentioned, it’s been so heartening to see the strong response to appeals for volunteers. Whilst we’re not able to take up offers of volunteer support just now, we may put out a call for help with specific tasks, skills or expertise later. We’ll keep you posted on our social media.

Finally, we’re very conscious that there will be many demands for your support for compelling and urgent causes in the months ahead, but for those who feel able to help, we would greatly welcome any donations you can give, to help ensure we are still able to stand up for a zero carbon Cumbria in the future. You can donate via our website.

Stay safe and we look forward to being back in touch with you before too long.

Best wishes,

Karen Mitchell
Chief Executive Officer

3 April 2020
Cold to Cosy Homes scheme responds to Covid-19

Our Cold to Cosy Homes Cumbria service has been modified in response to the Coronavirus situation. We are currently offering only the free-of-charge emergency service to vulnerable households whose gas boiler has broken down.

Call free to the LEAP call centre on 0800 060 7565 to find out if you or someone you know could be eligible for a free boiler replacement. This emergency boiler scheme, called ECHO, will run for the next few weeks, until the fund is used up.

The scheme is aimed at households that are vulnerable and need immediate assistance to stay warm and well and is completely funded by energy suppliers under Warm Home Discount Industry Initiatives.

For those people who need to stay at home due to illness or to avoid risk of contracting Coronavirus, it is more important than ever that their homes have a working heating system.

To date Cold to Cosy Homes has provided over 350 home energy advice visits across Cumbria in collaboration with LEAP (the Local Energy Advice Partnership).

As announced earlier this week, we are temporarily suspending visits to people’s homes through our Cold to Cosy Homes service in order to help ensure people who are affected by health issues are not put at risk of infection. We will resume visits as soon as it is appropriate to do so. In the meantime, we are still taking bookings, which we ask you to do online here: https://cafs.org.uk/cafs-draughtproofing-energy-saving-services/.

And while you are thinking about helping your neighbours, how about checking that they are on the Priority Services Register with their energy company and the utility companies (water, gas, electricity). You can phone Electricity North West on 0800 195 4141 or sign up online: https://www.enwl.co.uk/priority.

19 March 2020
Coronavirus – CAfS response

Last updated: 31 May 2023

The way we’re delivering some of our projects and services has been adapted to take account of the current Coronavirus guidelines.

Here are some updates about our main services and activities:

CAfS events

We are now running both in-person and online events. We are taking Covid precautions at our in-person events. We request that for the protection of vulnerable people, you remain COVID-19 aware and follow the government guidance. Visit our events page to see events we’ve got planned.

Cold to Cosy Homes Cumbria

We’re continuing to offer our free telephone advice calls, and our free professional draughtproofing service has now resumed. Find out more >

Staffing & contact

The majority of our staff are working from home. Email is the best way to reach our team. You’ll find contact details on our staff team page. You can also phone our office on 01768 210276.

We thank all our customers and supporters for their patience and understanding.

16 March 2020
Focus group informs EV project

In last months newsletter and on our website, we put out an appeal for electric vehicle owners and non-EV owners alike to lend us their experiences and perceptions and the response we received was heartily enthusiastic!

Dozens of respondents told us how they would happily give us some insight into their views on EVs, so we asked them to do exactly that over a pizza and a pint at Kendal’s Brewery Arts Centre.

Because we had a wealth of respondents to choose from and only a small amount of space, we sent out invites to those who lived fairly locally so it would be easy enough for them to attend. That’s not to say that we’re completely done with consultations though, so Eden respondents may still have a chance to shape our direction at some point!

The informal focus group was intended to give some insight into the mind of an EV-driver for a team from Mirales Data who are working on their ChargeBetter software for EV chargepoints.

Topics of discussion included the current challenges around adopting EVs, the ideal home situations for making the switch and the smart charging technology being trialled by some companies for future implementation.

The evening was a huge success with each participant contributing enthusiastically to the discussion from a whole range of perspectives for far longer than we could reasonably have asked them to.
Those from Mirales headed home with a greater sense of what the world looks like from an EV driver’s point of view and some optimism from the non-EV drivers who all reinforced their interest in making the switch from petrol and diesel.

Anyone interested in the wider EV project that we and Mirales are working on can find out more on its dedicated page on our site.

27 February 2020
EV chargepoint share offer under way

About a month ago, we mentioned that we would soon be supporting the launch of a unique community share offer that aims to change sustainable transport in the North West.

Well, the launch has been and gone and the Charge My Street share offer is NOW OPEN as anyone who follows our social media should already be well aware. We’ve tweeted and Facebooked about little else since the offer went live on the 24th. We’re like a new mother or Piers Morgan after a Greggs vegan pastry reveal.

It closes on 31 March so you can expect to hear more about the progress being made in the campaign to increase the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) in the rural North West.

As previously mentioned, Charge My Street are raising £130,000 worth of shares in their community benefit society to help fund the installation of 100 EV chargepoints in Cumbria and Lancashire. These chargepoints will be owned by the Charge My Street shareholders and placed in public locations where they can be an asset to EV drivers who don’t have their own driveway to charge in.

Over a third of UK residents don’t have their own driveway so it’s a big ask for a flat-sharer in Carlisle or a villager in Troutbeck to switch from a system where they know they can quickly grab petrol at a station in town to one where if a car is parked at the one chargepoint for miles around, they’re out of luck.

More public chargepoints in convenient locations are what is needed to solve this problem and build people’s confidence to switch to the cleaner and cheaper EV technology. Following the moving of government targets earlier this month, this is going to need to start to happen sooner rather than later to clean up our air and slow the rate of climate change.

We’ve been flat out here at CAfS spreading the word about the share offer to those who might be interested with only the weather stopping us from physically climbing onto the roof of the office and shouting it at passersby.

You can find out how much has been raised so far and, dare I say, even invest yourself by going to the Charge My Street website.

27 February 2020
Sunny side up for Ambleside

Sixty per cent of Ambleside’s annual domestic energy consumption could be powered with solar PV systems. That’s according to a study done by Alex Boyd who came into the CAfS office recently to present his findings to a wide-eyed audience of our staff.

Alex’s aim was to produce a workable methodology to create large-scale assessments of roof space for solar panels using publicly available data. The lakeside town was chosen as the guinea pig for this study as part of the Ambleside to Zero programme, but the method was designed to apply to any town on the map.

Using LiDAR (basically RADAR but with light) data from satellite images, Alex was able to identify all roofs big enough for solar panels.

He then eliminated various sites from consideration using a dizzying array of parameters. Any roof that was too small, too steep or too shaded was cast aside for only the most prime rooftop real estate.

After combining this information with Ambleside’s admittedly modest record of sunshine, he managed to calculate a total potential energy output of 3.5 GWh. That’s the equivalent of brewing 175 million cups of tea which, coincidentally, is also how Alex got through the process of calculating all this data.

While the findings from the study have exciting implications for the future of renewable energy sources in Cumbria, it also suggests that we as individuals needn’t simply wait for change to happen. Just over sixty per cent of the total output came from roofs that produced less than 3000 kwh (that is, residential homes). This suggests that individual homes do have the capacity to change our overall energy habits for the greener.

Alex has recently graduated from the University of Lancaster with a master’s degree in physics, astrophysics & cosmology, so it’s hardly surprising that the CAfS staff felt like they had just walked out of a NASA briefing when he wrapped up!

Alex’s work is one of the projects that CAfS is undertaking to support the Ambleside to Zero programme, a whole-place approach to cutting emissions in the town. The programme is being run by the community organisation Ambleside Action for a Future (AAFAF), supported by South Lakeland District Council. Have a look at the AAFAF website to find out about the programme overall. We’re excited to be playing a part in it – watch this space for more updates soon.

1 February 2020