Who We Are

Many people have helped to get this project this far. We are a small Board of voluntary Directors supported by an expert panel of Advisors and working with a group of inspiring Partner organisations.

Alister Scott

Alister Scott is the Chair of Cuckmere Community Solar.

He has lived in Berwick since 1995, lives very close to the site, and has been involved in the project since its inception.

Professionally, Alister is a Director of The One Leadership Project, which supports the people in organisations who are leading big change. Over the past 20 years, Alister’s clients have included multinational companies, charities, government departments and international organisations. Alister routinely chairs, facilitates, advises and trains Boards, teams and individual ‘catalysts’ in high-pressure and complex situations.

Alister has been involved in catalysing big change on numerous occasions, for example as the founder of the group who persuaded the UK’s third largest pension fund USS (now worth £38bn) to adopt a “responsible investment” policy, setting a useful precedent in the City; USS in turn founded the influential Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change. In 1991, he helped to achieve 50-year protection for Antarctica as a World Park free from industrial development.

Ian Rogers

Ian Rogers is a director of Cuckmere Community Solar. Living in Tunbridge Wells and is a regular visitor to the South Downs, Ian has a background in engineering, the law and sustainability, and he set up the ventures arm of global consultancy Arup, which commercialises ideas for sustainable products and businesses. He was the sustainability director for Arup in the UK, Middle East and Africa for six years and has a passion for renewable energy. Ian says “Our project will embrace community ownership, biodiversity enhancement, generate significant amounts of green electricity and act as a demonstrator of how to address the climate threat in imaginative ways.”

Ian did a Masters in Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, followed by a law conversion course and trained as a solicitor in the City. After a stint working internationally he joined the global employee-owned consultancy Arup in 1998 as the second lawyer. At Arup he has worked at Board level, overseeing a broad range of legal issues but increasingly realised that there was a pressing need to both increase the firm’s efforts to address the unfolding climate crisis and experiment with new business models given the threats to the firm from automation.

In 2012 he set up the ventures programme, where staff could pitch ideas for new products and businesses. The programme is now global and has launched businesses in areas as diverse as train signalling, digital building management and geothermal heat. Around the same time Ian became sustainability director for Arup’s UK Middle East and Africa region, during which he pioneered an innovative scheme to invest in high efficiency cookstoves in Kenya to address health, fuel poverty and reduce carbon emissions. Outside of work Ian volunteers with the Ashdown Forest Rangers and the Sussex Wildlife Trust.

Barney Merrett

Barney Merrett is a director of Cuckmere Community Solar and lives in Berwick. He has spent the past 15 years working in the sustainable energy sector, managing government support schemes for both large and small-scale renewables. This has enabled him to develop a detailed understanding of different types of renewable energy projects, as well as the various legislative and infrastructure requirements that underpin them.

Barney strongly believes in Cuckmere Community Solar’s aims and wants to play an active role in helping them achieve their objective, of building a community solar farm that connects straight into the rail network.

Dr Kathy Martyn

Bio coming soon

Advisors

Louisa Cilenti

Louisa Cilenti is a special advisor to Cuckmere Community Solar. She has been involved with the project since 2018, providing support initially to Riding Sunbeams to advance their first-of-kind solar traction demonstrator project and later to raise funding for the project from Thrive Renewables and Friends Provident.

Louisa specialises in clean energy investment and financing. She has over two decades’ experience across a wide range of low carbon projects, and co-founded Lux Nova Partners in 2015. Lux Nova is the UK’s only law firm dedicated to fighting the climate emergency and accelerating investment into climate change solutions.

She has been recognised as a Leading Practitioner in the renewables sector by Legal 500 since 2015 (the UK’s leading independent ranking company). She is also a member of the REA’s Finance Forum Steering Group, is a member of the renewables investment committee for Social and Sustainable Capital and has been a guest lecturer since 2018 at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford University.

Louisa has been a passionate advocate for the community sector for over a decade and is currently leading an initiative to create a new stakeholder partnership model between the community energy sector and the commercial sector – the joint venture between CCS and Riding Sunbeams paving the way for co-investment to propel an inclusive Net Zero future.

Christopher Powles

Christopher Powles has been visiting the Cuckmere Valley regularly since 2012 when he and his colleagues started to develop the existing commercial solar farm adjacent to the Cuckmere Community Solar site. He has been involved in the community solar farm project from its very beginnings, as an investor and corporate adviser. Christopher says “I am inspired to assist Cuckmere Community Solar as when developing the existing solar farm we were asked not for the normal community benefit that solar farm developers generally provide but for help to develop a community owned solar farm. No other community asked this of us.”

Christopher’s professional interests are in the funding and financial management of small businesses. His personal interests are largely connected to the environment and wildlife conservation.

The main current roles Christopher has are with a venture capital fund, Octopus Apollo VCT, and in the renewable energy sector, notably for Susenco Management Limited and African Power Projects Limited. In the renewable energy sector he raises money to develop hydro, solar and wind power projects in the UK and Africa. Octopus Apollo VCT is a successful venture fund that had a large portfolio of renewable energy investments and now supports mainly young high growth software companies. He has been a director from inception since when it has grown from a c.£6 million fund to approaching £200 million. Christopher originally gained a professional qualification as a Chartered Accountant at what is now part of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Christopher’s personal interest in the environment and wildlife conservation is currently focussed on chairing the Kirtlington Wildlife and Conservation Society (known as “KWACS”), his home village wildlife group where he runs a hedgehog project that is attracting national acclaim, and being the founder Chair of the Mount Elgon Foundation. The latter is a UK registered charity established to preserve the natural and cultural heritage of Mount Elgon on the Kenya-Uganda border. As part of that, he helps direct the Mount Elgon Elephant Project on the Kenyan side of the mountain that supports the livelihoods of local people and seeks to save from extinction a population of elephants that go deep underground to mine salt.

James Richardson-Gasson

James Richardson-Gasson has been a friend of the Cuckmere Community Solar project from the outset and has assisted and advised on many aspects of the project. Having developed in excess of 180MW of solar energy projects since 2011 he sits on various advisory panels developing large scale MW renewable energy. James has a particular interest in decarbonisation, innovative and first-of-a-kind community-based renewable energy.

Dr. Dicle Kortantamer

Dr. Dicle Kortantamer is a researcher undertaking a case study of Cuckmere Community Solar.Dicle’s research is part of the Project X initiative: a large three-year ESRC funded programme of research involving a collaboration between the Cabinet Office, government departments, industry partners, the project delivery profession and a large number of universities. Dicle says “Community energy projects present significant opportunities for delivering path-breaking innovations that can accelerate our transition to a zero-carbon society. They are also likely to create local social and financial benefits such as the development of local resilience and the creation of new jobs. Using the case study of Cuckmere Community solar, we will be able to develop knowledge that can guide other communities about effective forms and practices of leadership that are required to initiate and deliver community energy projects and inform policy-makers about the ways in which they can help nurture such projects.”

Dicle is a research fellow at CENTRIM (Centre for Change, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management), University of Brighton. Her research is a collaboration between the University of Brighton and University of Sussex.

Dicle’s research aims to advance understandings of effective forms and practices of leadership in community projects concerned with generating novel solutions to sustainability issues. Insights and evidence generated by this research will inform policy makers of interventions that can help unlock the potential of community energy projects in developing path-breaking innovation with the potential to help address our grand challenge of climate change. They will also provide guidance to local organisations and community groups that seek to initiate or deliver innovative local community projects. Moreover, the theoretical explanations that are offered will be of interest to a broad set of scholars engaged in understanding leadership, sustainability transitions and projects.

Partner Organisations

Riding Sunbeams (ridingsunbeams.org) is developing the idea of powering the railways with solar energy from community solar parks like ours. We have been working with Riding Sunbeams since their inception, and we are their first full-scale project.