Lawrence Weston is a community of several thousand residents in the city of Bristol, in the west of England, and one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the region.

Between 2014 and 2023 a group of determined residents and supporters led a successful campaign to build an onshore wind turbine in the area through their community action group Ambition Lawrence Weston and subsequent sister group Ambition Community Energy.

They did so overcoming great difficulties including a government-imposed, de-facto ban on onshore wind power in England that the UK’s new centre-left Labour government finally ended several weeks ago.

The resulting turbine — a 4.2MW EP115 EP3 unit supplied by German manufacturer Enercon — began producing electricity last year and is already generating money for Ambition Community Energy and the residents of Lawrence Weston.

Now the people behind the project hope to see it replicated elsewhere.

Two of the project's key proponents — David Tudgey and Charles Gamble — believe they have created a model that can be replicated beyond Lawrence Weston.

“A lot of people will say this is a one-off, that it won’t happen again. But they don’t understand me and Charles. We didn’t do it for eight years just for one demonstration turbine [and] what we have codified is the Sustainable Innovative Financial Foundations for Turbines (SIFFFT),” Tudgey, the project development director at Community Power Solutions, told Windpower Monthly.

The pair’s SIFFFT model seeks to build on the solutions they and others came up with to overcome the major challenges they faced with the Lawrence Weston turbine.

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