East Ayrshire Council / Comhairle Shiorrachd Àir an Ear

Core - August 2024 update

East Ayrshire Council sent this bulletin at 02-10-2024 02:51 PM BST

Project update October 2024

Overview

The Community Renewable Energy (CoRE) project is one of the Ayrshire Growth Deal projects being delivered by East Ayrshire Council. The project is supported by investment of £17 million from UK Government and £7.5 million from East Ayrshire Council, with the aim of leveraging additional external funding to maximise community benefits.

The project aims to showcase how a green recovery can transform our rural towns and villages and make our communities better connected, healthier and improve the standard of living through a just transition, whilst supporting the creation of long-term sustainable jobs.

Revised aims and renewed focus

During the last three years, in common with the rest of the UK, Ayrshire has experienced unprecedented challenges as a result of global events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost of living crisis, construction inflation and rising interest rates.

For certain groups and individuals, the social and economic effects of these challenges has been more profound, which has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities between our communities.

Opportunity

In light of these challenges, we have taken the opportunity to reflect, review and re-focus the project’s aims and objectives to make sure it still remains true to the original aspirations of CoRE and the Ayrshire Growth Deal while alligning with the Council’s responsibilities to our communities,

CoRE presents a unique opportunity to address two of the greatest challenges facing our communities:

tackling the ongoing energy crisis
supporting a just and equitable transition towards net-zero.

Employment

Feedback from academic and industry partners has highlighted that there is regional skills shortage, which is a barrier to economic growth and is preventing East Ayrshire residents from gaining sustainable employment within the sector. This also creates skills capacity issues for our local businesses, making delivery of our net-zero ambitions more difficult.

Looking to the future

Going forward, a primary focus of the CoRE project will be to maximise the socio-economic and community health and well-being benefits from delivery of the project.

Partnership working

We are working closely with educational, academic and employability partners to:

maximise skills development
vocational training and STEM education opportunities for our communities
address regional skills gaps
ensure local people are positioned to benefit economically from the net-zero transition
support the creation of career pathways from our schools into further education and green employment.

See a list of our partners on our webpages

Project aims

Four key project aims have been set to reflect CoRE’s focus:

Ensure our communities have the skills and qualifications to contribute to the low carbon sector supply chain.
Help communities make affordable choices to heat and power their homes, to tackle fuel poverty.
Make places which benefit our communities’ health and wellbeing.
Make homes and buildings more sustainable and comfortable for people to live and work in.

Centre for Excellence

Due to spiralling construction costs, rising interest rates and changing priorities, we cannot now build the Centre to its original high specification - so we are carrying out a feasibility and re-scoping process to make sure it meets our redefined needs.

The primary function of the Centre will now be as a skills, training and STEM education Centre, to address the regional skills gap and create a pipeline of sustainable employment.

The Centre’s redesign will include

Skills, training and STEM education, to address the regional skills gap, and create career pathways, from schools through to renewable industry.
Research, development and innovation, to develop new sustainable technologies which can be implemented locally to benefit our communities.
Community hub, offering offer free and impartial advice and sustainable transport services.
Industry and SMEs, working with stakeholders to co-develop initiatives and training programmes.
Demonstrator houses, with the construction of a Passivhaus demonstrator house, which will be open to the public to see and experience benefits of technology and for on-site training.

Demonstrator projects

A programme of demonstrator projects will be developed to showcase how critical areas of community infrastructure, such as housing, energy and transport can successfully transition to net-zero. The projects will help to provide our communities and businesses with the tools and knowledge to adopt low-carbon changes across their lives and respond to climate risks and sustainability challenges.