How to own a wind farm with Sarah Merrick (CEO & Founder @ Ripple Energy)

You know, Wind had become the cheapest source of electricity in the UK. You know, to me, it just seemed really unfair that if you were Google or Facebook or Amazon or, you know, a big big company, you could access the cheapest source of electricity in the UK direct, but me as an individual, there's no way I could do that. I haven't got the sort of might of a large corporate. So I set up Ripple something that's always worked in the large scale end of the industry, it's really frustrating that, you know, community to us should not necessarily mean small scale and generally small scale projects are more expensive. It's all about opening up really, really good quality, large, low cost projects for individuals. Hello, everybody, and welcome back for another installment of transmission. In today's so that Quentin is joined by founder and CEO of ripple energy, Sarah Merrick.

Over the course of the conversation, they discuss how ripple are bringing clean energy ownership to the mainstream. As always, if you are enjoying the podcast, please consider hitting like subscribe, it really helps us to reach a wider audience. And with that, let's jump in.

Hello, Sarah.

Hiya. Thanks for calling on the podcast.

So I just wanna start with we'll get straight into it. What does it mean when you say ripple can bring clean energy ownership to the mainstream.

Yeah. So what happens is we make large scale energy ownership possible for consumers for the first time, pretty much. Before ripple came along, your only option of owning your own source of clean power was to put solar on your roof, but that's not possible. Was very expensive for a start.

It's not possible if you live in a flat or if you rent and if you move home, you have to leave it behind. Whereas Ripples model is that everyone owns a tiny bit of a large scale solar particle or wind farm, and then you get the electricity supplied by the grid. So it's kind of making it mainstream it like frees you from the constraints of home solar. It doesn't matter whether your house is behind a tree or what aspect it's facing, all of that stuff.

It is properly mainstream. It's really affordable, really cheap, really flexible, and literally anyone who's got an electricity bill in their name can now own a bit of a wind farm or solar park and get the green cheap electricity that that that it generates. That's absolutely wicked. So what's implied by this is that there's I mean, as someone who I live in a house with, well, ninety more.

I live in the US now, but in the UK, I lived in a house with a shared roof And that meant for me we could I really, really wanted solar panels, but it just there was no way to make it sense. There was too many parts involved and all that kind of stuff. I imagine there's lots of people like me who really wanted to be in on this thing. Like, I I I want to have some sort of power generation in my home or, you know, office dock or whatever.

And and what you guys do is help people like me access that without it being physically on my roof. Right? Or do you still put something on my roof? Nope.

There's nothing on your roof. There's nothing in your home all. And so what happens is we go out and we find ready to build wind farms and solar parks, and then obviously a wind farm or a big solar park can generate enough electricity for thousands of people, like, way more than you as an individual could ever possibly use in your home. So we'd gather together thousands of people and collectively They own that wind farm or that solar park, and then you get just like if you might own three kilowatts of a solar panel on on your roof, You can own three kilowatts of the solar park, and then the power that that three kilowatts generates gets supplied to your home via the grid and you get savings on your electricity bill every single month for, you know, so the parks last for forty years when farms twenty five, thirty years.

Yeah. It literally doesn't matter where in the country you are, not Northern Ireland at the moment, but but, yeah, it's making it possible to own your own source of clean power even if you don't have a roof, where wherever you are, basically.

Wow. And so do you guys net it off on my energy bill? What do I so if I'm a customer, we're getting straight into detail here, but, we're gonna talk about the founding story and what you've been doing for efforts. But So I'm a I'm a customer, and I'm with, I don't know, that's I'm with Octopus in the UK, and I wanna access this thing.

What is what's the customer experience like for me? Yeah. So we we work with octopus. So if you're with octopus, you haven't even got to change supplier.

So we're not a supplier. We partner with suppliers But, yeah, if you're with Oxford, it it works kind of thing. So, basically, you just go on to Ripples website, you decide how much when we've got a share offer open You decide how much if that wind farm or the solar park you wanna own depending on, you know, you can put in how much electricity you use, decide whether you want a hundred percent of that covered by your wind farm, fifty percent, ten percent, whatever it is. You then buy that share of a wind farm.

Typically, it's of just over two thousand pounds worth that people buy.

We go away. We build the wind farm for your solar park. And then when it starts generating, octopus would basically buy your share the wind farms electricity, but instead of paying the market price for it, it buys it at just the operating costs of the wind farm, which is really low, really stable for its life time. And then because they bought your electricity from your solar park really cheap, they pass a saving on to you.

So at the moment, members are saving twenty seven p a unit for the first wind farm that's generating at the moment. We that's because prices are crazy high at the moment. We expect it to be kind of like eight nine pence a unit for the next few years. Yeah.

You don't have to do anything, basically. What what does that mean prices are crazy high at the moment? So at the moment, because for the last sort of two years with the war in Ukraine, it meant that gas prices went through the roof, and that then spill over into the electricity market. So people's electricity bills have been two, three times what they normally are but because the market price has shot up, the cost of generating electricity from a wind farm or a solar park has not increased one bit.

So it means that the saving that our members get by own or the benefit you get by owning your own source of low cost screen power.

Is absolutely huge because your wind farm, the cost is still the same. It's just the difference between the costs and what is operating costs are or or the market price in the operating cost. So you get massive saving on your bill. As prices come down, in the market, we expect the that wouldn't then mean the saving that members get will come down, but their bills will probably come down at the same time as well.

So when prices are high, you're fifty bill would be high, but so would your saving from your wind farm or your solar park as prices come down, your bill comes down, and so does your saving from your wind park. So basically, it kind of stabilizes your electricity bill for the long term. And do you guys do you guys build the assets? Do you build up wind or solar So we we don't have any Spanish.

They're you know, they're there's kind of independent What? Subscription teams that, generally, turbine manufacturers come and build their turbines. And with with solar, you you would have a third party contractor that that that does all that. So we don't physically build it, but we manage all of that you know, pretty complicated contractual interfaces and everything.

So, yeah, so we're the experts in renewables. So you as a somebody who doesn't know anything about negotiating turbine, prices, or anything else, you can still own a bit of a wind farm or a bit of a solar park and we take care of everything for you. So everything else, you just buy your share, we go out and do the sort of hard complicated stuff so that for that you don't have to. It's extremely cool.

Just to take a step back for a second, Sarah. I know you're doing research on this. You've been involved in wind and wind turbine stuff for quite a long time. So can you just talk for a little bit about where, you know, your energy experience?

Where where do how do you get up to this point? And why why start ripple energy? And then I wanna dig even more into the detail about ripple energy, but I guess we should give everyone a little bit of a chance to understand who you are. So I started working in the renewables industry in two thousand, and this was back when, you know, wind was, whatever, point two percent.

Way way less than one percent of the UK's electricity. There weren't any or there was the very, very first two little offshore wind turbines that had just been built in the UK, like, right at the start of the industry.

And over that time. So over twenty three years, I've seen it go from virtually nothing to more than a quarter of the UK's electricity. And so I worked for a wind turbine manufacturer and then a big, renewable energy developer as well. And so my kind of expertise has been wind and its position in the electricity market, and I was also vice chair of the, like, wind trade body.

We should just just to come in here. So people so these are these aren't just any old this isn't just any old OEM. You should probably name drop here because it does give some credibility. So you're a Vesta.

Right? Vesta. Yes. It's one of the world's biggest, yeah, Yeah. Pretty big one. And then Renewable UK, which, of course, most of our listeners will know as a pretty big contributor to to our sector.

Yeah. And then, it was res. It was one of the biggest and raise the efforts. When you lend your developers.

So fantastic set of companies that I've I've I've been involved with. And but the the industry as a whole was you know, looking at what happens in a post subsidy world, you know, at this point, back in twenty fourteen, fifteen, you know, wind had become the cheapest source of electricity in the UK, but the industry's kind of response was, oh, we'll sell our electricity to Google and Facebook under long term contracts. And, you know, to me, it just seems really unfair that if you Google or Facebook or Amazon or, you know, a big big company, you could access the cheapest source of electricity in the UK direct, but me as an individual, there's no way I could do that.

I haven't got the sort of mite of a large corporate. So I set up Riffle. Once I literally decided, I just worked out how much of a wind turbine an individual house would need to own, looked at what I knew what the price of a turbine was, and then it just seemed like an absolute no brainer. It's so much cheaper than putting you know, home solar on your on your roof.

My background has always been large scale energy, you know, large scale wind because it's just so much cheaper. So just enabling everyone to get access to that super, super cheap power. Obviously, they can't do it on their own. So we have to work out a way of how do you actually you know, get together thousands and thousands people and give them the collective power of or, you know, buying power of a Google or Facebook kind of thing.

We do it through a kind of old school co op, which is, you know, it's a really good, really simple entity. So people become members of the co op. The co op owns the wind farm. That's how own the wind farm kind of thing.

So it took a couple of years to set up and sort of, you know, work it through, just try and work out exactly how we how we make it happen. But, yeah, I've got fantastic teams, the next colleague of mine from from res, another guy's, as our CTO. So, yeah, we've got had a fantastic, really early team. And, yeah, together, we just made it happen.

And how big how big's ripple energy now? Well, how long have you been doing ripple energy? Full time since late twenty seventeen. But I mean, a lot of that was Yeah.

Me, in my kitchen, kind of thing. So, yeah, so properly kind of twenty eighteen. And then we did a crowdfunding round in twenty nineteen, and that's when we kind of started hiring people, but there there were three of us working on it before then. And yeah.

So from twenty seventeen, basically, so it's taken it just take a while. These are long term things to to get up and running. And is it mostly wind? Is it all wind?

It's not all wind. No. No. No. So it's all you know, we we kind of technology agnostic amongst.

So our our requirements are mature low cost fuel free renewables. So we've got two wind farm one wind farms operational, one wind farm is under construction. We've launched a solar park this year. That's our biggest project so far.

We're about to launch another project in the next few weeks. So, yeah, it's it's wind or solar. We've looked at hydro even, but your hydro is kind of a different, you know, it's a it's a ninety year assay. It's really, really long.

It's kind of a bit bit different, but be it any fuel free, mature, with a low technology risk, but no fuel because, you know, one of the big benefits is, you know, we know how much it's gonna cost to generate electricity from a wind farm for the next twenty five years. Same with the solar park. As soon as you introduce a fuel, whether that is biofuel or whatever, you've got fuel benefits. You don't know what the cost of generating electricity from a biomass plant is gonna be in five years, let alone in twenty five years kind of things.

You know, and so you then haven't got that kind of that price stability that that that you have with a with a fuel free. So so, yeah, any fuel free source that's low, proven, low technology risk, and low cost is is the kind of key for us. Just wanna get my thoughts together here because my I'll ask what feels like a bit of a difficult question, but I'm you would have answered it a million times. So the If, if the our job in the energy transition is to allocate capital as efficiently as possible to to the lowest carbon fuel sources or energy sources.

How is there not already a way where this already happens on a large scale? Right? So surely economies of scale means that big offshore wind should be the lowest cost producer, you know, as a, like, a, as a marginal unit term, And therefore, the game here is to is big, big multi billion pound projects, which bring the cost in dollar a pound per kilowatt down, kilowatt hour down. And what we need to do is as a collective is procure that through the existing channels of the market, right, with existing suppliers and generators.

So Why why is that not the case? Yeah. That that obviously, there is already loads of, you know, that that there's loads of offshore wind there's loads of onshore wind and and solar being built it's just that generally if you have prices increasing, the owners of that wind farm or solar park will get higher prices because the market prices increased. End consumers just sit at home, they have to pay whatever bill lands on their doorstep.

So by enabling people to collectively access by directly and genuinely owning those large scale projects, they get access to that themselves. So, yeah, it it it's kind of, you know, that obviously there's loads of community energy projects, but they tend to be very small scale. And, you know, as something that's always worked in the large scale end of the industry, it's really frustrating that, like, you know, community to us should not necessarily mean small scale and generally small scale projects are more expensive. It's all about opening up really, really good quality, large, low cost projects for individuals.

But, but, obviously, you have to get to a certain threshold because, you know, if you've got a, you know, fifty hundred megawatt wind farm, you need to have tens of thousands of people together to be able to collectively own that. You can't do it, you know, with with a kind of local offering. So, yeah, it's all about kind of leapfrogging the kind of economies and scale of, like, right, low or traditional community geographically local community.

Is always gonna be constrained to smaller scale projects. So we wanna go big. Yeah. Get thousands of people from all over the country.

You know, we've got a grid let's just use it. There's no need for energy to be local. You everyone's connected to the grid. All the power stations, you know, wind farms and solar parks are connected to the grid.

Let's just join it all up and and kind of use it. You don't need to have energy being very, very local. And by having a kind of, you know, a really people offering. It doesn't matter where you live in the country.

It, you know, it doesn't matter how much you own. It's all fully proportional. It just works. It's really simple.

People can get it. You're you know, we're not constraining ourselves to people in a certain location.

And but there's still this really, really strong sense of community. So we've got community forum on our on our website. It's got about eleven thousand people on it. So of the fifteen thousand members, we got another fifteen thousand who have reserved.

But, yeah, it it's a really you know, vibrant community, people ask them that they ask us questions. They ask each other questions. You know, you can get a community, but we all live in a social media world. You don't sailing need to live near the people in your digital online community.

You can be all over the country, but you've got that shared interest of you all owed a bit of a solar park or a wind farm. Did you say there's fifteen thousand members and you've got another fifteen thousand in reserve? So we've got fifteen thousand on the waiting list for the for the next project here. Yeah.

Congrats. This is really good. Thank you. Yeah. My head my head's spinning. Right? My head's spinning in this, like, but this, the this is just a a a different solution.

I can't help but think there's a way to do this in a way that you can bring in the lowest cost of capital from big funds and debt and bring the cost capital down. And then somehow with, like, a swap, a basis swap, something's a synthetic contract, you could give the upside and the value of ownership whilst the the the cost of capital of the the big offshore assets are still low and still do stuff at scale. But No. We we have that that that there's debt in the projects.

So generally for the for So we have debt in the projects, which obviously reduces it reduces the number of people that we need for each project, and then, obviously, once the debt's repaid, then everyone gets a bit more because they all get this or share of of the debt. So it's, you know, the the projects that are leveraged, the, well, the last two are, the first one, the pilot project wasn't leveraged. But but but, yeah, so we do get the benefit of leverage. I mean, at the moment, obviously, with interest rates, it's not, you know, it's it's a bit of a different situation than it was five, six years ago.

But but but, yeah, no, absolutely, people get the benefit of project finance just, you know, the the whole idea is to give an individual the kind of benefit that a large corporate would have kind of thing. So, yeah, most projects are project finance, you know, It makes sense that Ripples projects are a a project's finance too because, you know, there were obvious benefits of of of doing that. Fifteen thousand users. I thought not users, fifteen thousand people members And how what's the minimum amount that Twenty five pounds.

So Twenty five pounds. Really, really loud. That's not gonna get you very much of a wind farm or a solar park kind of thing. So your savings will be absolutely minimal kind of thing, but it's really important for us because we do really, really want ownership to be accessible to everyone.

We deliberately put that the the minimum very low. We're not making, you know, a penny or that kind of level, but also we haven't got that many people at that level. So like I said, the average is about two thousand two hundred pounds that people purchase, and we set a cap. So you can only buy what would generate all of your consumption plus twenty percent.

You can't So you can't buy fifty thousand pounds worth of a solar park if you don't need fifty thousand pounds of of of a solar park. That then makes it available. So a lot more people, but but but, yeah, it's kind of yeah. The the the very low entry level is really important for us because we we want it to be accessible for for everyone.

I mean, it's cool because it means that even sort of Joe blogs down the street can get involved and start thinking about this stuff And then I imagine through the community, they can learn about the wind farm and the impact it's having, and they see it turn up on their bill. So what what do the suppliers think of this? Cause this feels like a bit of complexity for them to manage.

They're a bit good easy. They they they they they love the fact that it, you know, it's a product that customers really love. You know, people want low cost electricity, and they want, you know, green power, but green power that makes a real impact.

From their perspective, it there's very little work that they, you know, we do all the sort of calculations each month of how much everyone needs to needs to save. We tell them, you know, customer a needs to save fifty eight pounds ninety three of their bill. Customer b needs to save fourteen pounds, whatever.

Yeah, it it it's a very it's very attractive for for suppliers.

And I think they're going back to, you know, the the member who's if you own twenty five pounds of wind farm or a solar park, you can still see how much your little sliver of that solar park is generating in real time on your dashboard. You can see how much it's forecast to generate. You can see how much you've generated over the last week or day or year or whatever. And it's all about bringing energy to life.

You know, we our our members could track the the ships bringing the towers and the blades in for our Kirk Hill wind farm up in Scotland. So they could be tracking these blades, you know, arriving into the port of air ready to go up in their wind farm. And it just makes it makes it real. They can kind of see behind the curtain, whereas, you know, people might see when farms going up, but they don't feel any connection to them.

With ripple, they know, look, that's my a bit you know, I own a bit of one of those blades, and I wanna see it, you know, coming into the UK. So it just brings it it makes energy come alive for people.

It's a bit better than the the the pension fund or the fund of funds that my pension fund is involved in owns a little sliver of a special purpose vehicle that owns a bit of that wind farm. It's a bit more exciting to say. I own a bit of that wind farm, mate. Exactly.

And they, you know, when when they're generating, we have an open day. You can go up, take your picture, you know, go and touch the turbine kind of thing. It's people absolutely love it. And people haven't really been given the chance to get involved in the industry before.

It's been very much like the industry and then people are kind of they're they're not people. They're just consumers that, you know, sit at the end of the value chain. Actually, we kind of just invert that value chain. I can imagine a lot of our business.

I'm gonna be quite excited about this and go straight to the to website and sign up. I'm going to do the sounds about it. I guess you can't net it off against the techs and techs and power but I'll do it at my mom's address. How about that?

Nice. So can can I ask you a little bit more about the, the projects that you've been working on? So you got three projects now. What these projects look like.

I mean, how many megawatts these projects? So the first one was just our pilot project. So that's only two and a half megawatts. So that's not the scale that we're going for.

It was just a literally a pilot to kind of prove that something that had never been done before could actually be done. So that's operational at the moment. And then we've got a wind turbine that's under construction. That's nineteen megawatts.

So six of the turbines are up now. The other two are going up in the next few weeks. And then we in Scotland, that's just south of air in in the on the West Coast. And then we've got Darryl Water is our first solar pot.

That's forty two megawatts. And that's down just next to butte in in Devon. Okay. So these are big, big projects.

Yeah. They're decent size. Yeah. They're decent size. And that's the whole point is projects kind of have to be big to, you know, get the lowest cost possible because either energy, you can't overstate how important economies of scale are with energy.

So they have they have to be big. You know, the first project was literally just the pilot to make sure that it, you know, to have a manageable number of customers and all that sort of thing. So, yeah, we are going for going to scale.

A lot what I love about this is that you can imagine some people Well, obviously, you, and some of the people sat down the pub going, why don't we all just club together? Why don't we just club together and do this somehow? And then it's it's it's such a simple story.

That's it. It kind of, you know, once we came up with the idea, it was like, well, why hasn't this? I kind of assumed somebody would do it. And so there was a couple of years where I was kind of almost waiting for somebody else to do it, and nobody did.

So that's when, you know, I decided to set it up myself. How's your cost base compared to that, Albert? Have a, you know, an orsted or a, you know, an off off shore winds giant. I suppose, let's compare to onshore wind.

That's that's that's not very fair. How how does he cost base and your running costs compare to to those guys? And then ripple energy, how does ripple energy make money? So we're a startup.

So we're still getting investment into kind of, you know, grow the business. But in terms of the cost base for an individual project, it's pretty much exactly the same. We charge a we charge in terms of how we make our money. We charge a percentage of the CapEx.

So we've charged between about four and seven percent of CapEx, and that covers all of our, you know, legal cost, marketing costs customer support costs, and then we charge between one and two pounds per megawatt hour as a management fee throughout the lifetime of the project. So that's like you know, five, six pounds per customer per year. And, yeah, in in terms of our cost base, so we don't I guess the team structure is the biggest different. We don't go out and develop projects.

So we've got, you know, we've got an in house tech team. We've developed the whole tech platform ourselves.

So our tech our tech team is probably a lot bigger than, you know, only a a developer's tech team would be a tiny, tiny proportion of of of their team where it's a big part of of our team. You know, again, we've got a bigger marketing team because what we do we've got the platform, we've got marketing to sort of tell people, okay, this this is happening. You can do this now. Legal team, our projects team is just three people. So it's only ten percent of of the team is actual people working on on the project. So it's more about the different focus of of what we do because Yeah. We are much more, you know, we're we're we're the ownership platform that brings together projects with people.

So naturally, you know, our cost base is very, very different to to to anyone else in in the sector. You know, we're very different to utility, which is very, you know, obviously a big part of their team is customer service, whereas art, we've got people in our customer service team. So, yeah, it's it's a very, very different structure. It's like a it's a B2C company, but then it's kind of like a marketplace company in some ways.

But then it's also a bit like a fun manager Yeah. And asset manager in other ways. See, we don't fit into any obvious boxes, but we can kind of fit a bit in that one and a bit in in that one. But we're also with B2B as well.

So we we work for businesses as well. Again, same with businesses, you know, a business wouldn't okay. If you're Google and Facebook, you can own a whole wind farm and you know, your consumption would be sufficient for the whole wind farm, but most businesses don't. And so they still realize they, you know, they wanna be protected from, you know, spiraling energy prices that they've been really badly hit by over the last couple of years.

So, yeah, so we've got businesses on board as well. And again, they range from you know, two thousand pounds is kinda like the minimum that we've had from a business right up to nearly ten million pounds. So it it the massive, massive, range and appeals to a really, really wide range of different types of businesses. And are these all subsidy free?

Like, is that are the owners pulling the CapEx in, see, distributed across across thousands, but are are they taking market risk on power price? Yes. Because essentially consumers are taking market risk on power prices anyway. Because if prices go up, your bill's gonna go up.

So, actually, by owning your own source of low cost stable price power, you're hedging your own position out. So you're protecting yourselves from spiraling prices. And, yeah, you're you're already exposed. As we've seen, really, you know, evident over the last couple of years, consumers are massively exposed to energy price shocks.

And as we've seen, you know, energy price, prices go through the roof and consumers have a really, really tough time of it. Yeah. Someone's gotta pay for it. Consumer, sometimes utilities sometimes government, but can I ask you about future projects?

So what's what's coming next? So we've got these three projects right now, two wind and one solar. Solar's pretty massive. Right?

That's a lot of acreage to get forty four megawatts that you said. What are the what what are the next projects? There's gonna be another solar? I can't announce any more details apart from that it's another solar park.

Come on. And and and then basically we're we're looking at doing more solar, more wind, tensate offshore wind as well. So, you know, for offshore wind, it wouldn't be a whole project. It would be a portion of a, you know, single digit percentage of of a of an offshore wind because they're just so massive.

But, yeah, we are in discussions with a number of different developers about other other other projects because, you know, developers can see that you know, by offering something back to not necessarily the local community. I mean, it can be the local community as well, but, you know, by Yeah. By by by offering something back and we, you know, at market price, you know, our members pay full price for for for projects. You know, it it can just help you know, it can potentially help with planning consent.

So if you can say to a local community, you know, we wanna build a wind farm or solar park outside your town, we want you to be able to own part of it, though, that's a much more compelling proposition for that local community than, you know, just having a community benefit fund or or something else.

It's like a collective collective buyer for big PPA. Do you have to if you're say you've got a wind farm in Scotland, and person x who has signed up is down in the south in Cornwall. Today, you had to pay the transmission and distribution costs between of that megawatt hour or kilowatt hour between Scotland and down there. I mean, how do how do you net that off?

It's all just done. So it's kind of the the the PPA would be or the PPA price would be as it the PPA price would be for any wind farm in Scotland, and the customer's tariff will be based on any customer wherever they are in the southwest of of England. And so the kind of the risks are and and the costs are kind of kept where they or any otherwise would be kind of thing. So, like, your tariff reflects your, you know, the the distribution and transmission costs for being a consumer in the southwest.

And you your PPA kind of reflects and all your, you know, better benefits and everything else and your connection charges they reflect what any other wind farm in, you know, North of Scotland or South of Scotland would pay. And so we have we it doesn't it doesn't change, you know, any transmission, you know, and we pay all our transmission charges like any other wind farm would and all our customers pay all of their you know, grid costs like any other customer would. It's just that your customer your your your supplier is buying your power from has a PPA with with your wind farm, and they're buying it at a different price to to normal.

But but, you know, if if if every single solar park, every single wind farm in the country was owned by consumers with Ripples model, all the grids would still get paid, all the taxes would still get paid. Everything everything still gets paid. So it's not like Yeah. There there there's no kind of free ride at any point.

Everything, it still pays for everything. Like, you know, wind farms would pay for everything and consumers would pay for everything. Nothing is have lost. Okay.

And I want we've got two more questions to go. The first one is I was hoping you were gonna give us an exclusive on the podcast about your next project, but clearly that's not gonna happen. First one is, this is your chance to plug something. So if you're there's something bigger the business that you wanna talk about, now let's do it.

And then the last one is where I ask you for your contrarian view. So do you wanna do the first one? What do you wanna plug? Well, the next one, the next project is coming very, very soon.

So we're hoping to launch it in December. And, yeah, it Well, yeah, it'll be another trailer park. But but, yeah, we will just watch our watch this space for for Your face is lighting up This is this sounds great. You're really excited.

We are very excited. And, yeah, so another project coming very soon, and it'll be the cheapest project what the super solar that we've done so far as well. So, yeah, we're very, very excited about that. And I guess my contrarian view would be It's about community and the idea that community energy has to be geographically located or just based on a physical geography, you know, it really, really frustrates me when people kind of don't see ripple or that.

Oh, you know, they think they think ripples should be limited to the areas in which the solar parks and the wind farms are based, and it's like right we all live in a society, and we've all paid for the grid. We can use it. And also the, you know, the idea that The ripple community is not a proper community because people are all over the country. It's just madness.

Like, you know, members chat to each other all the time, you know, probably more than you might chat to your neighbors that live on your streets kind of thing. You know, people are involved. They're really, really engaged, and it is an absolutely thriving community. And it's just about, you know, people need to change their view of what community energy is.

It's like you can, you know, we live in a digital connected world and communities are just different now, but it doesn't mean there's less community spirit or people don't feel, you know, a sort of cohesive group of people.

It's absolutely community entity, but it is a community of people with this shared amazing thing that they're all doing together, and that is a really brilliant feeling. So, yeah, so my contrarian view is very much about what is and what isn't community energy because, you know, times are changing and, you know, our view of how things are done in the community energy world just needs to really changing. That's what we're all about.

You you on Reddit? No. We're not. No. I don't. You've read it.

Great example about how you you can build a big fan of Reddit. Great example about how you can build an amazing community and never be I mean, with people all around the world who have never been in the same room Yeah. It it is a a magical magical thing to build. You're on your platform can is there a is a message?

Exactly. So that's what I've got. It looks at people who, you know, they chat to each other. They comment on whatever they ask each other, you know, and and they ask each other questions about solar parks wind farms, but also, you know, I'm thinking of getting an EV or I'm thinking of putting a heat pump in.

Has anyone a heat pump, you know, and they can, like, share their experiences, share their stories, ask us direct questions. You know, it it is a real community. There's Facebook groups. There's, you know, there there's People who you're, like, even if you got an EV and you're one of our members, you can get a sticker.

So, you know, my car's powered by my wind farm, if people see each other with their stickers, you know, it's it's a really people are really proud of what they've done. They love the fact that they've done it with thousands of other people, and it something that's really, you know, it's a really cool thing to be involved with, and people rightly wanna share that and I wanna tell people about it. So, yeah, it is absolutely a really, really thriving community. You should start a festival at one of the solo parks.

You should do a festival one, you know, get everyone together in in person.

Alright. Say, I wanna say a massive thank you for taking the time to talk to us today. What you guys are building is awesome. Absolutely love it.

We're gonna put a link in the show note So if you're if you listen to this or you watched it and you wanna get involved, head to Sarah and the Ripple team site and get signed up you said there's a waiting list. What what does that mean in practice? So it means people have paid You have to wait. They pay twenty five pounds to be sort of first in line for the next project.

And we found that getting people to pay money for that.

Psychologically, at that point, they already own a little bit of a wind farm or a bit of a solar park. And, you know, I've had friends and other people come up to me and say, oh, yeah. I'm in your next I've paid my twenty five pounds. I'm in your next project, actually.

It's like, alright. We haven't opened the project yet. You're not quite in it yet, but, you know, it it they've really feel from that point on they are committed to to doing it and and they feel part of it. And then we've also got another, I can't remember, twelve or thirteen thousand people who haven't paid their reservation fee, but but but they're kind of just on on the email.

So, yeah, it's yeah. People really, really feel part of it once they've, you know, Got their credit card out.

And Exactly. Guys. Twenty five created. Get on the list. And then it's just deducted on cost.

It's not like you don't lose the money. You just gets deducted off the cost when you buy your shares. Alright, wicked. Thanks, sir, for joining us.

And good luck. And you'll see my name. Oh, my mom's on yours. Thank you. Take care.

Bye bye. Bye.