This blog will contain our personal views, whilst reflecting the CNI Raasay project including progress and challenges. We plan to let people know developments in the CNI project, including what funding has been sought and how it is allocated.
CNI Raasay: Where are we?
With our hands busy pulling the various project levers it’s easy to forget to share news and reflect upon what’s happening. For that reason, we have decided to publish monthly updates, this is the first in the series and therefore will cover what has happened since June when our capital funding was secured.
We had £160,000 Scottish Government funding secured in June 2023: once the funding was in place, we went from the waiting room lobby to the highspeed elevator which hasn’t stopped since. This funding must be utilised by March 2024, hence the rush!
A mention must be made of the members of the community who give up their free time to work on this project alongside us. The steering group and its now subgroups, play a pivotal role in the CNI project, providing advice, guidance and ensuring we stay attuned to community values.
The Housing
Housing energy efficiency was the top trump action in our Community Climate Action Plan (CCAP) and it also happens to be Raasay’s single biggest emitter! It was a no brainer that it would be on the starting manifesto for Rosie. Whilst we had lots of subjective data on housing conditions, we had little quantitative data.
In order to remedy this, we drew up a contract with Kestrix, a company which use drones for thermal imaging. This results from this will show where properties are losing heat and give a good indication of their energy efficiency, creating a starting point for our work and a comparison for the future.
In parallel to this, Rosie started working on a plan to do a collective retrofit, that started with collaborating with Home Energy Scotland (HES) to organise home visits. The assessors looked at individual home energy performance and earmarked what funding was available to householders. The reports that come from these visits lay out what suitable measures can be taken for each household to achieve better energy efficiency and Rosie can now start working with the council and willing householders to see how we efficiently retrofit our homes.
Getting an accredited contractor to come up and work on one house is no easy task. To try to get over this problem and tackle the project as efficiently as possible, Rosie is working on a means to do the retrofit in a collective fashion, i.e. getting a contractor to do all the heat pumps at once. For various (and not that exciting) reasons it’s quite challenging for CNI to inject money into a collective retrofit, more on this later.
Lack of affordable housing is one of the main issues Raasay faces (See the household survey for numbers on this) and in an attempt to tackle this and reduce the islands carbon footprint, CNI Raasay is regularly meeting with a housing taskforce including Raasay Development Trust, More Homes Scotland, Home Energy Scotland, Highland Council and Lochalsh and Skye Housing Association to action all things housing.
A terraced house in Inverarish has recently come on the market and we have successfully applied for round one of the Scottish Land Fund with the aim of taking it into community ownership, retrofitting and letting it out for affordable rent. The architects are drawing up renovation plans and once they have gone through the quantity surveyor, a business plan will be drafted and an application for round two will be submitted. Unfortunately, the timescales involved in applying to the land fund mean it’s not compatible with the open housing market and we’re working with Lochalsh and Skye Housing Association who have agreed to purchase the house until we get the funds together. Whilst CNI can’t fund the purchase of a house, it can contribute towards the energy efficiency measures and we have earmarked £50k of our budget to improve the energy performance of the building.
Enough about housing, what about other projects?
Lets start with the Hall…
While not one of highest priorities in the CCAP, the hall was identified as a quick turn around project. We knew from the CNI project and RDT consultations that hall improvements were necessary. This has become a multi-faceted project, though the biggest hole to fill was the repair of the heating system.
In 2019 the hall’s Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP) broke down, leaving it to run on the emergency heating system which uses 4 x as much energy as the heatpumps!! Previous repair attempts had been unsuccessful. Most contractors Tom spoke to did not want to repair the existing system and wanted to install a new system, this didn’t make sense to us and was against the CNI ethos. Finally, Tom found CJCRenewables who were able to diagnose the problem and come up with a solution to repair the efficient GSHP system. CNI are funding these repairs.
.
The design and condition of the doors sabotages any efforts made to heat the hall, and has led them to inviting the wind and rain in like a good friend. With help from local expertise, work towards getting a replacement solution was started. This alongside a larger renovation will hopefully be funded through a HIE and CNI partnership.
The halls heat pump has been installed this Halloween weekend, let’s hope it’s not a ghost! We are in the final stages of selecting suitable replacement doors. To further reduce the halls carbon footprint and reduce its bills, a Solar PV installation is in process working alongside Local Energy Scotland who will hopefully fund the majority of the installation. Once funding is approved, we can make an application to connect to the grid which may take some time.
More veg please
Increasing the islands food production is one of the top actions from the CCAP. Working with the Food subgroup we have been exploring how to increase the islands food production. Our thinking is to foster and increase existing outlets.
As the walled garden already does a good job of providing us with delicious locally grown produce, the most logical thing to do is increase the gardens growing capacity. Being able to pay a gardener to do more hours was the limiting factor, unfortunately our funding can’t fund wages. Restoring the old glasshouses in the garden could increase the capacity and also bring in revenue to the garden to fund wages, so it was decided to explore this resurrection.
There are lots of local producers already around but it’s not always easy to find them or know how to access their supply. To help with this we are working on local food producers list. Community lunches not only provide us with great local food but also a chance to get together, we were keen to see community lunches restarted. Working with the food group we are happy to see that a lunch group is restarting regular community lunches.
Enough veg, I want some meat!
We are aware the crofters are working towards getting the old waiting room up and going as a venison processing plant. This would be a positive step forward in increasing the islands local food production and we hope to help with this were possible.
Wood Processor
Much of the community relies on fires/stoves to heat their homes. The Wood fuel group provide us with a valuable fuel source to do this. Because trees take the greenhouse gas CO2 out of the atmosphere during growth, provided new trees are planted for forestry, then burning wood can be considered a low emission fuel source. Much better than coal! The group is invaluably run by volunteers, to help ease their workload the funding of a new wood processor was something that aligned with CNI and had lots of community support. This is in progress and all being well the island will be home to a wood processor this winter.
Land and Marine
Increasing biodiversity and sequestering environment was a top priority in the CCAP, to help whittle down what this could look like, a community consultation was facilitated by SCCAN (Pam and Liz) in September. The event followed a community lunch which was kindly funded through Climate Hubs. This has given us more clarity on how projects in this area could progress. One thing is clear, that there is a strong desire to not only encourage a flourishing community but also care for Raasay’s environment.
We used the visit from Pam and Liz as an opportunity to get all the community groups together for a round table meeting. We hope to continue these with the next one being end of November.
Groundtruthing Land carbon audits will be done with Scottish Agrciucutral College Consultants. We will be setting up an island working group to work alongside these consultants making sure the essential local knowledge is incorporated in this process. This will help us identify what are the key areas in terms of land-based emissions. For example, depending on the state of peatlands (most of Raasay), they could be a huge emitter. Peatland extraction also causes emissions but is not such a common practice on Raasay these days.
We are exploring how to lower the buildings carbon footprint. The first stages of this are to have a feasibility study that examines all options for the building and lays out a rough cost.
Get In Touch?
We are planning to do monthly blog updates to share and track our progress though if you have something specific you would like to know please get in touch. You’ll find our contact details on the home page or in the link below.
Wonderful work you are doing and thank you for the blog. Great idea.
Thank you for all you are doing to help things happen, and thank you for helping to pull the different Island groups together to work together and help understand what each other do.
Thank you so much for this update. We know you have been working hard, but missed all your public meetings in the summer. This is all very interesting. Thank you for a monthly blog. It all sounds very interesting. Tom and Rosie, you are doing are wonderful job
Great to see what is being done on Raasay and an inspiration to us on the Aran Islands as the Decarbonisation Zone for County Galway in Ireland.