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Wales' first solar powered village opens next month.

The houses in the village in Pembrokeshire, called Pentre Solar, will be affordable housing accepting tenants off the council housing register in Pembrokeshire.

The homes, which have a modern contemporary design, all have:

Fitted kitchens and white goods

Superfast broadband, satellite and Freeview TV connections

Landscaped gardens

Access to a shared electric car

Extremely low energy costs

Here's how they save energy

They have 11" of insulation

Use 12% of the energy of a traditional home

Powered by solar energy

All timber construction

A monopitch roof (single-sloping roof surface)

80% of space heating needs came from solar energy, achieved by a southerly orientation of the dwelling.

The cluster of six homes is not a local authority or housing association project. It is a purely private sector initiative launched by a small start up in West Wales that started as an experiment and could now kickstart a national trend.

'You can count on daylight'

When Glen Peters retired from PwC in 2010, after 25 years as a consulting partner in the energy sector, he was handed a gift in the form of the 2010 Energy Act.

Prime Minister Cameron promised the greenest government ever and opened up the opportunity for individuals to become generators.

Mr Peters had left an industry where oil was hovering around $120/barrel and the oil majors had abandoned the idea of investing in renewables given the superior financial returns of fossil fuels. However in the post 2008 environment where the banking sector teetered on collapse, the Act offered an investment opportunity to transfer his family savings from the traditional financial sector into renewable generation with a prospect of good returns.

"At least you can count on daylight, unlike the vagaries of the markets," he said.

Mr Peters built and commissioned the first solar farm in Wales in 2011, a 1.2MW installation of 12,000 panels on his Pembrokeshire estate. There were some smirks from his London colleagues at the thought of a solar farm in Wales. But a year later the farm had produced 1.2 GWhrs of energy and he was now getting approached to expand the facility.

Around the same time in in 2012 he became aware of a report on energy poverty in housing; about 5 million people lived in cold homes, which cost the NHS £4.5bn in related illnesses and thousands of premature deaths (there were 45,000 such deaths recorded in 2014).

"It seemed to be madness that here we were producing bundles of solar energy effortlessly and 40% of people in social housing couldn't afford to heat their homes in the fifth richest country of the world"

Around the same time two men approached Mr Peters with an enthusiasm to 'change the reliance on fossil fuels'. Gareth Dauncy, a young architect from the Valleys had come to live in Cardigan, said he had some new ideas about buildings and Jens Schroeder, a carpenter from Fishguard, who had a dream to build a £10,000 house.

The idealism of these men and their passion for change inspired Mr Peters to set up a thought experiment that was to become the precursor of a business that could revolutionise the provision of affordable housing.

Ty Solar, the prototype three-bed home set the framework for testing the idea that a home could run on virtually zero energy, be built at or below traditional bricks and mortar costs and have an ultra low carbon footprint.

As luck would have it, larch seemed to be in abundance in West Wales, thanks to a disease that had hit the region. Vast quantities were being felled and burned in Pembroke power station.

It seemed an obvious source of cheap building material.

"The madness of burning a building material that was fuelling the cycle of hopelessly inefficient buildings was something we needed to change," he says.

Solar village

At the opening, presided over by the First Minister Carwyn Jones, guests were impressed, the community applauded but little else happened.

"We expected the phone to ring with expressions of interest from the major providers of social housing but there were no calls".

Even the mortgage companies were ambivalent about lending to potential buyers of an all timber home.

Mr Peters concluded that the entire industry involved in the construction, supply and maintenance of affordable homes was stuck in a rut.

In an industry where slates and steel were being imported from China, timber from Siberia and bricks were scarce, it was vital to find a more sustainable way of building. Ty Solar was deemed to be too innovative and his small team at Western Solar had to change the madness of the current status quo.

His company Western Solar set about building their first solar village as a showcase to demonstrate the viability of their design. He established an eco factory in a disused cow shed in North Pembrokeshire, employed a workforce helped by the government’s apprentice scheme, and found a suitable site, a former garage at Glanrhyd within the National Park.

It took around a year to gain planning permission for the six homes. Despite objections from neighbours the planning committee passed the application unanimously. More local supplies of larch and Douglas Fir were obtained and the factory began production in earnest, converting logs into panels and joinery for the homes. Local family businesses were engaged in these endeavours too to supplement the skills in the construction to a point were 80% of the entire content of the project was locally sourced.

Hopes for a thousand solar homes

Now a subsidiary of Western Solar will manage the lettings to tenants supplied by Pembrokeshire County Council’s Housing department. Two members of the company have taken the training to be licensed landlords.

Given the completion of this showcase Peters now looks to the future where he hopes that another thousand homes can be built around the country. He sees two major issues that need to be overcome. The first of these is access to affordable land.

Current planning laws make it difficult to find suitable sites and Peters wants the local authorities to release some of their land banks to small developers specifically for affordable housing. He is addressing the second issue of finance by planning to raise an investment bond which provides for a 4% annual return.

There are of course wider benefits to this programme in terms of electricity generation into the grid and helping the government meet its renewable energy targets. The 1,000 homes would generate upwards of 5 GW per annum.

"We’re determined to end the madness that is depriving millions of people from a decent home," he says.