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Joint ventures in community energy development - Biographies
Dominic Farrugia - Managing Director – Technical, Carbon Free Developments
Dominic is a prominent Scottish renewables developer with a civil engineering background and a deep understanding of wind farm development in his native Scotland. Formerly, Dominic was Development Director of Scotia Wind Limited and Renewables Manager for Alfred McAlpine PLC. He is responsible for all aspects of development, including technical, engineering, environmental and, planning issues, including community relations and media management.
Mike Girvan - Partner, Corrimony Energy
Partner in Corrimony Energy Ltd and Co-ordinator of Glenurquhart & Strathglass Wind Energy project. Career spent in Agriculture, currently an Agricultural Consultant with SAC, Area Manager for the Orkney Islands.
Nicholas Gubbins - Chief Executive, Community Energy Scotland
I’m Chief Executive of Community Energy Scotland, a small charity dedicated to helping community and voluntary groups harness the potential of renewable energy for the benefit of all in their community. This role combines a lifelong interest in the environment along with a fascination with how business and development can be fashioned and directed at the local level. I see local and community control as a key part of a more sustainable future.
I’ve studied environmental sciences, conservation and law at various universities and worked in nature conservation and then on wider environmental policy with Scottish Natural Heritage. I moved to Inverness in the mid 1990s where I became more interested in community-based sustainable development and ran a number of projects across the Highlands and Islands with this theme. I moved to a post with Highlands and Islands Enterprise focussing on community regeneration, where I set up HIE’s Community Energy Unit, which then because the Highlands and Islands Community Energy Company. I was appointed as HICEC’s CEO in 2004 and led the development of community renewables as a new development theme. Community Energy Scotland formed independently out of HICEC and opened for business in August 2009. We’re currently supporting the development of over 600 community energy projects across Scotland.
Christina Noble spent childhood and formative years at Cairndow at the head of Loch Fyne, Argyll.
1970 -1992 set up and ran one of the first trekking businesses in India, Kullu Valley in the Western Himalayas. Wrote two books about communities in the Kullu area.
1992 – 98 worked in education and industry in London including an MA in Industry and Education at Warwick University.
1998 – to the present Project Director of Here We Are (HWA) centre in Cairndow. Conceived the innovative community development project in 1998.
In response to the first, First Minister Donald Dewar’s :-
“There must be ways of integrating the economic, the social and the environmental and the desire to live 21st century lives while still maintaining Scotland’s beauty.”
HWA endeavours to explain how a rural community while loyal to its roots, makes its way in the modern world. Its subject matter is people in a place – and hence its title.
- Wants to ensure the self sustainability of our community organisation through revenue earned through renewable energy project owned by our community.
- Wants to establish self sustaining community initiatives for the long term that will benefit future generations here.
- Wants to become a leading rural development area and an example for other rural communities to follow.
- Wants to promote work done in a local community at a national level.
Stephen Phillips - Partner, Burness LLP
Stephen Phillips (partner, Burness LLP) has a very strong specialist practice within Scotland in providing legal advice within the field of community renewables. He has first-hand experience of a wide range of models - ranging from community-owned windfarms, joint ventures, the “virtual turbine” model, and structures for investment by registered social landlords in renewables …….through to the development of bespoke structures for the administration and distribution of community benefit funds from commercial windfarms. He has good links with key umbrella bodies and support agencies who are helping to increase the scale and range of activity in community renewables, including Community Energy Scotland and Development Trusts Association (Scotland) and is very much at the cutting edge of new models and new thinking within this field.
