Greater Manchester Combined Authority declared a climate emergency in 2019 and launched its Five-Year Environment Plan, which sets out a long-term environmental vision to be carbon neutral by 2038 and the urgent actions that need to be taken in the next five years to help achieve this.

The Unlocking Clean Energy in Greater Manchester (UCEGM) project was conceived of as part of this vision. UCEGM is a pioneering project that has delivered a number of renewable schemes across the Greater Manchester city region, and it has created a blueprint that can be replicated in other regions across the UK aiming for Net Zero carbon emissions.

Energy Systems Catapult, in partnership with five Greater Manchester local authorities – Manchester, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, and Wigan – secured £8.6 million from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) to deliver the project.

UCEGM was split into two workstreams, with the aim of Workstream 2 being to create a stronger business case for investment to help bring forward more projects in the future with less reliance on grant funding.

To do this, the Catapult worked with partners in Greater Manchester to:

• develop and test outline business model approaches
• assess costs, benefits, risks, opportunities
• design and validate business model in detail for most promising option(s)
• support adoption of the model.

The commercial model has been developed using funding and information provided by Workstream 2. This financial modelling tool can be used by renewable energy project developers, as well as large energy consumers willing to procure renewable energy, to assess the economic sustainability of solar photovoltaics installations. Users without any technical or financial background can perform a financial assessment of a solar project and quickly generate results, in a PDF or CSV (Excel) format, to be shared with other colleagues and partners.