Fintry Film Launch: A Scottish Village Benefits from Wind Energy

Fintry Development Trust has today released a short doc­u­ment­ary that shows how com­munit­ies can bene­fit from invest­ing in renew­able energy. The vil­lage of Fintry in Stirlingshire is a primary example of a com­munity that has embraced renew­able energy – and benefited greatly.

The short doc­u­ment­ary film Wind of Change has been released online.  It shows how Fintry, with its 300 house­holds, became the first vil­lage in the UK to enter a joint-ven­ture agree­ment with a wind farm developer. Instead of fight­ing the plans for the 14-tur­bine devel­op­ment, they con­vinced the renew­able developers to add an addi­tion­al tur­bine for the vil­lage to the pro­posed wind farm. Fintry now receives an aver­age of approx­im­ately £30,000-£50,000 a year in rev­en­ue from the wind tur­bine and is invest­ing the money to the bene­fit of the entire com­munity. Fintry Development Trust man­age the income stream from the tur­bine and has provided free insu­la­tion to more than half of the house­holds in the vil­lage and is now embark­ing on new ambi­tious pro­jects to even­tu­ally make Fintry a sus­tain­able, zero waste and zero car­bon community.

Wind of Change fol­lows the Fintry com­munity as it car­ries out a num­ber of these pro­jects such as installing micro-renew­able heat­ing sys­tems, plant­ing a com­munity orch­ard and open­ing a wood­land area for the loc­al primary school. The 15-minute doc­u­ment­ary was pro­duced by Edinburgh-based film­maker Cornelia Reetz. It premiered at the UK Green Film Festival in Leeds and Glasgow and will be broad­cast on the Community Channel in a few weeks time. You now have a chance to watch the film online on the fol­low­ing web­site: http://windofchangefilm.wordpress.com/.