Bovalley Community Association received £4,000 from SSE’s Slieve Kirk Community Fund

Bovalley Community Association recognised that their local community was going to be impacted by the pandemic restrictions. They were concerned about their elderly and vulnerable residents and quickly mobilised a network of volunteers to provide support.

The Association gained emergency funding from SSE Renewables to enable the volunteers to deliver care packages, food packages and activity packs to 300 local residents who were vulnerable and self isolating.

The funding supported the group’s activities throughout the pandemic and they were able to distribute 150 food packages and 153 care packages in the Bovalley Area of Limavady.

“Most of our residents are elderly and live alone so to receive these care packages meant so much more than just food and supplies, it represented a community willing to support each other during difficult and challenging time. For this, we are all so grateful to SSE Renewables.”
Janice McClay Chairperson, Bovalley Community Association

Everun is a leading provider of onshore Wind Turbine Generator (WTG) Asset Management services. Our experienced team removes the day to day challenges associated with the management, operation and administration of Wind Turbines.

Sustainability is important to us as a team and as a business therefore we were thrilled to be involved in two initiatives that saw our wind turbine blades being repurposed for an important cause with Greenpeace and our involvement in the bridge made out of the recycled turbine blade that was brought about by Re-wind project.

For the Re-wind project our turbine blade was repurposed for use on the Midleton to Youghal Greenway Project which consisted of teams from Cork Institute of Technology, Queens University Belfast and Georgia Tech in the USA. Our involvement in the Re-wind project meant that engineers decommissioned a N29 turbine where the blades were then used and transported to County Cork where they will be recycled into the main structural element on a number of small bridges spanning the Greenway with two blades laying apart horizontally, with a walkway in between. The blades have recently gone through destructive testing to ensure structural integrity with the rest being retained for the actual construction.
The project has made great progress and should be in place by the end of the year. Not only will it be the subject of a paper in the Transportation Research Board but it will also make the space more accessible for pedestrians and cyclists to pass through.

We also teamed up with Greanpeace UK, Friends of the Earth and Platform to support the transition from oil and gas to renewable energy through their ‘Just Transition Tour’ where the aim was to secure offshore workers easy access to sustainable green jobs in renewable energy. As a company that operates in the Renewable Energy sector, with our services in managing wind turbines and after recently launching Everun Electric Vehicle Charging Solutions which provides charging solutions for homes, workplaces and public and commercial premises throughout Northern Ireland, we believe it is important to invest into Renewables as the way forward and we were pleased to see our blade contributing to the success of the Just Transition Tour which saw the #SignTheBlade campaign tour gained a total petition signatures of 14,215.

Neo Environmental have successfully consented some of the largest wind, solar and battery storage projects across the UK and Ireland with many over 100 Megawatts (MW) in scale. They take a multi-disciplinary approach to projects with all main planning and environmental disciplines in-house including Chartered planners, environmentalists, ecologists, archaeologists, landscape architects, hydrologists, noise consultants, hydrologists, transport engineers and glint and glare consultants.

Their works on these projects can take over two to three years to complete from initial feasibility studies, bird surveys, bat surveys and various other baseline assessments to planning submission. Our clients include large utility companies such as Energia (Power NI) and Scottish Power who we advise and help facilitate decarbonising their networks and powering new electric vehicle hubs.

Neo Enviromental have an environmentally focused ethos and are proud of what they have achieved in the renewables industry over the past nine years, having worked on over 3.5 Giggawatts (GW) of development to date. This is enough to power over 1.1 million houses from renewable energy sources and to offset circa 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 Annually!

Their ecologists and landscape architects collaboratively work to ensure that we produce landscape and ecological Management Plans (LEMPs) to maximise the potential benefits of these projects through the enhancement and creation of biodiversity-rich habitats. These result in a biodiversity net gain for all of the projects we work on, particularly for at-risk species including pollinators, birds and various mammals.

Neo have completed the design and planning work on a number of dual-use and multi-use projects where different technologies are incorporated into the project design, this has included the co-location of large battery, solar and wind projects in Ireland and the UK. This has helped ensure an effective technology mix where different technologies work at different times to maximise the use of available land and grid, while also offering solutions to intermittency.

As an environmental consultancy, Neo have sustainable development at their core and have a firm focus on the consenting and development of renewable energy projects with clients. As a growing company, they have emphasised this commitment through our various accreditations.