While most people in Moray will spend today preparing for the New Year celebrations those connected the refurbishment of a community hall will be going flat-out to complete some paperwork!
Newmill Renewables is a community interest company (CiC) set up with sole purpose of completing extensive refurbishments on their hall in Keith.
This involved extensive internal work and has also seen a new biomass boiler put in place to provide the Hall and Newmill Primary School. A grant was also awarded to the CiC that allowed the fitting of solar panels that would greatly reduce energy costs for the building.
However – with planning permission finally granted on December 19 it has been a race against time as the deadline for the work to be completed is midnight tonight!
All would appear to be going well however, as all 48 solar panels have been put in place thanks to the efforts through the festive season by Forres firm GM Renewables.
The race to have the panels fitted before January 1 was made necessary by a change to feed-in tariffs for systems that comes into force at midnight. Any installations completed after that deadline would attract a much reduced income from power generated by the panels.
Voluntary director for the CiC is Rod Lovie – who was delighted to announce all was in place last night, saying: “48 Solar panels installed at the Newmill Hall – now just two days to get all the paperwork approved before the New Year as the feed-in-tariff is reduced for installations after that date.
“A Huge thanks to GM Renewables for their work over the festive period.”