What began with a single windfarm has blossomed into a values-led renewables investment company that has funded 42 UK green energy projects
“Back in 1994, renewables were generating less than 2% of the UK’s electricity,” says Matthew Clayton, managing director of Thrive Renewables. Fast forward 30 years and that figure is 50% and rising. As a renewables investment company, Thrive has been at the forefront of the clean energy transformation, funding 42 such projects including some of the UK’s first windfarms.
“During the first five years of projects, the question wasn’t: ‘How many projects could we support?’ It was: ‘Will this work?’” Clayton explains. Work it certainly has, as the milestone of Thrive’s 30th birthday and its portfolio of wind, solar, tidal and geothermal projects attests.
Thrive subscribes to the concept of a ‘just’ energy transition, which is one that sees climate action as fair and inclusive, and that positions ordinary people as agents of change. While that might sound apt for 2024, it’s something Thrive advocated from the start. Its very first windfarm, Haverigg in Cumbria, was created in 1998 in partnership with a community energy group.
The success that followed is testament to people power at every level. Thrive was an early adopter of crowdfunding and it’s how it continues to fund the majority of its investment. Thrive’s Community Energy Funding Bridge has delivered £21m of support to community-owned renewable energy projects in the UK since 2017 alone.
A personal highlight for Clayton is a project near Thrive’s home city of Bristol. With Thrive’s support, a community group from Lawrence Weston – a deprived area in Avonmouth – overcame seven years of planning obstacles in 2023 to eventually build the England’s largest onshore wind turbine. The machine now supplies enough electricity for nearly 3,000 homes and is expected to bring in an estimated £100,000 in surplus annually from sales to the grid.
Thrive provided funding and expertise where needed, but the Lawrence Weston community maintains complete ownership and control. This means they can use their profits as they choose. First up, community members plan to fund a social hub, providing training, support and debt advice to local people. “It’s providing a case study for other community groups, [who are] saying: ‘If they can build something that size, why can’t we?’,” says Clayton.
For Thrive, improving access to renewable energy sources isn’t just about reducing emissions, but also “addressing the fundamental need” for better energy provision, says Clayton. With fuel poverty having risen sharply in the UK since 2021, Clayton explains that many in Lawrence Weston had the more immediate worry of being able to afford to pay their energy bills, than reducing emissions, and this has to be addressed as well as the issues around the climate crisis.
Thrive’s commitment to education and engagement has seen it celebrated in the B Corp community. “Becoming a B Corp was a natural move for the company, but the process also validated our way of working,” says Clayton. Part of this is its relationship with employees, which has always involved a forward-thinking approach to benefits. In the early days, that involved bike to work schemes – a rarity at the time – now it’s offering ‘climate perks’ such as extra holiday so employees can take more sustainable forms of travel, such as trains instead of planes.
Staying ahead of the curve has also meant embracing pioneering technology. Just as Thrive was an early advocate for wind energy, it supported other forms of renewable power as the technology for them emerged and became viable. “We were involved with getting the first commercial-scale tidal generation unit in the water back in 2008,” Clayton explains. “More recently, we’re working on United Downs in Cornwall, which will be the UK’s first geothermal power station, and we’re also aiming to connect solar farms directly to the railway network to make them [the railways] cleaner and more sustainable.”
The machine now supplies enough electricity for nearly 3,000 homes and is expected to bring in an estimated £100,000 in surplus annually from sales to the grid
As Thrive looks to the future, there are no signs of slowing down. It plans to double the number of renewable energy projects it’s supporting. As some of Thrive’s earliest projects come to the end of their life cycle, it’s reinvigorating them with the latest technology.
One such repowering project in Lancaster exemplifies how far renewables have come in the past few decades. “We’ve replaced 10 turbines with just eight,” Clayton says. “They’re only an extra five metres of tip height, [but] they’re generating seven times as much energy from the same footprint.”
The sheer scale of this sort of upgrade has Clayton feeling confident about the years to come: “If you replicate that across the whole national portfolio,” he says, “you can see that net zero isn’t so much a vision as an entirely deliverable thing”.
