This couple tried to turn their street into a power station: 'We had no idea what we were doing'

Something radical is happening on Lynmouth Road. You just need to look in the windows to see: every so often there’s a sign blu-tacked up, reading POWER STATION. Glance up, and solar panels cover plenty of roofs on this street in Walthamstow, east London. 

This didn’t happen on its own. It began with a simple idea from artists and filmmakers Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn, all the way back in lockdown.

“Can we turn this street into a power station?” Powell says. “Obviously we had no idea what we were doing and there’s all these wrong turns.”

The idea was ambitious: get solar panels on 150 houses on the street. Raise a million pounds. Turn the street into a power station and a community energy co-operative, sell shares in the solar panels, and sell energy back to residents to pay the shareholders back. 

It would free them and their neighbours from energy companies, and show how people can come together to save the planet in concrete ways. Lynmouth Road would become the street of the future, a model for others to look to. A one-street Green New Deal.

“Well that was the dream, but it’s not the reality,” says Powell. The filmmaking couple have just released Power Station, which documents their journey. In their ramshackle DIY way, if they did not achieve what they set out to, they have exposed a lot of the barriers to a seeming no-brainer.

Read more:

• Should taxpayers pay for solar panels to be installed on homes?
• Communities that build solar panels and wind farms should get cheaper bills, says Labour minister
• Labour’s billion pound gamble: Can community energy deliver the affordable power the UK needs?

‘Some people were getting a divorce, some people felt that solar was evil’

“Knocking on every door, we were hoping everyone on the street would do it,” says Edelstyn, as he and Powell sit in their garden discussing the journey with Big Issue.

As the pair set to work, their crusade had the flavour of a political campaign. On their wall, a diagram of all the houses on the street quickly became covered in colour-coded post-it notes, documenting how keen each household was.

Such expensive houses might give the easy impression of “it’s London, it’s rich”. But as a constituency, 14.4% of households in Walthamstow are in fuel poverty, placing it in the top third in England. And the idea sprung up even before energy prices went crazy.

Powell appeared the optimist, pushing through potential criticism and relying on the power of the idea. “We’re doing it, so we have to move forward,” she tells her husband as difficulties mount. Edelstyn played the pragmatist, asking where the money is going to come from, knocking on doors wearing a Sherlock Holmes-esque deerstalker hat.

Obstacles quickly sprung up, though. If a roof was too flat, or north-facing, it wouldn’t work for solar. Renters may have been on board, but their landlords were harder to reach and convince. Council tenants also had no say. “Some people were getting a divorce, some people felt that solar was evil,” says Edelstyn.

As they got into the details, they realised mortgage companies were also in the way, with the Power Station concept amounting to getting people to rent their roof space to the community energy company for 25 years.

“Really that would then mean brokering a mortgage deal with the mortgage provider for each one. So that just sounded way too complicated, so we just gave grants to each house to get their own solar and they own their own solar panels,” says Edelstyn.

A grand idea doesn’t come for free on this street, either. “When we started off, we wanted to raise a million, and we really thought we’d do that from the bank notes,” says Powell. The bank notes in question featured pictures of ordinary people from the local area, unique artwork sold to fund the project.

Solar panels are expensive, though, so the pair also took to a stunt to raise money: sleeping on their roof until they hit a CrowdFunding target. Their film does not make it look fun, huddled under plastic sheeting as the weather turned so cold that the state takes rough sleepers indoors.

What they raised was remarkable, building support from people around the country who believed in the project. And yet. “We raised £100,000 which was amazing. That’s not enough to do a whole street. That was quite disappointing at first, but we ended up realising, even if we’d done the whole street it’s a drop in the ocean,” says Powell.

‘It can’t just be activists’

When Big Issue visits Powell and Edelstyn, just 20 houses on the street have solar panels, they say – 16 in an initial wave, at a cost of around £4,500 per house, and then four more subsequently.

Doing so required working with the energy company Octopus – going back on the earlier idea of freeing the street from such firms. But they realised it was the only way to get panels fitted.

“We definitely haven’t lost our ideals or forgotten what the goal of the project was, just in case you were asking that, we definitely remember that. But equally, our research showed us that we’re living in a moment where it’s very, very difficult to do the thing that we needed to do, and we had to team up with people who were unlikely team members,” Edelstyn.

“It can’t just be activists… activism has to inspire action, and the action has to be taken by normal people, and businesses are involved in that, local government’s involved in it.”

Another pivot was towards schools – the pair discovering it can be easier getting solar panels onto civic buildings than residential ones. Their efforts have got solar onto five local schools, bringing bills down.

“It was useful as a test bed and a beacon. It’s imperfect, but the coming together around it was the key thing, and making it a story.” Powell.

The result is their film, Power Station. As they were getting ready for the release, however, a row erupted. The pair set about some legal action against Michael Sheen.

The dropped legal action

Welsh actor Michael Sheen made headlines this year – including in Big Issue – with his latest documentary, where he spent £100,000 of his own money buying up debt in his Port Talbot hometown and writing it off.

It’s similar to Bank Job, Powell and Edelstyn’s previous film, where they blew up a van containing £1.2 million of payday loans.

Their argument is not simply that they had the idea before him, but that they had tried to get Sheen on board.

“We pitched it all over Channel 4, to every single exec at Channel 4, so the idea that they didn’t know about us or our project was just not true. And then also the production company who were employed to make the film for Channel 4, we have literally a receipt of them streaming our film, because they had to come through our website to stream it. And they pretended they’d never heard or seen our film,” says Edelstyn.

“We were in touch with Michael Sheen, there’s probably about 100 emails between us and his team while we were making Bank Job. We asked him to do the voiceover for it, we offered to help him do a Bank Job in his area where he lived, Port Talbot,” Edelstyn added.

When news broke that the pair’s lawyers had written to Sheen and the show’s makers, Channel 4 said buying up debt was an established practice and that it was “ludicrous to suggest that one is a copy of the other”. Sheen said the inspiration came from watching a John Oliver stunt in 2016. Full Fat TV, the production company behind the documentary, said they had developed the idea separately and pitched it to Channel 4.

The pair now tell me they’ve dropped any potential legal action. “It was going to cost us 500 grand to actually push that through,” says Edelstyn. But they’re clearly still annoyed. “Very extractive, from a do-gooding public figure,” Powell adds.

What they wanted was acknowledgement, an apology from Channel 4, and for the channel to air Bank Job and put money into Power Station.

Big Issue has contacted Full Fat TV for comment.

‘It’s leaping into the void’

With the panels on their roof, Edelstyn and Powell have noticed a 30% decrease to their energy bills.

The end result of their energy crusade may be different to what they’d imagined, but they’ve learned all the same. They’ve demonstrated just how hard it can be to make a change.

 “I’m ending this film angry with all these powers, local councils, who have it within their power to do something and aren’t,” Edelstyn says.

“The failure of it, on the one hand, which didn’t achieve the scale we hoped it would on the street, in a way is not the central part. It’s about the inspiration and the hope that we can change the world.

He adds: “It’s kind of leaping into the void, hoping for the best.”

Power Station, the new documentary by Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn, is in cinemas UK-wide via Dartmouth Films.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

Reader-funded since 1991 – Big Issue brings you trustworthy journalism that drives real change.

Every day, our journalists dig deeper, speaking up for those society overlooks.

Could you help us keep doing this vital work? Support our journalism from £5 a month.