Volunteers filled the room on Tuesday evening, eager to find out more about energyshare and how they could help out. The voting had been going less than 6 hours and Radio Sheffield had already broadcast a call to vote on our behalf.

Once they realised that energyshare could provide £100,000 towards Jordan Dam Hydro (all of the grant funding needed for the project to go ahead), they couldn’t wait to vote. By voting they are helping us generate as much electricity as used by 80 typical family homes and save 170 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. They were keen to know about the following:

How do we vote?
Those who have registered in advance will be pleased to know that energyshare has made voting even easier.

1. Go to www.energyshare.com/voting
2. Left click on the word ‘Vote’ that is next to ‘Sheffield Renewables’
3. Follow the instructions that appear.
If you have any problems, further details on the voting process are illustrated here, in our photo album hosted on Facebook. You can view this even if you don’t have a Facebook account.

Voting closes at 5pm on Saturday 3rd December so we need everyone to make a big effort in a short period of time to stand a chance of winning.

What else can we do?
As with our co-operative, everyone voting on energyshare can only create one account and have one set of votes. This makes it really important for us to get everyone we know to vote too. We have made some promotional materials available below to help:
– Suggested email text is available for downloading and editing here
– Images showing how to vote, step-by-step, for anyone that has problems can be found here
– Poster/hand-outs design that can be downloaded to print or shared online. You can download the image below to print off and use it as an A4 poster here or share online, there’s also a double sided version for anyone that wants to make A5 flyers here (please check with the owner of the space as appropriate).

– An online animation, hosted on YouTube, for people to upload to websites and share in any way they can think of, can be accessed here and viewed below

– There’s another video of a couple of our volunteers talking about Sheffield Renewables and what we will do with the £100,000 if we win here.

This video is available courtesy of Lyndsey Young
– We will also be providing regular updates via this blog entry, Facebook and Twitter.

Thousands of people will be voting in this competition so we need to get everyone talking about it and voting for Sheffield Renewables to get the cash.

Other Schemes
Another Sheffield based scheme, Millhouses Mill Buildings has got through to this final round. They want a much smaller amount to help them install renewable energy as part of the refurbishment of buildings in Millhouses Park. As they need a lot less cash than us, they are in the small category. The volunteers that live near Millhouses were keen to vote for both and we think it would be great if everyone else did.

We are friends with another project, in the meduim sized category, Tutbury Ecopower. They have been encouraging their voters to vote for Sheffield Renewables so it would be good if our voters returned the favour.

Many of the volunteers left with ideas of people to start sharing the excitement with. We hope you’ll join us in voting and possibly even catch the ‘energyshare bug’.

Thank-you in advance for your vote and support!