Agamemnon Otero

Energy Garden is combining community gardens with a city-wide community energy cooperative model to create a highly public, transport-based initiative to dramatically expand renewable energy in London and create a self-funding cycle towards climate mitigation. He is working on the collective imagination of a city to redesign how it powers itself and feels ownership over its energy.

Agamemnon has created Energy Garden, developing a new hybrid cooperative model which links together community garden spaces on transport infrastructure with community owned renewable energy, creating a network of cooperatively owned green space and green energy across London. He brings together individual funders to invest in community solar arrays along rail lines, which creates revenue recycled back into the gardens and broader youth programmes. In a symbiotic cycle, Agamemnon installs solar panels and community gardens along urban train lines, including verges, social housing, and station rooftops, bringing together individuals into a one-vote one-shareholding community benefit society that has a financial return and a social return for members. Sales of the resulting energy to transport buildings on the rail as well as excess to partners such as Patagonia, Faith in Nature and Pukka Herbs funds a broad array of youth programmes, accredited courses in renewable energy technologies, garden maintenance, and other community initiatives including beer, herbs, and honey projects. Agamemnon has cracked the code to ensure sustainability of local community initiatives such as gardens through a centralised structure and revenue model. He has created a network woven together with joint ownership across the city of London. He is committed to creating multiple streams of value - solar, youth training, garden space and biodiversity, community engagement, and revenue. With 500 + investors having raised more than £1 million, 300 volunteers and 130 community groups, and gardens and solar arrays across the London transport system, as well as innovative pilots using carbon trading and block chain technology, Agamemnon is opening up new avenues for renewable energy investment while building community owned energy and cooperation into the very fibre of his work.

Agamemnon has cracked the code to ensure sustainability of local community initiatives such as gardens through a centralised structure and revenue model. He has created a network woven together with joint ownership across the city of London. He is committed to creating multiple streams of value - solar, youth training, garden space and biodiversity, community engagement, and revenue. With 500 + investors having raised more than £1 million, 300 volunteers and 130 community groups, and gardens and solar arrays across the London transport system, as well as innovative pilots using carbon trading and block chain technology, Agamemnon is opening up new avenues for renewable energy investment while building community owned energy and cooperation into the very fibre of his work.

In the UK, twenty-seven percent of the UK’s emissions are from transport. Network Rail is the UK’s single largest producer, and Transport for London is the largest in the capital city. London consumes eleven percent of the UK’s energy, and half of that consumption is for powering trains. Rail lines, a community asset, have a lot of open land alongside tracks, as well as substantial nearby property inaccessible to the community- a dramatically underused outdoor space in the midst of high-density urban development.

Solar energy is traditionally the preserve of the wealthy – installation requires a significant cash outlay, and it is a long time before that cash is recouped in energy savings. Traditional shareholding companies are designed to produce the highest return in the shortest amount of time – an approach which can often be at odds with social change work, particularly around climate.

Solar panel installation has also been for those who are property owners, and the right kind of property owners – with south-facing roof space or ample yards. Those in social housing, rental accommodation, or ill-suited real estate don’t have the option to invest in solar. People in fuel poverty often tend to pay the highest energy bills, topping up debt-loading prepaid cards at exorbitant rates. Many social energy projects are from external companies or initiatives, and not drawn from the knowledge or leadership of locals, nor owned by them. Renewable Energy can also be an unsexy, overwhelming concept for the average person who struggles to find their own relevance or potential contribution.

Local initiatives such as community gardens are very easy to start and far more difficult to maintain – intermittent small grant funding and significant volunteer turnover, as well as varying seasonal engagement makes long term management of gardens and local programmes challenging. Community gardens are often a type of initiative often plagued by constant turnover, lack of accountability, and intermittent (or non-existent) funding. These projects are also often tucked away in whatever land can be secured, often on a tenuous basis.

Energy Garden uses London transport infrastructure to install solar panel arrays and community gardens in a symbiotic system within the city. There is an ample unused resource here: forty percent of London Underground is above ground, and ninety percent of the Overground has available space above ground. Agamemnon utilises this space – previously inaccessible—in a unique public/private/citizen partnership to build a cohort of individual solar investors. Energy Garden sets its lowest investment threshold at £50. It was the first community share offer in the UK under £250, creating a truly accessible opportunity for the lay person to invest in solar. Recently, Energy Garden has also seen lots of larger organisations-non-profits, religious groups, and companies - invest at levels of £50,000-£100,000, with a one shareholder/one vote system, even at differing levels of investment. Together its investors have raised more than £1 million in solar investment. Energy Garden is an overarching organisation, and individual energy gardens are co-owned.

He installs solar along the train line verges, on rooftops and other infrastructure, the assets of which are owned by the members of the Energy Garden community benefit society. The energy produced is sold onsite to building residents and excess to major corporate partners, including Patagonia, Faith in Nature (a prominent cosmetics brand), and Pukka Herbs (the largest herbal tea company in the UK), and the proceeds are used to fund a wide assortment of youth programmes and community gardens.

A community garden is not a new idea, but the Energy Gardens are a broad engagement tool as much as a space for growing – a means to an end. Agamemnon installs the gardens at train stations across London. He uses the visibility of these gardens as a kind of daily reminder of the broader work – and few gardens in the world are more visible. There are 2.4 billion passenger journeys on the overground and underground every year. Every day, roughly half a million people pass through the overground stations with Energy Gardens – roughly 185 million passenger journeys a year. The gardens can be a kind of relatable, approachable entry point with beehives and solar panels to the broader cooperative energy work.

Agamemnon has also created a fully sustainable funding and management model for his Energy Gardens. These community gardens are funded entirely by the proceeds from the sale of solar energy. They are maintained through a centralised management structure with engagement officers organising local residents, multiple community groups at each garden. This structure of education and resources support ensures the long-term success of these gardens in the greater network. Energy Garden can then hold the full liability, insurance and oversight enabling the community buy in, transport operators’ approval and overall success. Gardens are centrally managed with one full time person per five gardens and a central staff for biodiversity, horticulture, engagement, school coordinator, youth programme lead driven by over 300 volunteers across London. The crops, seeds, and brewed beer, honey, and preserves are given to participants and neighbours as a gesture of good faith community-building. Agamemnon’s gardens are partnered with 130 community groups across fourteen authorities in London.

The sale of energy also funds youth training programmes for people of colour aged eighteen to twenty-four and placing them into higher education and full-time employment. It features various place-based and classroom modules on renewable energy installation, horticulture, and other areas, six of which are officially accredited. Youth participants are paid a London living wage for their time within the programmes and have a chance to meet leading exemplars of change from MPs, visits to the House of Lords, to business moguls. They perform surveys and learn to build and install solar panels and batteries. In addition, Energy Garden has worked in forty-four schools with thousands of children aged seven to nineteen on issues of horticulture, energy, biodiversity, and sustainability. They have also accredited nearly a hundred young people in renewable energy installation.

Energy Garden has a complementary organisation in Repowering London, previously created by Agamemnon. Repowering London, itself a community energy initiative, was designed to combat fuel poverty, offering peer-to-peer trading of energy between residents, creating community funds in some of London’s poorest neighbourhoods. Repowering London was the first time an aspect of the UK energy system was cooperatively owned. Repowering London helped hone the model used by Energy Garden, working with communities, local authorities, and youth groups to map local space for solar and create a Society for the Benefit of the Community to own and manage the solar, the share offer, and management of the fund. The solar generates income, which allows investors a 3% - 4% return as well as a 1% surplus to fund community projects. Repowering London was the first community solar energy project to carbon trade. The initiative uses all the modern resources at its disposal – it conducted the UK’s first blockchain energy trade, allowing residents to sell surplus power to their neighbours using the national grid.

Energy Garden, and precursor and partner Repowering London, are designed to build community and cooperation in every step of their processes. Their one vote/one shareholder structure (meaning large partners have as much influence as a grandmother buying a £50 share); community cells, engagement officers and support network, education, and free produce all help realign the system towards cooperation. Agamemnon has created a series of elaborate steps and processes to establish an Energy Garden, identifying a sixteen-step process for individuals, from the inception of a garden to actual growing; and a 181-step approach for a district network operator. Agamemnon sees these cooperatives as a much larger tool to transform fiduciary responsibility to create new kinds of interaction and states of mind.

Energy Garden has built in strong metrics for impact measurement, including pre- and post- interview surveys for participants and measurement tools based on the SDGs. In a soft measure of their success, they’ve found that sense of purpose, place, and community rise by seventy percent amongst those who participate. Thus far Energy Garden has raised £2.6 in grants and £1 million from investor members. This year they have installed 1 megawatts of solar and manage thirty Energy Gardens across London. They are building an adapted cooperative structure – called London Community Renewables- to absorb multi-million-pound investments from large investors like Rathbones and Bank of America. This August they became an official concession for Go Ahead groups Govia Thames Raile, opening up a broad swath of new large urban building. Agamemnon is scaling with the development of work five cities on five continents around the world, with his eye on Brazil and South Africa as other promising cities. Energy Garden is built into the current Resilient Cities Strategy of Salvador, in Bahia, Brazil. His goal to build £100-£500 million ‘resilience bonds’ powering sustainability hubs delivering dividends. He works with large scale operators such as Rockefeller Foundation to imbue their work with the Energy Garden model.

Agamemnon has been steeped in cooperatives from a young age. His maternal grandparents came from Russia to America through Ellis Island and built housing and working cooperatives in New York. Hi paternal grandparents indigenous Uruguayans unionised supported workers’ rights. Agamemnon grew up in upstate New York in collective farm communities built on a similar ethos. His mother was a Steiner educator, further distilling the importance of cooperation in his raising. The work he does today – building cooperatives for solar energy – seems almost an inevitability, a throughline from his family history to a life of creating initiatives in community.

Agamemnon has created entrepreneurial ventures since he was a child. He created his first garden at five and made money shovelling driveways and raking lawns at eight. At ten he attended a 4H vegetable auction. Dismayed by the poor showing done by the adult auctioneer, he stepped up the microphone and ran it himself. He won a gardening contest and opened his first bank account with the winnings. Growing up in a commune, he overhauled their roadside produce sales and offered pizza, making the community an extra $6000 a month. By fifteen he lived largely independently, managing his own finances. In college he ran his own construction and tiling company, worked as medical assistant in a doctor’s office and designed flower arrangements for events.

Twice diagnosed with serious cancer before his thirties, he became obsessed with finding solutions to the broken things within him and in the world around him. Told he was going to die, he learned not to accept ‘no’ as an answer. Grappling with his own mortality, he turned to writing and when the weight of articulating it became impossible, he turned to painting and then finally to rethinking the built environment. He began to focus on how to make hospitals – the dreary places he had spent so much of his twenties – more ‘hospitable’ through painting and large-scale art pieces. Finding this was not enough to transform patients experience he pursued a Masters in Architecture. He was less interested in bricks and mortar and more in how one creates structures in which society can flourish. His combined passions for painting, architecture and cooperatives merging were a profound success, bringing commissions and exhibits around the world, including Tate Modern and Venice Biennale. Eventually he realised ‘just painting was someone else’s dream,’ and turned his attention focus on a wholistic approach which had renewable energy as the engine, people as medium and social and environmental outcomes as a measure of success. Energy Garden is a culmination of all these disparate influences.

In his initial attempt to develop an egalitarian financial solution to renewable energy infrastructure development he co-developed an organisation called Better World Finance with a partner from Merrill Lynch. Finding the for-profit business lacking social equality he began developing cooperatives, creating eight community energy cooperatives in some of London’s poorest areas, with adjacent volunteer programmes and outreach; Repowering London, Brixton Energy Solar 1 , Brixton Energy Solar 2, Brixton Energy Solar 3, Vauxhall Energy, North Kensington Community Energy, Banister House Solar and Community Energy England before establishing Edible Bus Stop, which became Edible Overground, which became Energy Garden.