£4 billion is to be put towards community-oriented renewable energy schemes, as part of a pledge by British renewable energy company Octopus.

The money is to be raised through Octopus’s ‘Fan Club – The Collective’, an expansion of the company’s local wind power tariff, ‘The Fan Club’, which allows customers to benefit from cheaper power when wind is blowing.

Octopus have initiated their pledge with a £10 million investment, which they say will fund increasing The Fan Club’s number of turbines from two to eight.

Although the project is expected to concentrate on onshore wind to begin with, Octopus plan to expand to solar energy. It is hoped that ‘Fan Club – The Collective’ will provide 2.5 million households with sustainable power by 2030.

“We are pledging to create a whopping £4 billion of people driven clean energy projects over the next decade,” said Zoisa North-Bond, CEO of Octopus Energy Generation.

“In order to do that we’ll be bringing the worlds of energy technology and institutional investment together, and opening up the opportunity for anyone who wishes to invest in energy projects.”

The announcement comes following the launch of a £3 billion investment project to build new green hydrogen plants across the UK, a partnership between Octopus Renewables and independent renewable energy company RES.

Octopus’s investment pledge is one component of a larger £20 billion strategy to generate 18 gigawatts of sustainable energy projects by 2027 – the equivalent to 10 million homes-worth of power.