PURE the Clean Planet Trust began life as a charity created to raise the bar in carbon offsetting. Our expertise in carbon finance led to the development of the British Airways Carbon Fund in 2011 and shortly thereafter the creation of the Community Energy Fund in 2012, which was launched at the Cabinet Office. This was the UK's first dedicated finance facility supporting the development of community energy projects drawing on a £1.5m credit facility from Big Society Capital.
In parallel, Carbon Leapfrog was launched by a network of professional service firms as a broker and project manager of professional support to community energy projects. Our in-house and brokered professional expertise has gone on to support many precedent setting, sector firsts and innovative projects worldwide.
PURE and Carbon Leapfrog worked alongside and supported each other for a number of years and in 2012 we decided that by working together and combining our expertise and resources we would be able to have a greater impact. As a merged entity, Pure Leapfrog has been able to scale up both its impact and reach.
We have standardised the process of delivery through a template legal platform and advised local governments, including Bristol City Council, and lobbied for change by engaging with the likes of the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. We have also scaled up the finance available to the community energy movement through setting up a trading subsidiary, Leapfrog Finance, that provides large-scale bridging finance to large scale community renewable energy projects through a £30m bridging facility.
To date, Pure Leapfrog has supported over 100 renewable energy and energy reduction projects, benefitting around 530,000 people and generating over £11m of community benefit. We have deployed over £25 million to support the development of community renewable energy projects and through our carbon offsetting programme we have also offset over 228,400 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
Find out more about our current work here.