Wren outgrows its first climate project

Just the gist

Short on time? Here's what you need to know this month:

👷 Mandulis Energy recently won a huge grant, worth €450,000, from the Dutch Fund for Climate Development! The project is now on track to set up a 500 kW bioenergy power plant, which will power the production of 50 tons of clean burning briquettes each day, with 100% renewable energy.
🌱 Since Wren is growing faster than this project, we have reduced our support for it. We're still buying all the offsets we can from it!

This is an update from our project Clean Cooking Fuel for Refugees. For more updates like this one, follow Wren on Twitter and Instagram.

It's a historic moment for Wren: we've outgrown our first climate project! In this update I'll explain what that means for the future of this project, and I'll share some exciting progress the project has made.

Project Lead Peter Nyeko and team pose by the project's pellet mill.

Wren outgrows Clean Cooking Fuel for Refugees

At Wren, we're constantly evaluating the best way to allocate the money you send us. We're lucky support for our projects has grown fast– we're now offsetting about 10,000 tons of CO2 every month across all projects.

Clean Cooking Fuel for Refugees' operations are scaling, but not fast enough to keep up with the growth of Wren's community. Therefore, we've reduced the funds we're sending to this project until their production ramps up further. We will continue to update you on the progress the project is making as they grow their operations and provide clean cooking fuel to thousands more refugees.

We still believe this is a great project with enormous potential. In fact, it has made good progress recently:

The project wins a €450,000 grant from the Dutch Fund for Climate Development!

USAID recently visited the project's first briquette factory.

COP26 was a momentous occasion for climate, but it was especially so for this climate project. Peter Nyeko, CEO of our project partner Mandulis Energy, pitched the Dutch Fund for Climate Development in Glasgow. He was pitted against several other world-class projects for the change to win a €100,000 no-strings-attached grant, with commitments to receive another €350,000 in follow-on funding.

You can watch his pitch here:

Here's what Peter himself says about how they will spend their hard-won grant funding:

We have as a result won a total of €450,000 in grant funding from the DFCD, and are now on track to raise more funding to enable us set up the first of six bioenergy power plants each at 500kW, across Uganda, where each power plant will power a 50 ton/day of biomass briquetting.

– Peter Nyeko, CEO of Mandulis Energy

Refugees cooking with the project's clean burning fuel.

We're hoping the increased funding will help the project provide thousands more refugee families with clean burning cooking fuel. In the next update, we'll share how the project manages to reach these refugees, without expensive operations costs.

Thanks once again for your support– Clean Cooking Fuel for Refugees would not exist without it. 🧡

- Thomas and the Wren team