‘Power Station’ documentary is a triumph of imagination

It is impossible to summarize the documentary film ‘Power Station’ in a single sentence.  

Ostensibly it is a film about two artists with an ambition to power their street with renewable energy. The strength of the documentary lies not just in its storytelling, but in redefining the word “power” as the ability to build a community resilient and determined enough to find creative solutions to all the administrative and financial hurdles that prevent them from harnessing the power of the sun.  

Dan Edelstyn and his partner Hilary Powell begin the documentary in their home in Walthamstow in the middle of the COVID lockdown. What begins as a film that feels like a lockdown diary quickly grows creative tentacles into a project that will raise money to buy and install solar panels for every house on their street.  

Their street is remarkable for its ordinariness. Neighbours include Dorothy, a centenarian who has lived her entire life in the neighbourhood; a Pakistani immigrant who feels so tied to his community he says he wants to be buried in Walthamstow; middle class homeowners, private renters, and council tenants – one of whom is a lung cancer survivor living with damp growing like moss up her living room walls. Like many people in the country, several residents on the street suffer from fuel poverty. In England, 11% of households were classified as fuel poor in 2022. In Walthamstow the figure is as high as 20%.  

Given high fuel costs, it feels like a no-brainer that solar panel installation would be a top government priority. As Dan and Hilary point out at the beginning of the film, the cost of installing solar panels on every roof in the UK would be recuperated within ten years. Solar energy is also a vital piece of reaching the country’s net zero goal. Analysis from the Climate Change Committee found that the UK will need to deploy 40GW of solar energy by 2030 if it is to achieve net zero goals by 2050. This means tripling installed solar capacity over the next decade.  

Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powel of the Power Station project seen here during their 28 days living on the family house in London, 25th November 2022. Commisioned by Dan Edelstyn.

And yet, as the film quicky makes clear, each step of the way comes with seemingly insurmountable hurdles. The first problem is money. To install the panels the couple needs to raise £100,000. Drawing on their previous experience making a documentary about personal debt, Hilary devises a plan where they can sell green bank notes with the faces of local residents. The pair refurbish an unused high street shop to sell their artistically designed notes, but only manage to raise about 30% of their total. A new plan is needed, and in a move that feels like it came straight out of a Richard Curtis film, Dan and Hilary work with the local primary school to record the children singing an original tune they hope will top the Christmas song charts.  The song is a hit, landing the school in the chart’s top 20, but doesn’t manage to bring in all the needed funds.  

This is when the couple concoct their most ambitious plan yet: they will sleep on their roof every single night until they raise the remaining funds for the panels. This wouldn’t be so bad if the plan began on a midsummer night, but Hilary and Dan move their brass bed to their roof at the end of November. For twenty-three nights the pair wrap themselves in coats, hats, and gloves and sleep on a plastic tarp tied to their bed frame. For three weeks they are beaten with freezing temperatures, rain and hail, all the while constantly refreshing their crowd funding page as donations drip and then gush into their account.  

A natural ending would be the magic moment when the £100,000 goal is finally reached, but here we are only half we through. The money was only one battle, the next is fighting the administrative juggernaut to get the panels installed.  

Dan summarizes the next stage of the project with lines from a Leonard Cohen song, “they sentenced me to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within.” After descending the roof, we see Hilary on the floor of her living room cutting out fabric letters for a protest sign. She’s not crying, but it’s easy to feel she should be. She tells the camera about complaints to the local council about the solar panels, inflationary costs, and endless admin tasks needed to get the panels installed on roofs. In an effort to boost morale she invents a plan to line the street with 10,000 sunflowers. When July comes around the panels are finally installed. The street celebrates with a “Sun Day” by removing the cars and bringing out the sunflowers. The documentary ends with images of school children flying like superheroes over their street carrying cardboard signs reading “power station”.  

It is tempting to interpret Power Station as a story of triumph, a testament to imagination, endurance, and the quiet power of collective action. And it is that. Dan and Hilary’s project proves that with enough creativity and stubbornness, even the most complicated problems can be solved. And yet the film also leaves behind an uncomfortable question: why should it take this much effort at all? Installing solar panels on a row of ordinary homes should not require chart campaigns, rooftop vigils, and months of bureaucratic trench warfare. 

Schemes like the government’s Warm Home initiative suggest an awareness of the problem, offering grants or zero-interest loans for solar installation. But the criteria are so narrow that to qualify applicants must be property owners or landlords and earn under £35,000 a year — a threshold that excludes much of a city where average house prices now exceed £600,000. Landlords, meanwhile, have little incentive to act when they are not the ones paying the energy bills. At a Q&A following a screening at The Conduit, Dan recalled receiving a call from his MP, who noted that £1 billion has been allocated for solar, but remains effectively untouched while policymakers struggle to determine how to deploy it. If two artists on an unremarkable street in Walthamstow can summon the imagination to make solar power a reality, it is hard to accept that the government cannot do the same.  

You can learn more about Dan and Hilary’s project and find a film screening here.  And you can contribute to their crowdfunding page to help scale the project here.