Having exhibited his art across the globe and twice beaten cancer, Agamemnon Otero has now set his sights on giving London’s power back to its people. By Oliver Gordon.

4 August 2019

It’s a frosty October afternoon in London as commuters traipse into Shoreditch High Street Station after a long day’s work. Today, however, their faces contort with perplexed curiosity as they encounter a cacophony of sound and colour. A DJ is hammering out bassy beats from a set of industrial-sized speakers as a violinist accompanies with instrumental renditions of miscellaneous chart toppers. Greenery litters the usual grey morass; potted plants squeezed into every nook and cranny of the station’s entrance hall. Orange-vested volunteers swarm the floor inviting distrusting Londoners to take a chance on their informative paper gifts. The walls are adorned with banners announcing, ‘Energy Garden: Where community gardening meets community energy’.

Quietly orchestrating the scene is a man in his early-40s wearing a floral dress shirt more befitting a salsa club in Cali than renewable energy coop in London. Agamemnon Otero, however, already boasts an MBE for his services to the UK’s community energy sector.

“Transport is the most polluting element of our economy,” Energy Garden’s founder passionately recites to me on the sidelines of the event. “27% of the UK’s emissions come from transport; Network Rail is the country’s single largest producer, and TFL the largest in the capital. 11% of the UK’s energy is consumed by London and half of that is the trains.

“This initiative is about making that transport system net positive, so generating more energy than it needs and generating it in a way that actually helps the communities that use it.”

Agamemnon in front of platform sign - high res.jpg

“This initiative is about making that transport system net positive, so generating more energy than it needs and generating it in a way that actually helps the communities that use it.”
Agamemnon Otero MBE

Energy Garden

Stripped down to its core, Energy Garden is a community energy cooperative that creates green spaces on London’s overground stations. They are spaces for the local community to come together to grow food, generate clean energy and improve the local environment. They offer Londoners the opportunity to grow vegetables, install solar panels, and learn how to make preserves, brew beer, harvest honey, store seeds, cook and support biodiversity. Crops from the gardens are shared among local people and food banks, with produce such as honey and hops distributed among volunteers and supporters. Solar panels installed on station roofs and trackside spaces fund the gardens as well as power water pumps, lights and notice boards.

“The gardens not only give life — as well as food and sustenance to commuters — they are also tended by the local community and by TFL staff. It brings us all together in a more cohesive way,” says Eunice Olumide MBE, a Scottish supermodel, curator and charity fundraiser who helped Energy Garden put together its launch event. “I decided to work with these guys as it’s a cause that’s extremely close to my heart,” she explains.

To date, Energy Garden has been funded by the People's Postcode Lottery and The Greater London Authority but moving forward the initiative will be financed through a community bond offer. Investment in the bond will fund the acquisition of solar sites which will, in turn, generate revenue for the gardens. The organisation has assessed over 200 megawatts (MW) of potential solar PV assets and has selected an initial pipeline of 12.5MW. The sites are of varying sizes but would cumulatively generate enough energy to power the equivalent of 3,800 homes, with a saving of 5,375 tonnes of CO2 a year.

As well as providing an annual return to investors, the income generated by the sale of the solar electricity will sustain the gardening projects by covering the ongoing cost of materials and general upkeep. The coop is looking to raise £16.5 million though the 20-year bond, with a £2 million minimum target. Investors, who can put in from £50 to £100,000, will see a 4% annual return on their money.

“The reason we moved to a bond is to give large corporates something they can invest in that they actually understand,” explains Otero. “But anyone can invest from £50, be that someone off the street or a large corporate wanting to put up big money. On top of the 4% return there’s a social return, through the youth training programmes, improved biodiversity and air quality etc, which equates to another pound for every pound invested.

“Once we’ve raised the money, we’ll start putting the solar panels on top of the TFL buildings. We’re also looking to put panels on top of local schools and hospitals as well.”

So far, 34 gardens have been installed in stations across London. In the process, Energy Garden has worked with 127 community groups, 37 schools and delivered 26 paid accredited training schemes. Otero started the initiative by himself in 2011, but by next year he forecasts the scheme to hit seven full-time employees and to have secured funding for the next 20 years.

“It’s a behemoth before it’s really been birthed,” he tells me at a preliminary event for Shoreditch Highstreet's TFL staff. “There are 2.4 billion passenger journeys on the overground and underground every year. Every day, around 334,000 people pass through Energy Garden’s 34 stations — that’s 124 million passenger journeys a year.

“All these people are talking about sustainability, never mind just passing by and seeing gardens rather than a grey platform. And this is in the middle of a city, where the people actually are. Some of the best community initiatives are in the middle of nowhere: the Eden Project, the Centre for Alternative Technology – they might as well be in Never Never Land.”

DJ and energy garden sign - high res.jpg

Aga, Rhy and Eunice with TFL staff - high res.jpg

‘Blue-sky thinker’

Half Uruguayan, half Russian, Otero grew up in New York but now lives on a refurbished fishing trawler in Vauxhall. He exudes passion, and is completely open and unguarded with his emotions in a manner that is disarming for the recipient. His earnest air and toothy grin are indicative of cheeky-chap charm that gives you the impression you’re chatting with an old friend.

He comes across as a dreamer, constantly pushing for bigger and better things, and almost seeping an infectious yearning to fix what he sees as a broken world. He is fun and full of energy, and knows how to use it to his advantage. I watch him as he corrals some skeptical-looking TFL staff into a photo shoot that starts as a chore and ends as a social occasion.

In many ways he is the archetypal entrepreneur. He is a problem solver and a motivator, and won’t let minor details stop the ball rolling. He is momentum, constantly on the move. But there is a certain scattiness to his persona. He is always at least 45 minutes late to each of our appointments and he is difficult to get to focus on the task at hand; often distracted by things going on around him and impatient with questions that require thorough explanations. There is a quirky non-conformism to him that takes visual form through a wide repertoire of loud, colourful shirts.

“Blue-sky thinker is probably the term that comes to mind,” says Rhys Williams, Energy Garden’s project officer and Otero’s second in command. “He’s very ambitious, and great at coming up with solutions that get to the crux of an issue. His ability to come up with practical solutions to real problems is the reason his projects have done so well. He’s got great management skills, and his optimism and drive really inspires the team around him.”

“Blue-sky thinker is probably the term that comes to mind. He’s very ambitious, and great at coming up with solutions that get to the crux of an issue. His ability to come up with practical solutions to real problems is the reason his projects have done so well. He’s got great management skills, and his optimism and drive really inspires the team around him.”

In the blood

The stage was set for Otero at an early age. His mother brought him up on various communes around New York. The two of them were always on the move, and she would regularly hand young Agamemnon over to surrogate parents she thought he could learn from. He was often sent off to nearby farms for a month or so to learn about self-sustaining communities. “They were proper communes; of over 100 acres with doctors, lawyers, dentists, printing presses,” he recalls. “And they all had the same problems: they were full of idealists eating their own tail and preaching to the converted. So when I hear people say, “I want to go live on a kibbutz in Israel, or set up commune in Barcelona”, I think, ‘for Christ’s sake, the answer isn’t on the mountain top, it’s right here in the city; you have everything you need, right now’.”

Otero’s grandparents served as a particular source of inspiration for his ideology. His grandfather, Samuel Alpert, was a policeman who stood up against corruption in the NYPD and set up worker cooperatives in the city; his grandmother, Alisa Rosa, was a key player in the Uruguayan socialist party. “My grandfather was the first non-Irish Catholic policeman in New York city; he used to get such a hard time. He would mentor all the troubled young kids that weren’t Irish Catholic. He would vouch for them and teach them to dance and swim. Eventually a lot of those kids joined the police force with him.” Agamemnon inherited a ceremonial ring given to his grandfather by the NYPD “recognising him as the unofficial — ie non-Irish Catholic — Chief Sergeant”.

Alpert also organised his local community into collectively buying the building in which they lived. “It was a kind of hybrid socialist-capitalist approach to property,” explains his grandson. For example, each family would individually design their homes but would use the same contractor to save on costs. “It was only when I was in my 30s that I realised, ‘fuck, I just do what my grandfather did,’” Says Otero. “Also, my grandmother’s partner on my father’s side was part of the Uruguayan socialist party, and they were always working on community and social development. So I guess it’s in the blood.”

Otero lived in six communes over his childhood, the largest being the Rudolf Steiner Fellowship Community. Despite going to a Steiner school for six years, he mostly attended normal state schools and had regular hobbies: American football, baseball, art, dance. Nevertheless, he was never allowed watch television; he saw his first film when he was 14. “I wasn’t that into community stuff but I knew that the relationship between people was the most important thing in my life,” he recalls. At 15, he started living independently alongside his mother at one of the communes; managing his own finances, filing his own tax returns. When he wanted to leave the premises, it was the commune’s executive committee, rather than his mother, from whom he needed to ask permission.

After departing the commune at 18, he drifted a while; travelling, living with friends. He waited tables in restaurants, worked in construction, started a tiling company for bathrooms and kitchens — “whatever I could to get by”. For a spell, he considered becoming a monk. “But the idea of of going off to come to peace with yourself is completely unappealing to me,” he says. “It’s actually quite a dangerous philosophy: it’s very easy to come to terms with yourself on your own, but it’s a different story with family, kids, bills, and living among your peers. But it’s not about getting 20 people together to try and find themselves in an artist retreat on a remote island. It’s about collectively acknowledging our community, and supporting one another while immersed in the hustle and bustle of the 21st century — the here and now, warts and all.”

But when Otero was 19 he fell ill. With the US health system unable to identify the cause, he began studying medicine and started working in a doctor’s clinic. After the seven months in the dark, Otero discovered the mystery illness was in fact bladder cancer. During his subsequent chemotherapy, Otero started writing about his life as he attempted to come to terms with his condition. But when he struggled to find the words to describe certain sentiments, he began painting about them instead. “I had to face my own mortality and there were things I couldn’t explain to myself,” he recounts. It was the discovery of these talents that got him through his recovery, and would eventually lead to him attaining a scholarship to attend the prestigious New York liberal arts college Sarah Lawrence.

“It was the most expensive school in the country. It was an amazing place to be for the quality of teacher but the students were from a different world. There were eight people in my dorm and two of them had their own planes.

“They were all 18 and fresh out of school. I was 22 and had already struggled through cancer while attending community college and working. I ended up hanging out with the staff mainly.”

Otero already had an undergraduate degree in social science and math science, but turned to Sarah Lawrence to study literature, pre-medicine, and visual arts. “I was dancing 40 hours a week, studying science and literature, and I also had three jobs — it was really tough,” he recollects. He was working a couple nights a week in a doctor’s clinic and would do tiling jobs and flower displays on weekends.

But inspired by his professor, the abstract expressionist Ursula Schneider, Otero dedicated himself to his painting following his graduation. He did a six-month classical apprenticeship in Italian renaissance art and then moved to London to start exhibiting at museum and gallery shows. He would spend the next 10 years making a living from the trade.

But at age 27, he was dealt a devastating blow: a second bout of cancer, unrelated to the first. He spent nine gruelling months in hospital receiving chemotherapy. “It was hell: my teeth went black, all my hair fell out; I couldn’t even lift a bottle of water.” And right when he thought it was over, he was told he had no white blood cells left. At that point he fell into a deep malaise that would end up having a monumental effect on the direction of his life.

“Nothing made sense to me when I looked out at the world,” he recounts. “We know that climate destabilisation is man-made and systemic; we know that going into Iraq and Afghanistan will create bombers; we know most of the 124 terrorist attacks in the US were committed by white dudes, not black or muslim people. So why are we doing these things and why are we being told all this bullshit?”

“I was being told to change my light bulbs when every food choice I made, every beer I drank, etc was part of a system that was totally broken. I felt a repulsion for anything that wasn’t healthy in my body and also a repulsion for those broken systems. But that’s when I started wondering how I could address those issues.”

“I felt a repulsion for anything that wasn’t healthy in my body and also a repulsion for those broken systems. But that’s when I started wondering how I could address those issues.”

— Agamemnon Otero

When Otero eventually recovered from his illness he left hospital, built himself an art studio and got his head down to a few years of hard work. But he couldn’t shake his previous revelation “that the world needs alternative solutions” and, at age 30, he was offered a vent for those nagging sentiments when he was asked a speak at a conference on how to design hospitals. “I’d been working with hospitals for some years, trying to make them more hospitable places, but I had no idea about designing them,” he says. “Anyway, I did the panel and it actually inspired me to go back to university to study a master’s degree in architecture.”

While he was studying, Otero continued to the consider the topic of the conference. In his subsequent research, he realised there was in fact no lack of innovative designs for hospitals but they just weren’t being built. “I looked at the funding and the financial sector and all of a sudden I realised how wasteful designs got funding but the sustainable ones didn’t. The industry wanted them to use loads of energy and to charge them for energy contracts, water contracts, cooling contracts, maintenance contracts.

“The hospital design itself was inefficient: it was predicated on the principle of planned obsolescence. There was tonnes of money out there but they weren’t going to the right projects. So I thought, ‘where the fuck is the disconnect here?’ And that’s when I realised that was what I was meant to be doing.”

Otero took himself back to the basics: questioning where his energy came from, how his water worked — the fundamentals of his quotidian existence. And if he didn’t like the way the system worked, he wasn’t going to use it. It started off very simply: buying his groceries from the farmers’ market. “It was a slow burn, one thing leading to the next,” he says. “I started putting solar panels on my roof, and then on my friends’ roofs. And then I put a garden in my flat, and then in my friends’ flats, and then I started planting vegetables in parks and on the sides of streets.”

The latter would come to form the basis of two community garden initiatives in London, The Edible Bus Stop and The Edible Overground. They started as ideas to create gardens that would grow community-grown vegetables, evolved into collecting rainwater and finally to generating energy. And it was energy side of things that really piqued Otero’s interest, who had written his master’s thesis on creating collective energy banks that would generate renewable energy for independent cooperatives.

And so in 2010 he began working on the predecessor to Energy Garden, a solar power intermediary development cooperative called Repowering London. The idea was to address fuel poverty in the city by delivering community-owned renewable power stations on social housing blocks and community buildings.

“I lived in Brixton and around the corner on the Loughborough Estate 60 people a year were dying of cold-related issues. So that was a big driver initially,” says Otero. “Repowering is all about addressing fuel poverty and building an energy cooperative was a way we could generate revenue streams to directly address that issue.”

He found a willing collaborator in the community-led sustainability initiative Transition Town Brixton. They started meeting in a pub to flesh out the project and eventually got their hands on some funding and registered as an official community group. A few months later they were putting up solar PV arrays on the Loughborough Estate, creating the cooperative they coined Brixton Energy Solar 1. The initiative grew rapidly from there: Brixton Energy Solar 2 came nine months later, and then Brixton Energy Solar 3 a year after, and projects have popped up in Lambeth, Vauxhall, Hackney and North Kensington in the years since.

Repowering London

Repowering’s projects are aimed at generating community funds for some of the capital’s poorest neighbourhoods, combating energy deprivation and providing employment and mentoring opportunities for young people and local residents.

Otero explains the model: “Repowering brings a community together to invest, they buy the solar panels and put them on the roofs of their social housing or schools, and then the return goes towards paying for community projects for the next 20 years.”

The organisation kicks off each project by working with the relevant local authority to identify areas that could physically host a solar PV installation and then collaborates with local residents’ associations and youth groups to realise the initiative. That stage continues for six to nine months, reaching deep into the community to engage residents who might not normally take part in such schemes. Weekly meetings give residents the opportunity to gain experience across a variety of areas included renewable energy technologies, energy literacy, business, entrepreneurship and public speaking.

Repowering then helps the local community form a Society for the Benefit of the Community, which will own and manage the solar PV installation, and aids in the launching of the share offer and the managing of the community benefit fund. The solar PV installations generate income from the supply of discounted electricity to the host sites, allowing investors to receive a 3-4% return and generating a reliable surplus to fund community projects over the following 20 years.

Since its inception, Repowering has installed 324 kilowatt-peaks (kWp) of solar capacity and its projects generate 200 megawatt-hours (MWh) of clean electricity annually, saving over 100 tonnes of CO2 every year. The organisation has also conducted energy audits and energy-efficiency retrofittings in 60 homes, attracted 485 investors to its projects, provided 84 London Living Wage-paid internships, and mentored 100 local volunteers.

“I was Repowering’s only employee for two years; now there are 8 full-time employees and six part-time contractors,” Otero says proudly.

The initiative has now moved onto the next stage of its development: peer-to-peer trading of energy between residents. Current UK regulations only allow customers to buy electricity from a single party, thus prohibiting peer-to-peer trading, but industry regulator Ofgem is considering amending that rule as the sector evolves.

In April last year, Repowering announced it had teamed up with a machine-learning startup called Verv to conduct the UK’s first physical blockchain energy trade at the site of one of its projects. The government-backed trial took place at Hackney’s Banister House estate, with Verv’s energy trading platform allowing residents with renewable energy supplies and battery storage to sell surplus power directly to their neighbours. Through Verv’s AI-based smart hub, which combines machine learning functionality with blockchain, the platform is able to calculate the energy demand profile of homes, and determine the solar energy supply in each battery, subsequently allocating low-carbon energy to residents based on their needs.

Similarly, in February Repowering teamed up with University College London’s Energy Institute and energy giant EDF to launch a peer-to-peer blockchain energy trading pilot at Elmore House in Brixton, the site of Repowering’s Brixton Energy Solar 1. 'Project CommUNITY' allows power to be used by residents of the estate and stored in domestic batteries for trading. A consumer-facing app facilitates the trading, which is tracked on a blockchain. The eight-month trial started in the first quarter of 2019 and will run through to October.

“Repowering brings a community together to invest, they buy the solar panels and put them on the roofs of their social housing or schools, and then the return goes towards paying for community projects for the next 20 years.”

Branching out

But as Repowering began to take off, Otero started to think bigger and bolder; realising the popularity of the concept offered the potential for something with a much wider impact.

“We soon realised that of the people who wanted to invest in the projects, only 20-30% were the residents themselves. The majority were just strong advocates of sustainability, holistic thinking and climate stabilisation — they weren’t just driven by solar panels, but by wearing sustainable clothes, driving sustainable cars, eating local organic.”

That revelation led Otero to conceive of Energy Garden: an idea for a development cooperative that uses the core tenet of Repowering, raising money to put solar panels on public buildings, but applies it to the transport network, schools and hospitals “in order to not just address fuel poverty but also to pay for air quality, biodiversity, horticulture and training,” says Otero. Rather than a intermediary body like Repowering, Energy Garden will itself own the assets — “a transport-based energy coop that effectively treats the city as a system, providing fresh air and sustainability to its citizens directly,” Otero clarifies.

“In London, we have air quality issues, food-quality issues, and so on, and over the years of Repowering we tried to develop the programme to address those people but it wasn’t quite within the scope. So I went and set up Energy Garden to add all the stuff I thought was missing. When we’re working on a local authority in an estate with Repowering, we’re effectively helping say 5,000 people on one estate over about 20 years. There are 5,000-15,000 a day on Energy Garden’s station platforms,” says Otero.

But rather than stepping on each other’s toes, the two organisations have been designed to complement each other. Repowering is now working with the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities programme, and Energy Garden has been kept within the Repowering group structure to also benefit from that relationship. Similarly, the no-debt cascade, one-vote/one-share bond offering that Otero has pioneered for Energy Garden can now be used by Repowering. “The innovations piloted in one of the schemes can be transferred across all of them,” he says.

With the help of TFL, Repowering and some local residents, the first Energy Garden came into being in 2014 at Brondesbury Park station in northwest London. It won Otero a London Leader award from the London Sustainable Development Commission. A year later, the organisation was awarded £750,000 from the Players of the People’s Postcode Lottery Dream Fund to extend the project over the entire London Overground network. The funding has overseen the creation of 34 gardens and a due diligence schools programme, as well as the tailoring of the innovative bond offering, which the group hope will generate enough funding to the power the programme for the next 20 years.

‘Basic rights for humanity’

But Otero is, of course, dreaming bigger. He’s targeting raising £100 million to install over 100MW of solar energy over the next four years; working with transport across the UK as well as branching out to other countries. “But the fundamental goal is achieving a model for a global transport network that is energy net positive,” he asserts.

Working alongside the Rockefeller Foundation, both Energy Garden and Repowering are looking at exporting their models to cities across the world. Williams discloses: “Agamemnon is working with the Rockefeller Foundation in order get to the point that we can hand over a blueprint of how we’ve gone about these things so that other cities can use it to do the same.”

They are certainly big and ambitious dreams. But judging by the metaphorical mountains Otero has thus far scaled in his life, you wouldn’t bet against him. If there’s an overarching ethos that links all his initiatives it is one of democratising renewable energy. In many ways, his mission is one of a green-energy Robin Hood: robbing megawatts from the Big Six energy giants to redistribute among the people.

“There is no reason why a corporation should be able to buy all the energy systems and profit off them,” he declares. “Air, wind and sunshine should be inalienable rights for plants and animals — of which humanity is a part. While I respect the fact that there should be some kind of remuneration for the people who invest in these things, I don’t believe that they should be able to exclude and impoverish other creatures on the earth.”

And with that philosophy Otero will doggedly persevere; with Repowering, with Energy Garden, and with whatever he comes up with next. And one can only hope he succeeds. “He’s started something incredible,” says Olumide, as the lights come down on Energy Garden’s Shoreditch launch. “I’m thankful to the creators of heaven and earth he’s been inspired to build this, as it’s truly something we can all benefit from.”