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Tesco Village

Ross Clark

Wednesday, 23rd April 2008

Ross Clark looks into eco-towns

This is a rather interesting get-out clause, because it would allow the developer of an eco-town to build a wind farm several miles away, allowing those who live at the eco-town to earn the environmental brownie points but others to suffer the consequences. When pressed for details as to how Hanley Grange would generate its renewable energy, Bob Selwood admitted at this stage that they were a little lacking. ‘We’ve done sufficient work to convince ourselves that it is likely to be achievable,’ he tells me. Remarkably, promoters of the eco-towns chosen by the government do not seem to have had to convince anyone else that they have worked out the technology required to make a town of 8,000 houses carbon-neutral — they have been allowed leave to solve that small problem at a later date. All Bob Selwood could tell me is that Hanley Grange would use a variety of sources of energy, including turbines, solar panels and a ‘biomass plant’ using locally grown saplings.

I am not entirely sure where the saplings are going to come from, especially considering Cambridgeshire is Britain’s most treeless county. What was claimed to be Britain’s first zero-carbon housing estate — the BedZED development in south London, completed in 2002 — incorporated a biomass plant, but that has only 82 properties and was designed to gobble up tree-trimmings from all over the borough of Merton. Moreover, the plant failed and the development now has to draw all its electricity from the national grid.