Local low carbon housing pioneers Hockerton Housing Project are currently taking part in a UK-wide competition to deliver energy savings of 80% in social housing. They have partnered with Newark and Sherwood Homes to improve a pair of semi-detached homes in Newark.
After reducing the energy demand of the houses significantly through insulation and the harvesting of passive solar energy, one option to offset the remaining energy consumption was to introduce on-site generation. They are taking a different approach however, and investing in off-site generation.
Each house will have £1,500 of shares in Sustainable Hockerton’s local community wind turbine project (in reality the house doesn’t have the shares, but the social landlord, Newark and Sherwood Homes (NSH) does). This investment is predicted to generate about 2,500kWh of electricity per year, effectively offsetting the equivalent consumption in the homes. NSH get an annual return on that investment, and no maintenance headaches of on-site renewables; and the tenant doesn’t get technology that they don’t understand and/or cannot operate.
And financially it stacks up too. Consider if they had put solar panels on the roof (if they had the luxury of a south-facing roof). A 1kWp array (occupying around 10sqm of roof space) would have set the project back about £6,000 and generated around 800kWh per year. Yet for a quarter of that cost the project gets in excess of 3 times the output, and none of the hassle of maintaining/operating it.
What a fantastic speech from the local MP. Such a pleasant surprise from the usual waffle spouted by official opening ‘persons’ to see someone who actually understands and appreciates the significance of what has been achieved here. Marvellous…