£200,000 for low carbon communities
09 April 2009
The results of the final judging round from Cut your Carbon have been announced
St John’s Cathedral in Norwich and the Othona Community in Essex have been successful in their bid for funding after presenting their projects to cut carbon emissions to a panel of high profile judges on April 1st in the final round of the East of England Development Agency’s (EEDA’s) Cut your Carbon competition.
In addition two other communities, Three Villages Eco Group from Hertfordshire and Swavesey Community Energy Explorers from Cambridgeshire, who both asked for less than £20,000 each, were selected directly by the Cut your Carbon review panel to start work on making their projects a reality.
Alex Menhams, Cut your Carbon campaign manager commented:”We are delighted that we have been able to award £200,000 to four interesting projects in this final round of Cut your Carbon. All these projects have the potential to inspire community members and other communities to take action to reduce carbon emissions. We have not been able to offer as much funding as we would have wished due to budget reductions, but we are committed to helping the successful communities develop business plans to secure their funding and make their projects a reality.”
The four successful projects are
St John’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Norfolk, awarded up to £70,000 to introduce a sustainable heating system as a major step towards becoming an Eco Cathedral and an exemplar site for other historic buildings. The current heating system relies on hot air from four expensive and inefficient gas heaters, which they plan to replace with woodchip biomass fuel boilers with under floor pipes and hot air vents to enable continuous background heating for all parts of the Cathedral.
Othona, a community in Essex, awarded up to £103,000 towards providing a zero carbon-impact replacement for a condemned building used as a meeting place and dormitory by hundreds of schoolchildren and visitors every year. The building is highly innovative and designed to be zero-carbon in operation, achieved through very high thermal mass and the use of glass to maximize passive solar gain. The community educates visitors and guests alike in sustainable living and renewable technologies.
Three Villages Eco Group, made up of three villages in a predominantly rural area of Hertfordshire, awarded up to £10,000 to purchase thermal imaging cameras to map the energy loss of all domestic, commercial and public buildings within the project area, and to provide support to the building occupants to improve the energy efficiency of their buildings.
Swavesey Community Energy Explorers a group from bustling village in South Cambridgeshire, awarded up to £17,000 to use cutting-edge heat and electricity monitors to ‘make energy visible’ to homeowners. The village college will operate a term-by-term loan scheme for 40 monitors for schoolchildren, and share lessons learned to instill long-term behaviour change. The supplier chosen by the community, GEO, has been supported by EEDA proof of concept and R&D grants previously.
The judging panel, consisted of Richard Ellis, chair of EEDA; Tim O’Riordan, Emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia; Neil Jennings, founder Student Switch Off campaign; Edward Hyams, chair of Energy Saving Trust and Andy Brown, Climate Change Manager at Anglian Water. The Cut your Carbon funding competition will close after this round, earlier than originally planned, due to budget reductions across EEDA.