Developer says end is in sight for CHP in housing schemes

A leading housebuilder has said the greening of the electricity grid means scheme specific decentralised renewable energy projects face redundancy.

Many developers have been required to provide decentralised mini power stations, such as combined heat and power (CHP), in order to minimise their schemes’ carbon emissions over recent years.

However Chris Tinker, chairman of major projects and strategic partnerships at the top ten housebuilder Crest Nicholson, told a fringe meeting organised by the Town and Country Planning Association at the Labour party conference yesterday evening (Sunday) that renewable energy’s growing share of total generation raised a question mark over such plants.

He said: “We’ve made great strides in greening the grid. We’ve put quite a number of renewable schemes into projects.

“I would like to think one day they will become redundant because the grid will be very green and you don’t have all the localised management charges, which are very inefficient.”

As an example, running CHP schemes generated cheap energy but were expensive to manage, Tinker said: “When you add the two together it is quite difficult to make it work below the level of the grid.”

He also said that it makes more sense for developers to spend money on improving the energy efficiency of existing housing stock rather than building new homes to the highest environmental standards.

Tinker said: “There comes a point when rather than invest £1,000 in a modern house to make it ultra-efficient it would be better to invest it in a fund to address some of the short comings of the existing housing stock, which is not well insulated.

“This is a grown-up conversation about what it’s going to cost to turn whole housing stock into a lower carbon world rather than just the new housing stock.”