Solar panels project for council homes in green energy drive

The Labour Group committed itself to spending £5m on green energy in their budget before their landslide victory at the local elections.

Detailed plans have now been unveiled for photo-voltaic panels which create electricity from sunlight, to be installed on 500 council properties as well as 17 council buildings, possibly including the city’s Guildhall.

Tenants will get reduced price or free electricity, any excess going to the National Grid and creating an income for the council.

The panels will be fitted by the council-owned firm Kingstown Works Ltd (KWL) which will take on 10 new members of staff.

The scheme, which will be piloted on 20 council houses, was the brainchild of Labour’s deputy leader and KWL chair Daren Hale.

Labour Cabinet member Rilba Jones said: “The electricity will be fed back into the National Grid so it will make money for the council as well as giving tenants reduced price or free electricity from their roofs.

“The Cabinet was overwhelmingly in favour of it and just regretted that nothing happened before. We hope if it is a success it could be rolled out in other parts of the city.”

New Lord Mayor C Colin Inglis added: “People’s utility bills are one of the biggest household expenditure items. I think it is an excellent idea and I wish I could afford to do something like that myself.”

The council has to move fast, as the Government has set a deadline of March next year when tariffs designed to encourage investment in low carbon technologies will be cut.

Schemes which are installed by then will receive an index-linked, and therefore inflation-proof rate, over the next 25 years.

A study last year estimated that 42 per cent of Hull’s population were in “fuel poverty”. A household is deemed to be fuel poor when it needs to spend more than 10 per cent of its income on fuel.

The plans will be discussed by the Riverside Area Committee next Wednesday. A report says: “Occupiers of properties that the system is installed on will also benefit from reduced electricity bills as they’ll effectively become their own power stations and so will use less from electricity suppliers and the Grid...Tenants with installed PVs will get free electricity during daylight hours.”

A feasibility study carried out by consultants PlaceFirst identified 2,134 council houses as being suitable for PV panels.

The 500 properties selected for installation are aligned within 30 degrees of south and are not overshadowed.

The panels will be fitted on top of the tiled roofs. The cash for the scheme is believed to be coming from other regneration projects which have been shelved because of the recession.

Meanwhile East Riding Council says it has shelved plans for a solar farm after the Government dropped its subsidy, but will be installing panels on three council depots, at Melton, Carnaby and Goole.

It has gone out to tender and the council is expecting work to be completed by August. Work on 20 others depends on a Government consultation on tariffs, which is taking place at the moment.

The scheme will make a small contribution – just one per cent – towards Hull’s target of reducing carbon emissions by 2020.

Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.

Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide was poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuels, it said.