development partners 15 Nov 2013 18:10
older news
SHERWOOD Energy Village, built on the site of Ollerton pit, has long been touted as a shining example of how Nottinghamshire's former coal mines can be brought back into productive use.
But now three more redundant colliery sites are also being brought back to life – and all of them, aptly, to make energy again.
Landowner Harworth Estates has submitted planning applications to build large so-called "solar farms" on land at Bilsthorpe, Gedling and Welbeck.
If the plans get the go-ahead, these sites will become major producers of green energy in a Nottinghamshire landscape once dominated by coal production.
The Bilsthorpe site, for example, would be producing electricity from three sources: methane, wind and solar. Edwinstowe-based company Alkane Energy already extracts methane from the underground mine workings, turning the gas into electricity, and a new wind farm of five turbines, each up to 100m tall, is being built at Bilsthorpe by Peel Energy.
Alkane also opened a methane extraction plant at Gedling in June and the building of a solar farm there by Harworth Estates would give the site, within the Nottingham conurbation, a combined output of more than 8.5MW of green electricity.
The site last produced coal in 1991. Welbeck ceased production in 2010, the headstocks being demolished last year. Bilsthorpe colliery closed in 1997, four years after Ollerton pit, which later became celebrated for its community-led regeneration of energy-efficient homes and businesses.
If the new plans for the other three sites get the go-ahead, construction and maintenance of the solar arrays by development partners Juwi and RE-Fin Solar should support "dozens" of jobs, according to Harworth Estates' development manager, Gary Owens. And many of these jobs should go to local people. "The employment of local people is not an obligation but it is certainly something we are pushing in our development plans," he said. "It will obviously be good for the local economy to recruit local tradesman and so on."
Although the actual job creation at static solar arrays may seem relatively small-scale, it is arguable that redeveloping these former industrial sites for green energy is one of the easiest low-cost uses for them. Gedling, for example, has been the subject of several ambitious regeneration plans that have fallen through. Yet the advantages of these colliery sites are that they are large, may already have industrial planning consent attached to them and in some cases have infrastructure present. Indeed, at Welbeck, a rail branch line still leads into the old colliery.
Ground contamination can also make these brownfield sites more problematic for new buildings.
According to Professor Colin Snape, who is a fossil fuels expert at the University of Nottingham, more former coal mines will probably be used for green energy in the years ahead. Alkane Energy, for example, also extra
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