£700,000 green energy project approved for Alnwick community hub

Northumberland County Council's HQ in Morpeth.

The town’s former Lindisfarne Middle School site is being refurbished as part of a £1.2million project to house the adult learning team and other community organisations.

At the Tuesday, May 12, meeting of Northumberland County Council’s cabinet, members agreed to spend another £730,000 on solar panels and a ground source heat pump (GSHP) system.

The solar panels will cost £34,000 to install, but will actually end up making the council money over their 25-year lifetime, with total costs of around £60,000, but total energy savings of £70,000.

The work is expected to begin in September and be completed by November.

The GSHP, which uses the ground’s natural heat to warm water which can then be used to heat buildings, will cost £695,000.

The council will spend about £6,000 a year on this system, but the report notes that ‘most important from a climate-emergency standpoint is the carbon savings over the asset life’, with a 20-year saving of 530 tonnes of CO2.

In March 2017, when Lindisfarne Middle School was in its last few months of existence before the switch to a two-tier education system in the Alnwick Partnership, the plan was for the entire site to be demolished during the summer, likely so it could be developed for housing.

However, when the Conservative administration took over in May that year, it halted the demolition, with the sports hall being offered to the town council as a free community asset transfer in 2018 and a commitment to retain the playing fields for community use in early 2019.

Last summer, councillors approved £1.2million for a project to refurbish the annexe buildings for the Learning and Skills Service.

Other community organisations based on the site will also have the opportunity to move across, while the rest of the old school buildings will be demolished to reduce ongoing running costs.

The council has said that the space created can initally be used for on-site parking with the potential to expand the community campus with an appropriate new-build development in the future.

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