Things are moving locally in renewable energy and recycling with projects worth a possible £2billion proposed for Avonmouth. These would apparently be paid for by commercial investors and could, if the local, regional and particularly the national energy and waste strategies and mix of technologies is right, contribute towards making Bristol much greener as well as creating many jobs. At this stage though the £2billion investment figure is somewhat speculative but those in the know say it is a reasonable estimate!

The Bristol Environmental Technology and Services Sector project (BETS) established about three years ago to really get environmental technologies and services going in Bristol and the surrounding area are of course intimately involved in all this. They are saying that nine different projects are being proposed in and around Avonmouth, including green power stations and recycling/waste operations. Full details of all these are not yet publicly available but it’s quite possible that debate will surround just how green some projects actually are and so the spotlight needs to be shone on them.

What we do know is that The Port of Bristol already has three wind turbines and Bristol City Council wants to build two more and Wessex Water want four more. There are also at least three proposals around for biomass power stations burning such fuels as woodchip, along with some interesting ideas for combined heat and power (where waste heat is circulated and put to some use). The viability of this at Avonmouth however needs looking into - can the heat be efficiently used there? How? Then there are a number of possible ‘energy from waste’ proposals, from pyrolysis/gasification or ‘waste cooking’ plants to conventional mass incineration with energy recovery (electricity generation) – mass burning or other heat treatment of waste is very controversial.

There are claims that Bristol is leading the green development agenda and could position itself as the so-called ‘green-collar capital’. There will be ongoing debate about how  the scale of green investment matches the scale of the economic, climate and energy security problems though, with some calling for very large ‘green new deal’ plans to create an entirely different kind of economy and society out of the entwined economic and environmental chaos we now have.

Glenn Vowles
http://vowlesthegreen.blogspot.com