A university has spent more than £10 million on green energy schemes that have failed to materialise.
The University of East Anglia, which was at the centre of the 2009 Climategate affair over leaked emails, has abandoned what it had promised would be a “unique and innovative” scheme to burn wood chips to generate power.
A second scheme to generate electricity from burning straw is in doubt after the consortium behind it filed for insolvency. The university spent £8 million on the wood chip plant and invested £3 million in the Generation Park Norwich scheme, which included the straw plant. The wood chip plant was meant to use new biomass gasification technology but the university admitted yesterday that it had been using natural gas instead since 2008. Clive Lewis, the Norwich South MP, said: “These are large sums of money which ultimately come from you and me.”
Conrad Jones, a campaigner against the Generation Park scheme, said the university had tried to conceal the failure of the wood chip plant as it was not mentioned in its report on environmental objectives published last year.
The university said: “There is a real need for new technologies to secure a low carbon future and as a university we have a part to play in exploring those potential solutions. That process of exploration is never without some risk.”