Green schemes will aid Midlands construction industry
“But this is £30-40 million of economic activity. It’s very much about the local activity, about making sure this money is spent not in China or in Germany but in Birmingham.”
Encraft worked with Localise West Midlands for six months to design and secure funding for the retrofitting project being carried out in four areas of Birmingham.
It said it would retrofit more than 5,000 homes, save more than 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, and create 150 jobs. Encraft wrote the business plan with Localise West Midlands, developed the financial and supply chain models and are designing the retrofit products and services for the project. It will be launched initially as a pilot project within Aston, Lozells, Newtown and Northfield.
The scheme points people towards various streams of funding available for green projects from both the public and private sectors. The council is also operating a scheme which allows the cost of retrofitting to be paid back over future years using the savings made on energy bills and government bonus payments made for the use of microgeneration.
The Green New Deal is one of the first large scale UK projects to take advantage of the feed-in tariff scheme for microgeneration in the UK.
Mr Rhodes said the tariff was changing the way businesses could profit from the booming environmental technology sector.
He said: “I think there are massive opportunities now because the way the energy system in the UK is managed is changing radically. This represents a shift from a totally state managed market for low carbon technologies.
“Suddenly the lid has been taken off the market. This is a really good example of the public sector providing the confidence to say ‘we are serious about this in Birmingham’.”
