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Green recovery: Electricity North West and St Cuthbert’s Garden Village

26 May 2021

Electricity North West is supporting a green recovery, with one of its schemes helping to increase capacity on their network for planned housing, economic development, transport and community investments at St Cuthberts.

 

St Cuthbert’s Garden Village is located to the south of the City of Carlisle, and has secured over £110m of funding from the Government for its development which includes the creation of a southern link road.

One of the key guiding principles steering the St Cuthbert’s development is smart and sustainable living which means the development will support low carbon living through sustainable planning, transport and energy.

Building on Carlisle’s designation by the World Health Organisation as a World Healthy City, St Cuthbert’s will be a place that encourages and facilitates a healthy lifestyle. Walking and cycling, supportive neighbourhoods, planned educational facilities and a strong sense of community spirit will all improve health and wellbeing.

An objective for St Cuthbert’s is to promote sustainable energy use and the development of renewable energy resources, where feasible. It will also set out to promote energy efficient buildings whilst maintaining thermal comfort levels. Renewable and low carbon heat supplies being considered for the sites include:

  • Solar thermal
  • Air source heat pumps
  • Water source heat pumps
  • Ground source heat pumps
  • Energy from sewers
  • Deep geothermal
  • Energy from waste
  • Industrial waste heat

Electricity North West propose to utilise the replacement of the overhead lines that currently traverses the area with cables as an opportunity to uprate the circuits in the area and meet the developments needs for an additional 8.5MW of electrical capacity.

The new electrical network will be designed with the requirements to support both electrical consumption and generation in mind, enabling the decarbonisation vision of the Garden Village. As well as installing a higher capacity replacement circuit, Electricity North West plan to install ducts to futureproof the development, enabling future cables to be easily installed, providing the potential for even more capacity.

This includes provisions for the connection of electric vehicle charging capacity at Southwaite Service Station on the M6 motorway. This has been provisionally indicated for a required capacity between 2MVA and 7MVA to meet the requirement of EV charge points at motorway service areas. This proposal also leaves options open for a new primary substation to support St Cuthbert’s as it continues to develop and grow.

Notes to editor

Find out more about how Britain's electricity green recovery by reading our blog on Ofgem's website.

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Energy Networks Association (ENA) is the industry body representing the energy networks. Our members include every major electricity network operator in the UK. The electricity networks are at the heart of the energy transition. They directly employ more than 26,000 people in the UK, including 1,500 apprentices. They are spending and investing £33bn in our electricity grids over the coming years, to ensure safe, reliable and secure energy supplies for the millions of homes and businesses reliant on power every day.

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