Sustainable Housing in Small Heath
The East Birmingham Community Energy Company was formed in 2005 to implement the findings of an action research project done in 2003 by the West Midlands New Economics Group entitled "Sustainable Housing in Small Heath".
We set out to find out how renewable energy technology could be applied to the existing housing and what scope there would be for starting local social enterprises to do the work.
Small Heath is an inner city neighbourhood in East Birmingham and has a population of about 30,000 living in 8,500 dwellings mostly built before 1919.
After visiting projects in Leicester, South Wales and the Black Country and consulting a number of experts we concluded that a ten-year programme was needed, starting with home insulation and energy efficiency and leading on to community wind turbines, photo-voltaic roofs, wood-burning stoves and combined heat and power plants.
All of this could create new jobs for local people provided the government offered the right kind of support to create the economic conditions for a renewable energy market to flourish in urban areas.
"SUSTAINABLE HOUSING IN SMALL HEATH" was published in 2004 to illustrate the story of the study.
Photo-montage of a possible community wind farm in the Cole Valley
