Housing Associations were given the cold, hard facts about excess winter deaths at a recent event hosted by Trent & Dove Housing and Kensa Heat Pumps, where it was announced that every winter around 30,000* deaths occur in the UK due to tenants being too poor to heat their homes.

Softening the blow of the damning statistics, Trent & Dove Housing and Kensa provided step by step advice and evidence to help housing associations combat fuel poverty and alleviate the problem of excess winter deaths  in rural and off gas grid housing stock through the installation of ground source heat pumps.

Hope Construction Materials, the UK’s largest independent supplier of construction materials, is supplying 4500m3 of concrete to specialist civil engineering contractor I&H Brown to build 11 wind turbine bases at Crook Hill Wind Farm on the Lancashire Pennine Moors.

The project, which launched in October 2014 and should be complete by the end of July 2015, will secure renewable energy for 25,000 homes near Rochdale in East Lancashire with up to 36MW of electricity in total being generated from the wind farm.

Matt Hancock MP, Minister of State for Business and Enterprise and Minister of State for Energy, today visited MWH Treatment’s Bio Power Plant in Tyseley, Birmingham to mark one year since the landmark project’s groundbreaking.

The plant is the first of its kind in the UK and it will be supplied with approximately 67,000 tonnes of wood waste secured under a long term sustainable contract with a local supplier. It is forecast to save around 107,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions per annum and produce enough electricity to supply the equivalent of more than 17,000 homes a year.

A major programme of investment in renewable energy by Westward Housing has resulted in a first for social housing thanks to a pioneering system devised by heating firm Kensa Heat Pumps.

Croft House in Holsworthy, North Devon, is the first housing association scheme in the UK to be retrofitted with Kensa’s innovative “ground source heat network” system and has received support funding through a combination of the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) and a Ready for Retrofit grant.