Agenda item - Chairs Communications

43.1         The Chair provided the following communications:

“Along with members of the council’s Sustainability Team I recently joined a study visit to Eindhoven in the Netherlands.  The EU funded visit was organised through the CASCADE program and brought together representatives of medium sized “Euro-cities” to consider renewable energy opportunities.  Eindhoven is the research and development capital of the Netherlands and we were impressed by a range of initiatives we saw which are contributing not only to economic prosperity but also building a zero carbon future for the city.  We visited a biomass combined heat and power plant fuelled by locally produced wood chips that is providing energy to industrial areas and 2000 homes. We also saw an innovative application storing energy as heat within an aquifer. I was also particularly impressed by a software application the city has developed which uses satellite images to calculate the solar power potential of every single roof in the city.  This powerful tool offers residents and businesses the opportunity to check for themselves how much they could be earning from a solar installation on their roof.  Eindhoven hopes this will unlock the massive solar potential of the city and I am keen we look closely at this possibility for Brighton & Hove too.   

I’m very pleased to say that two of our schools, Carden Primary and Downs Infants have been awarded Eco-school Green Flags for their work on sustainability.  We now have 14 Eco-schools with the hope more will joining the fold soon.

I’m also very pleased to welcome the new community composting scheme that has just been launched at Stoneham Park.  This is the 26^th community composting scheme in the city, which together are now supporting low carbon local food waste composting for hundreds of households in the city.

I also wish to celebrate another outstanding achievement by the Brighton Energy Co-op which has raised more than £200,000 in just 3 weeks for their new project to install solar on 7 buildings in Brighton & Hove and realising more than 500 KWhr of new solar PV capacity.  This will substantially add to the BECs existing installations in the city, trebling the size of their operation.  They aim to raise £616,000 to fund these systems by selling shares in the project.

And finally, as Christmas approaches and we all start thinking about what gifts we might be giving; I would like to give a plug to Fair Trade Christmas Shopping Day which will be happening this Saturday 30 November. Shoppers are being offered the opportunity to hunt for their perfect Christmas gifts at six Fair Trade venues across the city. There will be refreshments, raffle prizes and the launch of Fair Trade Brighton & Hove’s film ‘A Fair Trade Journey: India to Brighton’. I hope we will all wish to support this”.