Wallingford based Hallidays Hydropower have been awarded a grant of £1,000 by Sustainable Routes, a project which aims to reduce the cost of business travel and CO₂ emissions.

The grant will contribute towards the design and installation of a smart metering interface which will allow the company to remotely access performance data from the company’s renewable technology installation at Dandridge’s Mill luxury apartments.

Dandridge’s Mill is the first project of its kind, a 91% Carbon Neutral Listed building with an Energy Performance Certificate rating of 100.  This has been achieved by the installation of an Archimedean Hydro Screw which generates electricity from a flowing stream which in turn provides power to the apartments. The power is backed up over summer by a Solar PV array which operates when the flows in the river are lower. 

“Up until now, we’ve had to drive 40 miles to take the readings required to monitor the technologies at Dandridge’s Mill. We see this as a huge area of unnecessary travel which has a reverse impact on the 28+ tonnes of CO₂ we save each year from the operation of the site” says Henry Reily-Collins, Technical Director at Halliday’s Hydropower “The Sustainable Routes grant will help us to design a system which can send data from multiple sites to one monitoring centre.  We will reduce travel, engineer visits and increase the performance of renewable technologies”

Visit http://www.dandridges-mill.co.uk/ to find out more

Sustainable Routes is a pioneering scheme, funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), available to businesses with less than 250 employees in Milton Keynes and the Thames Valley that focuses on smarter travel choices. The £1,000 grant, which needs to be matched pound for pound by the business, will then be awarded towards the cost of implementing an initiative.