One local complained: ‘Residents used to be able to watch the sun setting over the sea at Blackpool. Now all they can see is a mountain of muck.’ Not to mention the foul smell.
Clayton Hall, a supposedly ‘green’ electricity plant in Lancashire, has been generating misery for months – by shrouding thousands of nearby homes in a stinking fog of poisonous gas, writes David Rose in The Mail on Sunday.
The owners of the plant at the Clayton Hall landfill site in Lancashire, sandwiched between the commuter towns of Leyland and Chorley, a golf course and pretty, rolling hills, have received about £1.7 million in green energy subsidies since it opened in 2010.
These levies are added directly to consumers’ household bills. The firm has made a further £1.7 million from selling power to the grid.
But residents say the scheme has made their lives ‘intolerable’.
Mother-of-three Catharine Vamplew told The Mail on Sunday: ‘On cold, still days like we’ve had lately, you don’t even need your windows open – the stench is inside your house. It even gets in your car, so you’re driving around with it.
‘When the odour is strong, it wakes us all up. You can taste it in your mouth and you feel you’re about to choke. My four-year-old daughter told me this morning she was struggling to breathe.’
Her son Junior, seven, said: ‘It’s really stinky. It smells like rotten eggs and you can’t get away from it. I put a pillow over my face when my mummy goes out of my room after putting me to bed so I don’t have to smell it.’
Clayton Hall had been a landfill site for years when its owner, Blackburn company Quercia, decided to generate electricity from it.
Its method, which has been used elsewhere, was to drill into the accumulating rubbish to reach the deepest layers, where rotting refuse produces combustible methane gas.
This is collected by a network of pipes, then burnt in an on-site generator.
The ‘green’ subsidy is paid under the Government’s ‘renewables obligation’ scheme. According to John Constable, director of the Renewable Energy Foundation, the plant provides about 0.002 per cent of the UK’s electricity.
Continued here.
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January 21, 2018 at 04:57AM
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