Little Edstone Leisure - Committed to renewable energy

Little Edstone Leisure is a small organic farm with five holiday cottages, an indoor swimming pool, sauna, tennis court and gym. The company is committed to using renewable energy and has a biomass boiler, which uses waste wood to provide heat. As part of their commitment the company decided to look into purchasing a solar tracker and turned to York and North Yorkshire Business Environmental Forum (BEF) for advice and support. Company owner Peter Johnson comments: "BEF helped to smooth the way for financial support and made it a very straightforward, unlike the obstacles and hurdles experienced with other funding we had applied for some years ago which came to nothing. "The solar tracker heats the pool water in the summer months and will allow us to switch off the electricity powered heat exchanger for those months. The heat exchanger is the biggest energy consumer on site so we expect to make significant savings in that area. We are also having 18 solar panels installed to heat the hot water for the whole site.

Peter Johnson, owner of Little Edstone Leisure, by his swimming pool which is heated using environmentally efficient methods.

"Once that is done we should be able to switch off the main boiler for the summer months, again with considerable savings. We also plan to install a wind turbine."

BEF provided Renewable Energy grant funding through the 'exploiting the advantages of environmental technologies' scheme. The grant scheme enabled eligible businesses to access up to £4000 of match funding to purchase and install renewable energy technologies, including solar panels, photovoltaics, geothermal, wind and water power, fuel cells and energy crops.

The BEF funding programme is supported by the European Regional Development Fund and Yorkshire Forward, and is managed by Business Link York and North Yorkshire.