The University of York now has the chance to go green

Within days of becoming Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, the former Labour leader, announced an immediate end to the de facto ban on new onshore wind farms in the UK that had been in place since 2015. This got me thinking (usually a dangerous thing to do, I know), it is now conceivable that the university could build a wind farm on Campus East and become genuinely more sustainable in the future.

This may seem like a weak proposition, but hear me out. With everyone’s favourite consumer of bacon sandwiches having lifted restrictions imposed by David Cameron’s post-coalition government in 2015 (which made it virtually impossible to build new onshore wind farms), significant bureaucratic hurdles are being removed for the university to achieve energy security and sustainability. The Campus East Energy Centre (which runs on natural gas) was recently built next to Constantine College and was criticised by former YUSU president Pierrick Roger for being fossil fuel-based. It’s clear that the university plans to become self-sufficient in its energy supply in the near future.

As a member of Constantine College and resident there on East in 2021/22, it became very clear to me that the fields that Campus East is built on are extremely exposed and that it doesn’t take much to get a decent wind up (strong enough to make walking around campus very difficult). Furthermore, the land between Constantine and the Sports Village is currently marshy and it would be difficult to extend Constantine or build new buildings on it. I would therefore recommend that if the college were to build anything there, it should be a small wind farm. Given the environment in Heslington East, the electricity output from a wind farm should be relatively consistent and this could go a long way to not only ensuring that the college is producing clean energy, but because it is the energy they are producing that could also reduce costs.

For me it is a win-win situation, but unfortunately I am not sure how it works in practice. I mentioned the land between the Sports Village and Constantine as being marshy, would that be impractical for building a wind farm? Unfortunately my GCSE Geography and Combined Science knowledge does not extend that far. Either way, with the new Labour government lifting its restrictions, the University should be exploring options to improve its energy security and ensure it can truly commit to the clean energy transition.