Cheshire business leaders keen to lead way on zero-carbon tech

Business leaders want Cheshire to lead the way in zero-carbon technology over the next 20 years, writes Stephen Topping.

Cheshire and Warrington local enterprise partnership (LEP) presented its new local industrial strategy to Cheshire West and Chester Council committee on Wednesday.

The body wants to grow the area’s economy from £30.9 billion to more than £50 billion by 2040 – and it believes that ‘clean growth’ will see the county become a pioneer in that time.

Philip Cox, the LEP’s chief executive, told the places overview and scrutiny committee: “This is genuinely the centrepiece of our local industrial strategy – establishing Cheshire and Warrington as the international centre of expertise for zero-carbon energy and growth.

“We develop that technology and expertise, we do it here, we then export that technology and expertise to the rest of the UK and potentially the rest of the world.

“We are not looking to be the place that produces half of the UK’s hydrogen fuel, or half of the UK’s wind energy, but we do believe that we have got the capability and the capacity to establish ourselves as the home of technology.”

Mr Cox told the committee that Cheshire already has ‘an incredibly diverse energy mix’ – with the wind farm at Frodsham, low-carbon plants at the Protos site near Helsby and nuclear technology being developed at Birchwood Park, in Warrington, and Capenhurst, near Chester.

He also suggested that heat produced from Cheshire’s industry could eventually be captured and pumped into the domestic energy network.

Mr Cox added: “We have a very carbon-intensive cluster on the south bank of the Mersey, at Ellesmere Port and stretching into Runcorn.

“We genuinely believe that we can make that a zero-carbon industrial cluster by using all those things I have described by 2040.

“[Cheshire] has the potential for use to be a large-scale demonstrator of how you can decarbonise major industrial processes.”

Labour Cllr Matt Bryan, CWAC’s climate emergency champion, welcomed the ambition – particularly after CWAC declared its own climate emergency at May’s full council meeting.

He said: “In our area, per head we generate 2.5 times more CO2 than anywhere else in the UK.

“That’s probably responsible for a lot of our growth because we’ve got a massive industrial cluster over [near Ellesmere Port] and in Northwich which generate huge amounts of greenhouse gases.

“So if you think you can get that industrial cluster down to net zero by 2040 then I’ll buy you a boat – it’s brilliant, it’s ambitious, and that’s what we need to be doing.”

Mr Cox also highlighted the importance of life sciences laboratories in east Cheshire to the county’s economy.