Bishop’s Castle residents can have their say on plans to make the town one of the first communities in the UK to replace fossil fuel heating with underground renewable heat.

It is a scheme to find affordable ways of heating homes and “dramatically” reducing the town’s carbon emissions with a sustainable heat source.

Bishop’s Castle Town Council has commissioned the Climate Action Group to carry out a public consultation about the"ground-breaking" scheme to install a community-owned ground source heat pump.

David Luckhurst, from the Climate Action Group, said “We spoke to dozens of people on Friday and nearly everyone was fully supportive of the idea to help Bishop’s Castle move to a more sustainable future.

“It’s essential we get community approval first, in order to get the proposal into the Neighbourhood Plan, being finalised in October by the Town Council.”

The process will involve extracting large quantities of low-grade heat from deep boreholes before it is compressed by a heat pump into smaller amounts of high-grade heat. The heat will then be piped up through the town to, potentially, heat the Community College, SpArC centre and homes.

A one mega-watt wind turbine near Bishop’s Castle would power the scheme where every unit of renewable energy will be converted into around four units of renewable heat by the heat pump.

A public meeting will be held at the Three Tuns pub at 7.30pm on Thursday (September 16). Early arrival is advisable due to limited space as a result of Covid restrictions.