Malvern Hill DC least wanted ward.

Tenbury Wells - from Queen Victoria’s ‘Litte town in the Orchard’ to Malvern Hills least wanted ward.

So, not content with shutting our toilets, and trying to sell off Temeside House, the good officers of Malvern Hills District Council and Worcester County Council now want to sell of the Bromyard Road Industrial Estate to a Power Company.

Are these the same officials that started the ‘consultation’ process about ruining the local library days after the decision to go ahead had been made. This decision will cost more than the renovation costs at Temeside House, which could then be used by numerous other local services.
Are they hell bent on this pernicious waste of money because they perceive real benefits? Or do they just want to tick another box that shows they have increased ‘footfall’ into the library.
Having turned down the plans for the Market Square Veterinary surgery to move to the business park as it was the wrong sort of business, do the officers really think that a 40 ft tall power station with a 60 ft chimney is right for an edge of town location.

So will this monster be viable? Will Tenbury become clogged with ever more large lorries?

Once upon a time, electricity from biomass (wood burning) power stations was considered so inefficient that unless the heat could be usefully used they were a non-runner.

Now, because of ‘Corporate Responsibility’ large multinationals such as Tesco, want to buy green but the traditional power generators cannot produce enough ‘green’ energy and are paying over the odds to inefficient power generators with the issue of ‘traded instruments’.

The question is what happens when the market matures. This has already happened with Packaging Recovery Notes (another traded instrument) where the cost of issuing the note is now greater than its value. Companies using recycled materials to produce their products whose business model relied on this addition payment are going bust. If this happens in the power generation industry then Tenbury could have a very large White Elephant.

If the information released so far is correct, the design is already inefficient. If the power station cannot burn a mix of biomass and relies on wood pellets, it is questionable how much of the ‘energy’ produced will be needed to transport and pre-process the wood into pellets.

If the technology is now really so good that the Power Station will not be pumping out noxious fumes all over Tenbury and the Teme Valley, why not go to the next stage and build an incinerator that can also burn waste. Tenbury’s waste currently undertakes a long journey, to a processing centre 45 miles away, with many of the recyclable items going on to China.

Surely any ‘new’ power station should be able to burn a mix of products from Bio Diesel, to methane from anabolic digesters, to household and trade waste, to biomass from miscanthus, to logs, to shredded pallets., to short crop rotation willow.

Is the real reason that the council will jump at any offer, however poorly conceived just their usual unseemly haste at selling all the council owned assets and getting the money out of Tenbury.

Authors Note:
This article may contain inaccuracies, or even information that is not correct, but it was compiled using the information in general circulation and believed by many local people to be true at the time of writing.