Eco-village bid not that economical

With the election over we can get back to the world of reality, or can we?

I see the plans to build 17 houses on an area less than the size of a football pitch is being resurrected [‘Eco-village sub appealed’, Gazette, December 12]. Worse still, being in a country location at Broad Oak, with limited amenities and access to transport links, there will need to be room for at least two cars per household, plus parking spaces for deliveries and visitors.

The claim is that this development will be carbon-neutral, with ground-source heating and rainwater storage, but both of these taken up more land and still require some electricity. Then there are the usual household appliances, lighting, TVS, computers etc which all require more electrical power.

It is a fallacy to expect solar panels to meet these electrical demands as they only generate power in the day and, worse still, as I found from my own experience, their output in the winter when you need the electricity most is only a tenth of that in the summer. So until the supply industry can produce carbon- neutral electricity, which I believe the new government hopes to do by 2050, any development using mains electricity cannot claim to be carbonneutral.

Regarding the pictures shown in the Kentish Gazette concerning this proposal, it is interesting that CGI (computer generated imagery) on the right shows the new development with no parked cars and people walking between the trees, whereas the reality is as shown on the left with a real house and two cars parked right in front.