​In winter 24/25 UDCE thermal Imaging illuminated home efficiency possibilities for a further 13 homes. Our third year of thermal imaging has taken us to over 60 homes! This winter we moved from a free of charge service to a £30 a survey or whatever you can pay – see below. A quote from one home owner was “I found it satisfying to learn more about how the house was performing.  The report and recommendations have brought my focus to aspects I wasn't aware of and the improvements won't be as costly as I'd feared.”
We have helped in particular two homes that easily could save a significant amount of energy from relatively low-cost improvements. That meant however, that these homes had been unnecessarily cold and lacking comfort for many years. Our surveys aren't just about locating cold spots our surveyors, given their experience, can identify causes and help to point towards potential solutions.

By Barry Tylee
The Labour Government has pledged to make Britain self-sufficient in renewable energy and make the UK a world leader in floating offshore wind, nuclear power, and hydrogen. However, it would be overlooking a major source of energy – the old coal mines beneath many of our northern cities, including under Stocksbridge and the surrounding area. All these mines are flooded, the deeper the mine the warmer the water and the more energy that can be obtained via a heat pump. When you think of the effort over many centuries to dig the coal out, leaving large cavities which flood; it’s good to think that this can generate energy once again.  My house has been heated satisfactorily by an air-source heat pump since 2010, even though the building is very old and has solid walls; so, I’m a great enthusiast for these devices, which now have an efficiency of 300% to 500%.
Over the years, the Upper Don Community Energy and its fore runner have tried to encourage local developments over old coal mines to consider this as a source of energy. After all, there are plenty of examples to look at now. including whole towns in Europe, such as, Heerlen in the Netherlands where there’s a hot water network which you can plug your house into. However, it’s difficult to attract finance for such schemes. With regards to large-scale PV and wind turbines, while the capital expenditure is large, the return on the investment can almost be guaranteed as the amount of solar radiation or wind in an area is known with certainty. With regards to mines, if there aren’t open water sources to tap into, then boreholes must be made and this is where the risk becomes large and the outlay costs expensive.  You need the bore holes to hit the desired flooded galleries to avoid the need to drill any more expensive holes. With old mines, where the mapping was maybe inaccurate and used room and pillar mining, a bore hole might just hit a pillar of coal and be useless. With more recent coal fields, the retreat method of mining might mean the mined cavity has subsided so leaving much less warm water.
However, there are still plenty of schemes around the county to show that this works – a new one in the northeast of a partially-community owned mine water and heat network supplying 100 homes, 5 businesses and a green house. The temperature of the mine water here is 16 degrees centigrade, which is much more than annual surface water or air temperature, and which generates much more heat. The capital cost of this is about £8.5M, with a return on the investment of 10%.
I would hope that we can persuade the new Great British Energy to underwrite the risk from these schemes and so make a major contribution to renewable energy throughout the country, and it would be nice to see one heating homes and businesses in the Upper Don!

​The Climate Re-Assemblies Live Project saw architecture students from the University of Sheffield  School of Architecture and Landscape partner with the Climate Reassemblies Research Group to explore how spatial design could help to increase civic engagement with climate policy. The recommendations produced by the South Yorkshire Citizens Assembly on Climate (SYCAC) in December 2023 had led to little action since, and the design team were challenged to continue the research group’s work in continuing democratic discussion around these recommendations. By creating “support structures” and “rehearsal spaces” for meaningful climate dialogue, the project sought to make climate issues more accessible and relational to place, in order to catalyse community-driven action. 

By identifying peri-urban spaces (the rural-urban fringe) as an under-explored context for these climate conversations, the research was ‘placed’ in the Upper Don Valley. Working with the Upper Don Community Energy (UDCE) group, the team began to map the existing ecologies of social and environmental care in the area. Their work culminated in an experimental physical structure which presents the past and present climate realities of the area in a fun and engaging way. It invites people to speculate about the future, by contributing to the sculpture with their own fabric panels. Two “rehearsals” were hosted, one at Penistone Market and the other at Christchurch social cafe in Stocksbridge, to ‘test’ the outputs and continue co-producing future narratives for local climate action. 

The students were invited to present their project to Stocksbridge Town Council and what a great job they did!  The councillors were impressed with the way they had persisted with generating dialogue in the local area and produced their results in such an imaginative way. We are now planning for how their installation – a model linking the history of Stocksbridge Steel making and Penistone as an important rural community with the work of UDCE’s Community Workshop – will be used to continue the climate dialogue. The council were supportive of the project and have agreed to act on the following as soon as possible:
"Dr Jayne Carrick Postdoctoral Research Associate at South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre supported the students during their project and attended the presentation. She said: ”I am writing to let you know how well the students (Hannah, Ayako and Charlie) did last night in presenting their Live Project to Stocksbridge Town Council, where they also handed over the artwork they had produced to the community. They are a credit to the School of Architect and Landscape. The presentation was very well received by the councillors who had a lot of questions and they volunteered to write a letter to SYMCA to say they had seen the presentation, heard about the work of Climate ReAssemblies, and enquire how Stocksbridge could engage in the implementation of the recommendations - this is impact!”

Thanks to students: Ayako Seki, Charlie Mahoney, Charlie Young, Georgia Marsh, Hannah Spiers, Hattie Ward, Jiatao Li, Lizzie Jackson, Milena Chyla, Ryan Lim, Tia Kidd