A DEAL struck by a North Yorkshire businessman will see Middlesbrough FC become the first UK football club to use its own wind turbine for electricity.
Proving it’s not just their pitch that is green, the club will site a 136 metre-tall wind turbine in the Riverside Stadium’s overflow car park in a move that will see the club generate its own electricity for the next 20 years, from May 2014.
The turbine is being provided by renewable energy developer Empowering Wind Group, headed by Paul Millinder, who lives near Pickering.
Mr Millinder, chief executive of the London-based firm, said: “The Middlesbrough turbine demonstrates our strategy of developing renewable energy where it is needed and where the presence of a turbine is justified by offsetting power demands otherwise drawn from the grid. We are already in talks with two other UK football clubs and I envisage many other sporting venues to be contacting us.”
Mr Millinder, who was advised on the deal by Yorkshire law firm, Lupton Fawcett Lee & Priestley, claims the turbine will save about £3.2 million over the next 20 years, as well as saving an estimated 3,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide entering the environment each year.
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