Install solar panels on the roofs of the Chalcots estate

• I CONCUR with Tom Muirhead (Net zero: Camden needs to do more, Letters, July 25).

For example, the council have been asked numerous times, over many years, why it will not install solar panels on the roofs of the Chalcots estate, NW3?

The various councillors who are asked always give the same, “it’s not my department”.

Solar panels would generate electricity for communal, if not tenant, lighting and heating as well as generate power for the over-burdened lift system, which is always breaking down.

The current contractors, (who are replacing the external cladding on the estate), have erected scaffolding. This could facilitate the installation of panels on the roofs on top of the 22 floors of flats facing south, in direct sunlight most of the day.

I was informed by one contractor’s employee, that the Chalcots’ roofs are not suitable for solar panels though, he could not explain why.

This is nonsense, since solar panel companies explain in their advertisements that solar panels are lightweight and that any roof surface may be adapted so that panels may be installed.

The contractors themselves have solar panels on their storage cabins in front of the Chalcots block. There are solar panels on the roof of the UCL Academy across the road. They also, have planted a sedum roof. There are solar panels on the roof of a house formerly owned by Lord Lang of Monkton, now by a famous comedian, on Harley Road opposite the estate.

The initial cost of installation would soon be paid back many times in full over the years in savings, as well as in income obtained by selling excess electricity generated, back to the National Grid.

Muirhead also correctly points to the outdated heating systems on the council estates. Ask any electrical heating engineer, they will say the same. The energy-guzzling, immersion boilers, which are huge cauldrons of rusty water, were out of date when they were installed in 2008. They were, and are, totally unnecessary, when tenants already have combi-boilers installed.

Somebody at the council gave the go-ahead for these out-of-date, boiler systems to be installed. Are the same councillors blocking solar panels being installed, so
tenants continue to pay annual, exponential, increasing sums in electricity and gas bills, to gas and oil corporations.

If Camden were truly earnest about reducing the borough’s carbon foot-print and attempting to reduce pollution, they would act immediately in line with their own Labour government’s policies.

They would also ban the use of council and private-garden maintenance company leaf-blowers, that are also major air and noise polluters. But that is another story.

NAME AND ADDRESS SUPPLIED, NW3