Re:heat Alnmouth Golf Club

The stunning setting for Alnmouth Golf Club, on the coast overlooking the North Sea, means it’s one of the most dramatic courses in the country. This poses particular challenges for heating the complex collection of buildings which are in the control of the club, as the main clubhouse is in excess of 150 years old and has levels of insulation that you might expect from such a grand old building. Combined heating bills from oil and electricity had been rising for years, and topped £20,000 in 2013, with no prospect of meaningful cost reductions from sticking to these or other forms of fossil fuels.

We first began working with the club in early 2011, and helped the committee understand the technology and financial case for the installation of a wood-fired boiler at Foxton Hall. Detailed modelling of the heat load, and a careful analysis of the business case for the project enabled the golf club to secure finance from the specialist asset finance team at Close Brothers Bank, and the installation process started in February 2014. Oakes Energy Services were selected by the club to act as main contractor, while re:heat provided the 199kW ETA HACK boiler to the project, and worked alongside Oakes Energy Services on the design and installation of the system.

The project involved replacing most of the heat distribution system in the clubhouse, which involved the removal of several oil boilers, various electrically-powered hot water cylinders and the installation of new radiator circuits to the clubs’ 14 dormy bedrooms. Centralising heat production to the new wood pellet boiler made sense for to the club for a number of reasons :

• It maximises the use of the new asset;
• It displaces the maximum amount of electricity and oil used to generate heat and hot water with lower-cost wood pellets;
• It removed the need to service multiple heat sources around the clubhouse;
  Removing old boilers freed up space in various parts of the building, including the visitors’ locker room;
  It allowed for the 199kW boiler to be almost perfectly matched to the heat load of the clubhouse, thereby optimising RHI income.
  The club’s confidence in the equipment, design and quality of installation is such that one of the three flats at Foxton Hall, which is rented out as a private home, has already been linked to the pellet boiler, with the other two planned for connection later in 2014. Now the club isn’t just a golf club but a utility provider too, with renewable heat sold to the occupants. The club is now benefitting from increased RHI payments as a result of heat use by the occupants, who also benefit from lower cost heating. This in turn makes them more likely to remain at Foxton Hall, providing more certainty of the valuable rental income that benefits the club.
• We are all extremely proud of the system at Alnmouth Golf Club, and regard it as a great example of how to engage with a client, understand their needs and deliver a system which meets them from the outset.