What's happening with huge Key Point energy from waste plant?

But when developer Rolton Kilbride lodged an appeal, saying it would put the council through the ‘mincer’, it was given permission to build a huge energy from waste plant on open land at Key Point, just off the A420 at the southern end of the former Honda plant.

But since that expensive victory for the developer, nothing has happened.

The site, specifically chosen because it is next to a railhead and would allow shipping waste to the plant by rail, remains slightly marshy scrubland behind six-foot high chain link fences, off a road that literally goes nowhere.

How the gasification plant could look (Image: Rolton Kilbride)

A spokesman for Rolton Kilbride said there had been no progress and nothing to say but did not indicate that the company had lost interest in the plan.

The last progress to the construction of the gasification plant – which would see household rubbish imported into Swindon and heated to much higher temperatures than a normal incinerator would achieve – was the discharge of the condition mandating a landscaping plan, which was approved in October 2020.

And there is a small complicating factor – the owners of the site, Legal & General Investment Management, have put in an application to build a large warehouse, similar to several already in the area, on the very same parcel of land.

That application, submitted in October last year, is going through the normal planning process, with consultees like the Environment Agency, Stratton St Margaret Parish Council, and the council’s highways and urban design officers putting in their responses to the proposals.

But if the energy from waste plant plan is revived, it could see a huge industrial building built on the land just across the A419 from hundreds of houses on estates straddling Ermin Street in Stratton St Margaret.

Land at Key Point (Image: Aled Thomas)

The most prominent feature would be a 52-metre-high chimney stack looming over everything, more than twice as high as the enormous building supporting it.

At the time of the refusal of permission and the appeal which reversed that decision, household waste collected in Swindon was either recycled or turned into industrial fuel by Public Power Solutions at Waterside Park, and the borough council said there was no need to have the gasification plant in the borough with no local supply of waste.

PPS has subsequently lost its contract with the council, which now ships its waste out of the borough, and could conceivably change to sending it to the Key Point plant if it is built.