Sunday Times on Thanet Earth

Interesting comments about the increasing importance of water. Thanet planners please note.
"Thanet Earth is at the opposite extreme from organic farming.
Steve McVickers, the managing director, and Rob James, the technical manager, employed by the vegetable-marketing company Fresca, which manages the project, scoff at the idea that an organic tomato, pepper or cucumber could in any way be better than the unblemished perfection that will come from Thanet Earth.
All they see in the organic system is inefficiency, which produces an unpredictable, inferior result. Some of us may find romance in the vagaries of unforced nature; we may even think –perhaps irrationally – that the taste will be better. McVickers and James don’t. Taste equals variety plus nutrients. They see hard times ahead for small organic growers, and poorly resourced conventional ones too. The cost of oil to heat the greenhouses in winter will force them to contract their season.

It is the beginning of the end, in their view. Thanet Earth, by contrast, may be alarmingly high-tech, but it is also unexpectedly green. The key to the site is a gas-powered 35-megawatts-per-hour electricity generator, capable of powering a small town. This will be connected to the power line that, en route to Ramsgate, strides over the site by a substation, now being built at a cost of £5m. Via the substation, electricity will be sold to the national grid. A by-product of the electricity generation will be heat. This will be channelled into a holding tank and then around the greenhouses, effectively free of charge. You might imagine that this industrial-scale operation would leave a carbon footprint the size of Wales, but no: it is the old-fashioned organic greenhouses that commit the sin of emissions. Thanet Earth’s CO2 is pumped back into the greenhouses: the plants need it to grow.

Water hasn’t as yet become an environmental issue on a par with animal welfare, but Peter Kendall believes it’s only a matter of time. The salad industry in parts of Spain – there are so many polytunnels around Marbella that it has sometimes been called the Costa del Condom – relied on over-abstracting water from aquifers: “They’ve been mining water,” says Kendall. “Now they’re having to move on to Morocco. Around Beijing they’re dropping the water table by a metre a year. It is such an environmental issue that the public will want information about water put on products.” At Thanet Earth, the enormous roofs are used to harvest the rain that falls; they are now scooping out great white bowls to serve as reservoirs. The development should be self-sufficient in water during the summer, only tapping into the mains when household demand is low, over the winter.

The growers behind Thanet Earth come from Holland. By Rotterdam standards, Thanet Earth doesn’t constitute a particularly big area under glass. But it lies on the right side of the Channel for British consumers. The Dutch have noted the growing anxiety about food miles. And as oil heads for $200 a barrel, it makes sense to shorten the food chain."