When Curtis Fine Papers announced in July 2008 that it was closing its Guardbridge Mill after more than 130 years of paper production on the site, the shockwaves reverberated through north-east Fife and beyond.
Although profitable during the 1990s, the mill experienced considerable financial difficulties in the mid-2000s due partly to rapidly changing market conditions.
The rising price of gas and the credit crunch were said to have played their part in the decision.
How ironic then that more than seven years later, it is efforts to cut energy prices which are central to the renaissance of the site which was taken over by St Andrews University in 2012.
It is all part of the university’s strategic and ambitious aim to become the UK’s first carbon neutral university for energy.
Work on a £25 million Green Energy Centre officially started last month.
The facility, backed by a £10m grant from the Scottish Funding Council and an £11m loan from the Scottish Partnership for Regeneration in Urban Centres, will use only wood from sustainable local forests within a 30-mile radius and will pump hot water from the plant four miles underground to heat and cool laboratories and student residences in St Andrews.
On the one hand the university hopes to combat what was an energy price escalation of around 18% per annum. With the university’s annual energy bill around £5m, those unsustainable rises equated to an extra £750,000 to £1m each year.
But the university also hopes spin-offs could benefit wider business, academia and the community.
With a brewery and micro-plant business already sharing the site, the university hopes the centre will help regenerate this part of north-east Fife by creating more than 225 jobs in the construction phase, with the potential to attract further businesses and provide heating for local villages.
Wider academic research could also benefit with a geothermal feasibility project set to investigate how warm water recovered from sedimentary rocks deep below the ground can be used to heat buildings.
On Tuesday, as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Scotland Lord Dunlop was given a tour, St Andrews University chief operating officer Derek Watson told The Courier: “It’s taken us a while to get to this stage but we are now committed to building a biomass plant that will produce hot water that we will pump the four miles or so to St Andrews and we will use that heat to heat and to cool the North Haugh, which is our science buildings, and the residences around that. That’s the core purpose. We would also like to look at community renewable schemes looking at heating homes in Guardbridge and Leuchars.”
Potential hurdles remain, though. The university is anticipating complaints when it starts work on the pipe that will link Guardbridge with St Andrews. Road disruption is expected in Guardbridge during the early stages before the pipeline crosses the Eden and follows a route through farmland to the south of the A91.
With permission previously granted for its windfarm at Kenly, to the south of St Andrews, a dispute has yet to be overcome over the turbines’ interference with air traffic control at Leuchars.