BURNING AMBITION

WORDS BY MARTIN GURDON
PICTURES BY SIMON CHILDS

With a degree in zoology and a background in farming, India Bacon might seem an unusual person to run a company installing domestic boilers…

…but she sees no contradiction. Based near Woodbridge, Suffolk, 25-year-old India and farmer husband Nat run Energy Innovations – a company specialising in bio-mass boilers, which burn wood chips or pellets rather than fossil fuels.

‘We were farming and wanted to diversify with something that fitted our backgrounds’, she says; and India reckons the renewable energy aspect of bio-mass boilers sits well both with what she learned as a zoology student and with working on the land.

‘It’s a bit of a leap but the science is quite closely tied in’, she says, ’in conservation terms they go hand in hand’. And she adds that the Austrian-made boiler systems they sell and install have the potential to be carbon-neutral.

Five years ago, few would have seen bio-mass heating’s wider commercial potential; now, India’s team have full diaries and have travelled as far as the Isle of Man. And she claims the infrastructure to supply the wood by-products that they burn is expanding rapidly, with facilities appearing around the UK.

She gets a lot of work from local authorities - who now have to meet renewable energy targets and are looking at what were once seen as marginal technologies to do so. ‘We’ve done many community energy projects where one boiler serves many properties’ - an idea taken up from private housing collectives to property developers.