MORE than £200,000 has been pumped into revamping Southamp-ton’s pioneering underground renewable energy scheme.

Cofily District Energy Limited, who run Southampton’s deep geothermal plant at West Quay, has secured Government funding to refit its well.

This will help it source more green energy from deep in the earth’s core for city centre businesses and hundreds of homes.

And it will cement its position as one of the UK’s largest and most successful commercially-developed district energy schemes.

Announcing the grant, Greg Barker, minister of state for Energy and Climate Change, said: “I want to ensure that geothermal energy – which is both renewable and can be produced locally – can become one of the energy technologies of the future.

“Geothermal sources in the South West of the UK alone have the potential to meet two per cent of the country’s annual electricity demand.”

The money comes from the Deep Geothermal Challenge fund, set up to help companies carry out exploratory work needed to find viable sites for this technology.

Keele University also received a funding package of £500,000 to drill a 1200m bore hole to provide geothermal heat for their proposed sustainable campus.

Meanwhile £400,000 went to a Newcastle and Durham University project to fund the drilling, hydraulic testing and geophysical logging of a 2km deep borehole at “Science Central”, a large development in central Newcastle.

Deep geothermal energy uses the natural heat found kilometres underground to produce electricity and heat at the surface.

Geothermal energy is non-intermittent, low-carbon, renewable and could be a valuable technology in diversifying the UK’s energy mix and reducing the UK’s dependence on imported fuels.