A £16.8 million geothermal project to heat the Eden Project is to get under way after European Union and Cornwall Council funding has been secured.

The Eden Project and EGS Energy Ltd (www.egs-energy.com) will drill 4.5km down into the Earth’s crust next summer after a 10-year campaign to bring pioneering clean-energy technology to Cornwall.

According to Eden co-founder Tim Smit (www.edenproject.com), this will be the biggest ‘leap forward’ for the project since it was opened — in a former clay quarry near St Austell — in 2001.

He said: “Since we began, Eden has had a dream that the world should be powered by renewable energy.

“The sun can provide massive amounts of solar power, and the wind has been harnessed by humankind for thousands of years, but because both are intermittent and battery technology cannot yet store all we need, there is a gap.

"We believe that the answer lies beneath our feet, in the heat underground.

"This can be accessed by technology that pumps water towards the centre of the Earth and then brings it back up super-heated.

"We now have the green light and the funding to start drilling, and we are determined to make this technology work.”

The £16.8 million of funding has been secured from a mixture of public and private sources.

It will pay for the first phase of the project — drilling one well to prove the extent of the resource beneath the Eden site and to supply a district heating system for its biomes, offices and greenhouses.

The second phase should mean that Eden will be generating enough renewable energy to become carbon-positive by 2023, at which point it will be able to provide heat and power for the local area.