London Press Service Informs
WORLD’S BIGGEST BIOMASS POWER PLANT FOR THE UK
The largest, clean electricity plant on Earth is being constructed to provide green power for a huge area, helping the successful expansion of the United Kingdom’s renewable energy policy to reduce carbon emissions.
The plan for a 350-megawatt power plant – fuelled by renewable wood chips – was announced by Energy Secretary John Hutton who said: “This will be the biggest biomass plant in the world, generating enough clean electricity to power half of the homes in Wales.
“It joins eight major renewables projects already given the green light in the past 12 months and is another important step towards the low-carbon economy envisaged by the Prime Minister,” added Mr. Hutton who is Secretary of State of the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR).
The 400 million pounds facility will be built on disused harbour land in Port Talbot, South Wales, and will be able to produce baseload electricity – 24/7, all-year-round power – over its expected 25 years of life.
London-based Prenergy Power plans to build on a brownfield site, making use of vacant industrial land close to Port Talbot’s deepwater harbour. The installation has the potential to create up to 550 jobs. This includes the 400 staff that would be part of the building process and the 150 full-time posts required to run the plant.
When completed, the facility will produce about 70 per cent of Wales’ 2010 renewable electricity target. Prenergy says it believes the power plant will cut carbon dioxide emissions by 3.5m tonnes a year.
Wood chips brought by ship from sustainable forestry plantations in the United States, Russia and the Ukraine will be used to generate electricity to be sent to the national electricity grid by underground cable. “The process would be totally sustainable with all harvested trees being replanted, said Prenergy director Matthew Carse.
“Everything about this project is designed to be as green as possible. No rainforest will be cut down and the wood chip will be brought in by boat, so that no trucks are needed and which would have caused increased congestion in Port Talbot and surrounding areas.”
Traditionally, companies considering such power stations have looked to build the plants near large forests. Carse added: “Large-scale ship transport is highly efficient, emitting 25 times less carbon per mile than road transport. The plant represents an important opportunity for the long-term use of Port Talbot’s deepwater harbour, one of only four in the UK.”
He said the power station process would not produce bad odours and the only discharge seen would be water vapour. It would have a 100-metre chimney stack and the tallest building would be 65m. The effect on air quality had been independently assessed and would be “below insignificant”.
Fuel from forests: the largest biomass electricity plant in the world is being built to provide green power for a vast area of Wales in the UK. After construction, the Port Talbot facility will use wood chips to produce 70 per cent of Wales’ 2010 renewable electricity target. This should cut CO2 emissions by 3.5m tonnes a year.
Prenergy expects to start building by early 2008 and be on line in early 2010. A significant proportion of the 400m pounds investment will go to local manufacturing companies because relatively traditional boiler construction technology – similar to coal-fired power stations – will be used. There will be equipment maintenance costs of 8-10m pounds a year and a large part should go to local suppliers.
The Port Talbot renewable energy plant is the latest in a series of similar consents cleared by the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (DBERR). Six offshore wind farms have been given the go-ahead, alongside an onshore wind farm in Devon and a wave-hub marine energy project to be sited off the coast of north Cornwall (both in south-west England).
A Prenergy Power spokesman said the company is owned “by a group of power and energy professionals with a long experience of the biomass sector”. As well as burning wood chips, willow tree cuttings and sawdust, biomass power stations can use agricultural waste such as straw and even poultry manure to create electricity.
Biomass is expected to feature with wind power as the main winners under rules in the UK that will require energy companies to buy 10 per cent of their supplies from green sources by 2010. This could create a renewables market worth 750 million pounds by then.
Green waste is already used to produce small amounts of electricity for UK homes; the biomass industry believes the UK will need to build about 1,000MW of green power stations, up from 100MW today, if it is to meet its target of 10 per cent of electricity from renewable sources.
An industry spokesman said: “If biomass takes off, farmers could plant thousands of acres of land with energy crops such as willows and miscanthus, or elephant grass, a bamboo-type grass which would be harvested to fuel small power stations.”
Up to now, the UK’s largest biomass power producer is one of three poultry litter stations and producing 38.5MW at Thetford, eastern England – enough electricity for 93,000 homes, providing a welcome disposal solution for 400,000 tonnes of manure produced each year by the poultry industry.
Eastern England is also the home of the largest straw-fired power station in the world. The 38 megawatt (MW) Ely facility in Cambridgeshire consumes 400,000 bales of straw to provide electricity for 80,000 homes in the area.
Another wood-burning power station being completed near Lockerbie, Scotland, is expected to come on line by end-2007 to produce 44MW and meet the needs of 70,000 homes
The development is being carried out by the UK arm of the German utility company E.ON, a major UK energy supplier that already operates hydro, wind and biomass power stations in Europe.