Merseyside is set to become home to one of the most cutting edge waste to energy plants in the UK – the twenty eight megawatt wood waste to energy facility which has recently secured hundred and ten million pounds in funding. The plant will be CHP class facility – Combined Heat & Power. Investors are UK Green Investment Bank and Foresight Group – an environmental infrastructure company.
Foresight engineers say that when finished the plant will be capable of producing twenty point two megawatts of electricity, and seven point eight megawatts of heat. The fuel required for the job will be provided by the one hundred and forty six thousand tonnes of Grade B and Grade C wood waste collected around the country each year. The plant will operate on a long term contract with recovery companies supplying the wood.
The electricity produced by the plant will be supplied to the national grid, some of the heat will be used by the nearby wood drying facility managed by one of the investors. The waste to energy plant is part of the Mersey Multimodal Gateway Project – a hundred and eighty hectare logistics park outside Liverpool. Site operators will be Danish and Scandinavian companies. It is expected for the project to become operational by the end of twenty sixteen.
The investor companies backing the facility are also responsible for the financing and construction of another similar facility in Northern Ireland – the fifteen megawatt CHP Evermore Renewable Energy Plant. Green Investment Bank is also lending money to operators and contracts, besides taking actual part in funding. It is expected for the facility to be the first of a new generation of energy production sites of high efficiency. Its state of the art waste management infrastructure will be both cost efficient and highly effective.
It is expected for such projects i.e. waste to energy plants to vary in size and scale, so they can be constructed in different locations. The idea is for more and more plants to generate heat and power from waste, whether wood or other. Smaller sized facilities can serve local communities, making them more self-sufficient. The plant itself is one of the largest investments in the UK, when operational the plant will provide employment for at least two hundred people. Greenhouse emissions will be cut dramatically at a local level, and clean power will be provided to more than thirty five thousand homes.
The UK has set itself certain green energy goals, like using a substantial percentage of biomass fuel by the year twenty eighteen. Such facilities will help contribute toward that goal. The waste to energy plant is expected to yield high investment returns as it has secured a sixteen year contract for supply of biomass fuel. The more waste such facilities use the better, but constant supply of ‘fuel’ requires people and companies to dispose of waste properly – through specialised rubbish removal, disposal and recycling. Using a specialised rubbish removal service for recyclable materials ensures useful waste reaches processing facilities and waste to energy plants.
