Dalkia – a sister company to Veolia Environmental Services – has started commissioning its Biomass Energy Centre at Chilton, east of Bishop Auckland, which will produce 17.5MW of renewable electricity and heat from ‘life-expired’ wood.
Construction started on the project in January 2010, after Dalkia received planning permission in May 2009.
The plant is one of the first biomass facilities to be developed in the UK which is dedicated to burning domestic waste wood and which will also sell electricity to the National Grid, rather than to an industrial site.
Nick Burchett, head of marketing at Dalkia, told letsrecycle.com: “Currently the plant is going through commissioning and it is likely to become fully operational towards the end of June. Commissioning should take around three to four weeks altogether.
“We are very excited. This is one of the first plants of this type which will be operating on this scale.”
There are currently very few large waste wood-burning plants in operation in UK, although the Sembcorp Biomass Power Station (Wilton 10) in Middlesborough, Slough Heat and Power and Stevens Croft in Lockerbie are all up-and-running.
The Chilton facility is one of the first of many plants which Dalkia is planning in the UK. It has a number of planning applications going through including for a waste-wood burning biomass plant three times the size of Chilton (52MW) at Pollington, 15-20 miles South East of Leeds.
Mr Burchett said: There are quite a number of sites that we have identified and planning permission is going through at the moment.
Fuel
Feedstock for the Chilton plant will include old pallets, manufacturing offcuts, wood from the construction and demolition industry and material from civic amenity sites.
This will be sourced by a special arm of Dalkia which has been built up over the past few years to supply fuel to Dalkia’s network of energy plants across the UK.
The company sees this as a huge advantage. We saw that where schemes tend to fall down is that people do not have confidence in the fuel being provided. With our supply arm we can guarantee that, Mr Burchett explained.
Dalkia decided to use waste wood as a feedstock for its UK plants as it already has expertise in this area currently managing over 200 plants across Europe, most of which take waste wood as a fuel and because of its relationship with Veolia.
It also decided that it would be easier to capture waste wood than to investigate growing biomass crops such as Miscanthus, which have a lower calorific value.
The company is keen on sourcing wood locally rather than importing material, as many large-scale biomass plants currently in development in the UK are.
Feedstock
Despite predictions of a shortage of waste wood feedstock for biomass plants going forward, especially in North East (see letsrecycle.com story), the company is confident it will have enough. Mr Burchett said: We are confident there will be enough feedstock. We would not overstretch ourselves.
In particular, it expects to provide a market for material which is either currently landfilled or sent to export markets.
According to recent statistics published by the Wood Recyclers Association, the amount of wood which was exported from the UK for recycling or energy recovery in 2010 grew six-fold in 2010 (see letsrecycle.com story).
Related links
There is currently a lot of wood which is being wasted which does not have an established use, said Mr Burchett. A lot is not being used or is being exported which is not a very good thing to do if you have to cart it hundreds of miles away.
This is a way of meeting our green energy targets as a country, he added.
In the UK, Dalkia has already installed a biomass energy centre at a creamery in Cornwall for Dairycrest which it operates. It also runs a Tottenham Hale District Heating scheme.
Subscribe for free