It is hoping that newly-increased subsidies for generating renewable energy will make up the £7 million government grant by pulling out of the programme.
The Australian-owned company explained that it was pulling out of the Defra scheme, as revealed earlier this month (see letsrecycle.com story), because of the “significant delays” in getting planning permission for the 90,000 tonne-a-year facility.
Novera said last week it was going to miss the tight deadlines imposed by the programme, which seeks to test new waste treatment technologies for diverting municipal waste from landfill.
The programme requires all projects to submit a final report by March 2009, but the gasification plant being built in Dagenham looks set to miss this deadline by a year.
Planning
Delays in the plant's planning approval came partly because of objections from local residents and politicians including London MEP Jean Lambert and Hornchurch and Rainham MP James Brokenshire.
However, the plant has the backing of the London Mayor, and planning permission was approved last September (see letsrecycle.com story).
Speaking to letsrecycle.com last week, the company said it was confident of gaining alternative funding and that the plant was on course to be up and running in 2010.
A spokesman for Novera told letsrecycle.com: “The planning consent was delayed for a significant period of time so we started late so had no choice but to pull out. The company is still very optimistic as the support proposed in the Energy Review is more than enough to cover the lost grant, which was about £6-7 million.”
ROCs
One way Novera hopes to recover the lost funding for the plant is through the Renewable Obligations Certificate (ROC) scheme, a government programme that subsidises the generation of renewable energy.
The government is to change the value of ROC subsidies via its Energy Bill, laid out in a white paper in May, to favour power generating technologies like gasification.
Novera's plant in Rainham, dubbed the “East London Sustainable Energy Facility”, is to generate energy from 90,000 tonnes of solid recovered fuel produced from residual waste at the neighbouring Shanks mechanical biological treatment plant at Frog Island.
The waste-derived fuel will be used to generate around 10MW of electricity for the neighbouring Ford plant and the National Grid.
Subscribe for free