Energy isn’t just wasted in the home or the workplace; most of the waste in the electricity supply system occurs before it even reaches us.
UK power stations throw away the same amount of heat as is needed to provide hot water and heating for every building in the UK. How does this happen?
Well, generating electricity produces huge amounts of ‘waste’ heat, and about two thirds of the energy generated by burning fossil fuels is thrown away via the cooling towers.
If power is generated where the heat is needed - like at Double H - then it can be recovered and used to heat the greenhouses. Biomass CHP technology is well established in countries like Denmark and the Netherlands.
CHP plants can recover as much as 95 per cent of the energy in the fuel, whereas coal-fired power stations that we presently use, are on average, about 38 per cent efficient.
Waste wood from old furniture, construction and packaging is taken in skips, etc, to local waste recycling centres. Here the wood is separated from other recyclable materials, and in the majority of cases is dumped in landfill sites.
This wood is a valuable resource and contains a lot of useful energy which we propose to recover in the CHP plant. The carefully sorted material will be pre-shredded off site and delivered as a fuel to the nursery in covered vehicles.
On site the wood chip will be offloaded directly into a completely enclosed store with around 5 days capacity. Then we will transfer it directly into the wood burning boiler.
The hot gas produced by burning the wood chip fuel drives a turbine for electricity generation and the waste heat from the turbine will be piped through our existing heating system.
Most importantly the treatment of the flue gas is strictly regulated and continuously monitored to government standards, and will be filtered prior to release to remove potentially harmful emissions.
There will be a small amount of ash produced from the combustion process. This is collected and analysed before being disposed of, or in most cases recycled to make building materials.
