Wood-fired plant to power city (From Daily Echo)

Wood-fired plant to power city

9:24am Wednesday 29th October 2008 in News By Peter Law, Feature Writer

The wood chip would be transported to the plant by barge.

RIVAL energy firms are bidding to build a multi-million-pound wood-fired power station in Southampton’s docks, the Daily Echo can reveal.

The ten megawatt plant would burn millions of tonnes of wood chip and rise up on vacant port land off Western Avenue, in the Western Docks.

If given the go-ahead, the electricity-generating station would create hundreds of jobs and help reduce the city’s carbon footprint.

Timber off-cuts – that normally end up as landfill – would be sourced locally in south Hampshire and be shipped by barge up Southampton Water.

Under secret plans being drawn up with Southampton City Council, power from the biomass station would be plugged into the National Grid or sold direct to a major city business. The plant would produce about 10MW of clean electricity, enough to power about 5,500 homes and the equivalent of five giant wind turbines.

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The site was previously the location of a proposed £55m combined heat and power (CHP) plant scrapped by the city council in August.

The CHP plant, which cost taxpayers £1.99m over eight years, would have burned palm oil to provide electricity for the grid and supply cheaper heat to a network of 3,500 homes and schools in Millbrook.

But the ill-fated project was dogged by delays, setbacks and opposition since it was conceived in 1999.

Councillor Matt Dean, the city’s environment boss, yesterday confirmed two major energy companies had since opened talks with the council about building the city’s first commercial-scale biomass station.

The Cabinet member for environment and transport said: “There are two companies that have proactively contacted the council with proposals for a biomass power station.

“It is at a very commercially sensitive stage for them, rather than for us and that is why we cannot say too much.”

To avoid more motorway traffic, the city council wants the timber to be transported by barge from areas such as the New Forest.

Heat from the burning timber would boil water and the energy in the steam is used to turn turbines that generate electricity.

Biomass is becoming increasingly popular as a sustainable energy technology, with schemes recently announced for other port cities across the UK including Bristol, Newport, Port Talbot and Hull.

The plant will not pose a threat to residents’ health because biomass is carbon-neutral and does not produce harmful emissions.

Before an energy firm is appointed to operate the plant the contract would have to go out to tender.

The Isle of Wight Council earlier last week announced similar plans to conduct a £6,500 study into the possibility of building a 7 to 10MW biomass power station on the Island.

The money will be used to assess the amount of wood fuel available from the Island’s woodlands as well as clean, waste wood and how this can be supplied to market.