Inspiration is often found in the least obvious places. This summer, nestled in a glen in the heart of Scotland’s whisky region, a new £74m green infrastructure project starts work. The project will produce heat and electricity from renewable forestry residue, helping a centuries-old traditional industry cut its energy use, carbon emissions and costs. The new state of the art plant provides a much needed success story for the next leg in the UK’s energy system transformation – more efficient production and use of heat. It also shows how smart infrastructure can help the UK’s energy intensive manufacturing industries. The new plant is near Craigellachie, a small village home on the river Spey, set in one of the UK’s largest forested areas an hour’s drive east from Inverness and west from Aberdeen. It is a village which makes its living from whisky and the land. And now energy production is adding to the village economy. Over the coming months one of the village’s renowned distilleries will begin to receive the steam that is vital to its process, not from a boiler fired by natural gas, but instead from a state-of-the-art, combined heat and power (CHP) plant.
Business Green 21st June 2016 read more »
Over the past few years Bristol has quietly been transforming itself into one of the country’s most innovative cities for low-carbon energy. Flushed with success after being named Europe’s green capital of the year in 2015, in last November the city council adopted a radical plan to become a low-carbon city, with fresh strategies to hit targets to cut carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2025 and 80 per cent by 2050. To achieve these cuts, Bristol is not only investing in greener transport links and new sources of renewable electricity – often through community energy funds – but it is also leading the way on low-carbon heat, an area too often ignored by policymakers and businesses alike. As we know, the challenge of how to decarbonise the UK’s heating network is taxing some of the brightest brains in government. A leaked letter from Secretary of State Amber Rudd in November revealed the UK is well off-track to meet its 2020 renewable energy targets, largely due to a lack of effective policies for low-carbon heat and transport. The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has promised to provide a new plan by the end of the year. Bristol may well have some of the answers DECC needs. The City Council has been working hard to foster innovation in low-carbon heat, collaborating with the Carbon Trust on policy and planning changes to encourage local energy and heat network projects, and using £140m of funding from the European Investment Bank to bankroll promising new systems. As a result, by November 2015 Bristol had installed 20MW of renewable heat across the city, including the UK’s first ever-bus to run on gas generated from sewage and food waste – a runner-up project at last year’s BusinessGreen Technology Awards. Several more projects are on their way, including a major district heating scheme, which could eventually supply much of the city with low-carbon heat, after the new Mayor approved £5m in capital funding for phase one of the project earlier this month. There are signs that more companies are starting to think in a new way about heating. Earlier this month water, waste and energy giant Veolia announced up to 20,000 residents at a new housing development in London’s Docklands will be supplied with low-carbon energy from a combined heat and power plants. But these projects, outside Bristol, are too few and far between. Under current planning laws, all new building developments in Bristol within a designated “heat priority area” are required to connect to a heat network or be “district heating ready” unless it can be shown such an approach is technically unviable. More planning guidelines like this are required elsewhere in the country.
Business Green 21st June 2016 read more »