Biogas use heating up

The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) have released their latest monthly statistics showing deployment of the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) programme.

The figures show that biogas heat generated and paid for under the RHI in 2017 has already surpassed the full-year 2016 figure, a strong sign that heat use in the industry is firmly on the rise.

The link to the statistics can be found below:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/rhi-deployment-data-may-2017

*YTD = year-to-date

There are now an increasing number of AD operators who are finding a use for the thermal energy they produce, such as to heat their farm, greenhouse, or nearby factory. This is a good sign for the industry, as it strives to minimise the amount of heat vented, and instead make the maximum possible use of its energy generation.

ADBA members have provided data from a variety of operational plants with generation capacities in the 500-5000kW tariff band to show actual heat used in the industry, and the following are a few examples of these:

• May Farm Anaerobic Digester (Farm AD) / Barway Farms Ltd (Shropshire Energy) operate a 2.4MWe food waste plant in Shropshire that uses 34% of its potential heat. Of this, 3% is used parasitically for digester heating, 32% is used for pasteurisation and 65% is employed in the adjacent mushroom farms.
• Greenshoots Energy is a non-food waste plant supplying heat to an industrial source. It uses 60% of its 1200kW capacity supplying steam for a feed mill and for district heating.
• A food waste AD facility (which prefers to remain unnamed) uses 30% of the heat output from its 1.5MW CHP engine for parasitic heating of digester tanks.

Interested in finding out about the practical use of heat in AD? Why not come along to the UK AD & Biogas and World Biogas Expo 2017, where this topic and many others will be discussed by experts from the industry.

• The session from 12.00 – 12.55 on 6th July in the Green Seminar room, chaired by Ollie More, Head of Policy at ADBA, will be on ‘Finding practical usage of heat’, discussing how best to use biogas heat both in the UK and abroad.