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Bio-DigestersOrganisations from sectors including agriculture, renewable energy, utilities and finance have written to the COP26 President Alok Sharma asking for his support towards unlocking the Anaerobic Digestion (AD) industry’s potential to address climate change and boost economic growth across the UK by transforming organic wastes into valuable bioresources.

The letter, signed by 19 organisations, urges Minister Sharma to become an advocate for improving waste management in the UK in the fight against climate change, by ensuring that all organic wastes are captured and transformed into valuable bioresources through anaerobic digestion technology – which gets the most out of such material – in order to rapidly decarbonise UK’s key industries such as transport, heat, agriculture and food and drink.

The group also ask for an immediate commitment to swiftly develop a policy framework for the AD sector to enable the industry to thrive and support the UK’s Net Zero and Global Britain ambitions, in particular addressing methane emissions this decade - and it's practical utilisation within the energy sector.

“The UK is currently missing a huge opportunity to build on an existing UK success story”, they write. “By turning all its organic wastes into bioresources, the AD industry could help:

  • The UK achieve carbon neutrality, including delivering 30% of the 5th Carbon Budget shortfall
  • Build back greener by creating 60,000 green jobs this decade
  • Bring over £5bn of private sector investment
  • Boost the UK’s exports to a $1trn global industry growing exponentially
  • Support the UK’s agriculture sector and food and drink industry.”

With the letter to Mr Alok Sharma, the signatories seek the COP26 President’s support in unlocking the industry’s potential as fast as possible – thus helping place the UK at the heart of the fight against climate change as well as realise the government’s vision for an environmentally responsible and economically strong “Global Britain”..

The 19 signatories to the letter are: ADBA; Biogen; CCm Technologies; CNG Fuels; Country Land and Business Association (CLA); Energy Networks Association (ENA) ; Evonik Industries ; Food and Drink Federation (FDF); Gas Vehicle Network (GVN); GFD; Grissan; Institution of Gas Engineers & Managers (IGEM); National Farmers Union (NFU); Northumbrian Water; Privilege Finance; Scotch Whisky Association (SWA); Severn Trent; SGN and United Utilities.

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Bunhill Heat and Power Network (BHPN)Bunhill

Islington Council Energy Services won the Homes & Communities Project of the Decade Award at the Association for Decentralised Energy's Awards Dinner on the 19th October 2017 for Bunhill Heat & Power.

Islington developed Bunhill Heat and Power Network to provide cheaper, 'greener' heat to the local community, reduce fuel poverty and improve energy efficiency. It is the Council’s ground-breaking, innovative scheme involving retrofitting two kilometres of combined heat and power supplied district heating in an inner-city environment. The scheme began supplying heat and hot water in 2012 and it now serves over 860 dwellings, two leisure centres and four office blocks. Bunhill is a catalyst for driving regeneration in the area through investing in infrastructure and keeping energy bills low.

Islington Council has been working on developing heat networks since the mid-2000’s; this has been driven by many factors, including increasing energy efficiency, reducing carbon emissions and reducing fuel poverty. In 2003 a borough-wide heat map was commissioned, which served as the foundation of our 2010 Decentralised Energy Strategy. Bunhill was identified as the ideal location for the project because of the area’s high heat density and levels of fuel poverty (13%) and below-average life expectancy.

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Yes AD combined with CHP or even CHCP. What is all this acronym stuff eh?

AD is Anaerobic Digestion, its the sort of process that happens in a sewage works where all that nasty stuff is broken down by 'good' bacteria. What is left is largely safe but has given off lots of methane gas and CO2, along with some other trace stuff. Anaerobic means 'without Oxygen'.


Now that Methane is what we need. Its almost the same as Natural Gas that you buy at home. So it can be 'cleaned up' and sent down pipes to the gas mains or it can run a gas fired electricity generator.

But rather than just generate electricity, we also need to look at how effective the burning of gas in an engine really is. When gas is burned in say a modified car engine to drive a shaft to turn a generator to produce electricity, there are loses. These loses affect the efficiency of turning the energy value of gas into electricity. It is disappointing to discover that only around 20-25% of the gas burnt produces the electricity. The rest is 'low grade' waste heat.

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Cooling Towers are designed to WASTE HEAT to the atmosphere

Article from Alternative Energy Africa: 23 Oct 2009 

As Eskom continues to debate the prolonging of projects, Kusile coal-fired power station continues to be the center of attention. However, Eskom CEO Jacob Maroga insisted that Kusile would remain on schedule.

“We are saying… let’s commit ourselves to ensuring that [Kusile] doesn’t stop, and to the extent that there is a [funding] gap, let’s see how we can close it,” Maroga said. “We want to continue with the build,” he stressed, adding that Eskom was also committed to closing what would be a R30-billion funding gap should the requested increases be granted.

Yet he also admitted that the state-owned utility was continually assessing the “shifting of certain cash flows” as well as the possibility of bringing in “other parties to assist with the build.”
  1. Combined Heat & Power plus Cooling
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