Bioenergy & Waste News

Thursday 04 March 2010

Dryholme Farm in Allerdale, Cumbria will house the 1.2MW AD plant

Anaerobic digestion (AD) specialist Farmgen is set to build a £2.5 million rural plant in Cumbria after receiving planning consent from Allerdale borough council for the 1.2MW facility.

The AD plant will be built at Dryholme Farm, near Silloth, and Farmgen predicts that it could be fully operational and supplying electricity to the national grid by early 2011.

The facility will use grass silage and other crops from fields surrounding the farm to create biogas, which is then used to generate electricity. Farmgen claims the plant will create enough power for more than 1,000 homes and will provide a significant boost to the rural economy.

It forms part of a £30 million national investment programme, unveiled by the AD specialist earlier this year, to create the biggest anaerobic digestion "energy farming" expansion programme in the UK.

Farmgen's experts believe the UK's farming sector could sustain up to 1,000 similar plants - using marginal land to diversify into ‘energy farming', producing a high nutrient bio-fertiliser as a by-product and helping to protect and sustain existing land used for food production.

The company claims the new AD plant will be broadly carbon-neutral and, compared with other alternative renewable energy generators such as wind turbines, will have significantly less visual impact.

Commenting on the facility in Cumbria, Ed Cattigan, chief operating officer of Farmgen, said: "We are delighted to have received planning permission for the Dryholme Farm operation and look forward to seeing it come on-stream.

"We believe there is huge potential for anaerobic digestion across the UK. Our operation at Dryholme will also show farmers who may be interested in the process how it operates. We look forward to working collaboratively with all the various partners in helping to bring this project to fruition, as part of Cumbria's commitment to be at the forefront of future energy supply and low carbon power generation."

He added that similar plants were already commonplace in Northern Europe, with more than 5,000 running in Germany, providing benefits for their local communities and claimed that there is no reason why they should not be commonplace in Britain in the future.

Mr Cattigan said: "We believe when the farming community across the country sees what we are creating at Dryholme Farm, and the benefits it will bring, they will become more and more interested in exploring AD as a way of diversifying and of bringing marginal land back into production.

"Our view is we are at the start of something really exciting for the farming industry across the UK."

The company is guaranteeing farms which move into AD-based power generation a fixed 10-year income stream - with an agreed level of crop production and land rental over that decade. And, it is urging smaller farms of around 200 acres to join with neighbours to form ‘energy co-operatives', working together to make marginal land pay.

Farmgen received planning permission for a similar plant in rural Lancashire in November 2009 (see this NewEnergyFocus.com story) and according to the company, planning applications are being prepared for two more AD plants in Lancashire and Staffordshire and a number of potential "energy farming" sites have already been earmarked across Cumbria.