Billington Structures supplied construction steel for a new waste to energy plant in Scotland.
The Earl's Gate Energy Centre is a new £210 million energy from waste (EfW) plant is being constructed in Grangemouth, Scotland. It is expected to process around 216,000 tonnes of waste, the equivalent of around 20% of Scotland’s total landfilled household waste, into energy, producing 79 GWh of green electricity and 81 GWh of heat, in the form of steam, each year.
The Energy Centre will replace an existing gas-fired energy plant that has come to the end of its operating life. The new facility will provide heat to local industry, including chemical manufacturer, CalaChem, the utility service provider for the site, and also export electricity to the National Grid. The facility will be a fully integrated with CalaChem, providing them with heat and power for its production of fine chemicals.
The centre will be built by CNIM. Once completed, it will be operated by MES Environmental, a subsidiary of CNIM, for a contract duration of 25 years. The Grangemouth plant is expected to be an integral part of Scotland’s ambition to deliver zero waste to landfill, by recycling material where possible and incinerating the rest to generate power. The plant will be able to recover non-ferrous precious metals and other recyclable material, which could add up to 54,000 tonnes per year.
The Earl's Gate Energy Centre is a low energy-cost way of producing power, and it will reduce Scotland’s reliable on fossil fuels, while supporting recycling and mitigating climate change by using renewable sources. It also reduces the amount of waste send to landfill and the need to ship waste abroad to be processed.
The EfW plant will create around 500 jobs during construction, and once fully operational, it is expected to have 30 full time employees. Billington Structures were involved in the building phase of the facility, as we supplied the structural steel for the main plant.
