Industrial CHP

These are typically the largest type of CHP plant. Ranging in scale from a few MWe to the size of a conventional power station, these plants provide high value heat – at the temperatures and pressures often required by industry – along with electricity. In some cases surplus heat can also be used to meet heat requirements of the surrounding local community. Likewise, electricity that is surplus to the needs of the site can be fed into the local network.

Profile: British Sugar

British Sugar’s Wissington site is the largest sugar beet factory in the world and the most efficient factory in Europe. But whilst the site processes over 400,000 tonnes of the sweet stuff each year, it also produces much more than sugar. Adopting a highly resource efficient approach to production, the output of each process becomes the input of the next.

At the heart of this truly sustainable approach to manufacturing is a highly efficient CHP plant commissioned at the end of the 1990s. The CHP plant provides a low cost source of energy for the facility and has, therefore, been a significant enabler to the expansion and diversification of the sugar factory.

This includes for example a modern biorefinery that produces 55,000 tonnes of renewable bioethanol per year. Heat recovery helps to significantly minimise the carbon footprint of the process. The site also hosts one of Europe’s largest glasshouses. This uses significant volumes of low grade heat and even the CO2 gases from the CHP plant to help grow over 80 million tomatoes each year (about 10% of UK demand).

The 70 megawatt (MWe) capacity CHP plant also meets the steam and electricity needs of the sites core sugar production operations and is able to export some 50 MWe of additional low-carbon electricity back to the local network. This is enough power to meet the energy needs of 120,000 people. Performance of the CHP plant itself was also recently augmented by the addition of a multimillion pound water injection system which boosts output from the gas turbine.

This highly efficient husbandry of resources – be it sugar beet, to energy through even to CO2 – combined with environmental awareness and responsibility, not only ensures that the carbon footprint of the site is minimised, but also helps preserve and enhance the competitive advantage of British Sugar as a company.

 British Sugar's CHP plant at Wissington