To little - not to late

I was intrigued by numbers quoted in the Morning Star (online) the other day - so much so that I wanted to share them with you.

It seems that despite fears that the Feed-in tariffs would cause a runaway boom, it's not been the case. It would seem the tariffs have failed to really ignite the renewable energy cause, with installations totally a capacity of just 16 megawatts. A figure we're told that's in line with Government predictions.

To put that figure into perspective, Germany installed six gigawatts of solar energy this year - that's almost 400 times the UK's effort.

The article blames a "towering lack of ambition" on British policy. It cites the first biomethane plant at Didcot which opened recently. Whilst other plants are also being built and nearing completion, the article points out that it would take 200 similar plants to deliver half of the UK's domestic gas supply.

To put that into perspective, Germany has 3,500 biomethane plants already in operation and China has 4,000 city scale plants in addition to 40 million smaller installations.

Read the full report yourself here.

photo credit: emli bendixen

Schoolboy humour could run riot as new biomethane gas plant starts supplying

Yes, very well done to Didcot sewage works being the first biomethane plant to come on stream and start supplying biomethane gas to the nearby homes.

Although there are other similar plants close to finishing, the Didcot project which cost £2.5 million and took 6 months to complete (source new energy focus), was the first to be pumping gas derived from human sewage into the gas grid which supplies nearby homes in Didcot.

The process of extracting gas from sewage is called anaerobic digestion - bacteria break down the warmed up sludge, the resulting biogas is extracted during which impurities are removed, before it is fed into the mains grid.

The whole process from 'flush' to 'supply' takes around 20 days and apparently, gas consumers won't notice a difference.

However, the industry is counting on the introduction of renewable heat incentives before investors commit to more and news on that is expected tomorrow in the Governments spending review announcement.

Presumable though, the burnt gas is still a cause of co2?

photo credit: jason meredith