Glanford Power Station is an electricity generating plant located on the Flixborough

industrial estate An industrial park, also known as industrial estate or trading estate, is an area zoned and planned for the purpose of industrial development. An industrial park can be thought of as a more heavyweight version of a business park or office par ...

near

Scunthorpe Scunthorpe () is an industrial town in Lincolnshire, England, and the county's third most populous settlement after Lincoln, England, Lincoln and Grimsby, with a population of 81,286 in 2021. It is the administrative centre and largest settleme ...

North Lincolnshire North Lincolnshire is a Unitary authorities of England, unitary authority area with Borough status in the United Kingdom, borough status in Lincolnshire, England. At the 2011 United Kingdom census, 2011 Census, it had a population of 167,446. T ...

. It generates around 13.5

megawatts The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer. The watt is named in honor o ...

(MW) of electricity, which is enough to provide power to about 32,000 homes. It was designed to generate electricity by the burning of poultry litter, and was only the second of this kind of power station in the world to have been built when it went into operation in 1993. The station is owned by Energy Power Resources (EPR) and operated by its subsidiary Fibrogen.

History

After the BSE crisis in the 1980s, millions of cattle were slaughtered, and almost half a million tons of dried meat and bone meal (MBM), the cause of the disease, was stockpiled in secure sheds. Glanford Power Station was re-commissioned in May 2000 to burn them. It charges a gate fee for the fuel it burns, which would have otherwise been disposed of using conventional

landfill A landfill is a site for the disposal of waste materials. It is the oldest and most common form of waste disposal, although the systematic burial of waste with daily, intermediate and final covers only began in the 1940s. In the past, waste was ...

s. MBM has around two thirds the energy value of

fossil fuel A fossil fuel is a flammable carbon compound- or hydrocarbon-containing material formed naturally in the Earth's crust from the buried remains of prehistoric organisms (animals, plants or microplanktons), a process that occurs within geolog ...

s such as

coal Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other Chemical element, elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal i ...

, and has been labelled

carbon neutral Global net-zero emissions is reached when greenhouse gas emissions and Greenhouse gas removal, removals due to human activities are in balance. It is often called simply net zero. ''Emissions'' can refer to all greenhouse gases or only carbon diox ...

. Despite producing "green energy", Glanford Power Station is listed as the 27th largest

arsenic Arsenic is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol As and atomic number 33. It is a metalloid and one of the pnictogens, and therefore shares many properties with its group 15 neighbors phosphorus and antimony. Arsenic is not ...

air emitter in England and Wales in an air quality report published in February 2000. In January 2004 Glanford Power Plant received planning permission for the site to be extended to allow other sources of

biomass Biomass is a term used in several contexts: in the context of ecology it means living organisms, and in the context of bioenergy it means matter from recently living (but now dead) organisms. In the latter context, there are variations in how ...

to be burned. The plant technology is based on a conventional moving grate boiler and steam cycle. In accordance with the

United Kingdom Government His Majesty's Government, abbreviated to HM Government or otherwise UK Government, is the central executive authority of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

's new Renewables Obligation incentive mechanism, a premium is paid for renewable electricity generation. Each renewable generator is issued with Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROC), which they may sell to other electricity supply companies. This trade allows them to meet their obligation for the proportion of supplied electricity generated from renewable sources. The power output from the Glanford plant qualifies for ROC trading. The combustion ashes produced by the station are then disposed of via landfill (21% of fuel by mass). Before the switch to MBM, they used to be sold as agricultural

fertiliser A fertilizer or fertiliser is any material of natural or synthetic origin that is applied to soil or to plant tissues to supply plant nutrition, plant nutrients. Fertilizers may be distinct from Liming (soil), liming materials or other non- ...

References

External links

EPR Corporate website
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"Promising Future for Bioenergy in the United Kingdom"
{{Incineration in the United Kingdom Biofuel power stations in England Power stations in Lincolnshire Power stations in Yorkshire and the Humber Waste power stations in England