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Renewable Technologies

Biomass

Biomass CHP has been initially identified as being potentially well suited to the project, because Craik is located within one of Scotland’s largest forested areas. Hence it was anticipated that woodchips or wood pellets would be the most viable resource for this particular project.

Fuel cells were thought not to be still a well-established technology for CHP and for such a project the solution should rely on a robust technology. It would not be a good idea to rely on an emerging technology which could fail with the consequence of having to be replaced by a different kind of CHP plant later.

Since Craik project will have more phases; it was thought the possibility of having a larger biomass CHP than required that could operate at lower load for the first phase and at higher or full capacity when Phase 2 would be built as the first option. The second option would be the possibility of having a biomass micro/small-scale CHP unit sized to serve only the first phase of the development and then, as future phases would be connected to the system, further units could be added to the network, increasing in this way the total capacity in line with the demand. However, there is still a great degree of uncertainty surrounding small scale biomass CHP systems, because most of their products are still in under research and development or in a patent protected stage. Hence there are very few commercially available specification to use in Merit.