A new £60 million (€87 million) 30 MW biomass plant is to be built in Teesside, north east England. The wood-burning station, known as Wilton 10, is expected to be operational by mid-2007.
The plant is being developed by SembCorp Utilities and will be one of the UK’s largest biomass projects.
About £10 million (€14.5 million) of the development costs is to come from the government bioenergy capital grants scheme. The plant will need about 300,000 tonnes of wood a year from sources including off-cuts from conventional forestry developments, recycled material from consumer packaging, sawmill chips and wood from short rotation coppice (SRC) crops. The SRC wood, which takes around three years to grow, will all be sourced from farms within a 80 km radius of the plant.