Construction of £107m waste-to-energy facility to begin in Belfast

Full Circle Generation, a UK green investment consortium, is planning to build a major waste-to-energy farm in Northern Ireland.

The Belfast Waste for Energy site, to be located at aerospace company Bombardier’s factory, is set to become one of, if not the largest waste energy facility in Northern Ireland at an annual capacity of 61GWh, enough to power 14,500 homes.

An annual 120,000 tonnes of household, commercial, and industrial will be diverted from landfills to the £107 million (€152.2m) plant to mitigate the yearly £9 million energy costs at Bombardier’s wing production facility.

The design and preliminary site activities the site have already begun and construction is set to finish in 2017.

The consortium behind the farm includes Derry-based RiverRidge Energy, UK Green Investment Bank, Equitix, and P3P Partners, while the design-build-operate contact has been awarded to Bouygues Energies and Services.

RiverRidge Energy MD Brett Ross calls the beginning of the project a ‘significant day’ for Northern Ireland’s waste management sector.

‘The delivery of this critical piece of infrastructure provides a number of stakeholders with a world-class facility capable of recovering energy from waste in an environmentally sensitive and acceptable manner, as well as the provision of a meaningful base load of renewable energy for Bombardier,’ Ross says.

The building of the Belfast facility comes mere weeks after Northern Ireland Assembly’s Environment Minister Mark H. Durkan refused an application to build a similar £240 million facility on the old Hightown quarry site near Newtownabbey based on residents’ complaints and concerns over the impact on recycling rates.

Source: Belfast Telegraph