Areva to build biomass facilities

Energy company Areva has received funding from KIC InnoEnergy to build a series of small scale biomass plants in Europe, South Asia and Latin America.

Areva plans to join various solutions to optimise the small scale power plant cost for its customers and help to cut down on construction time.

The biomass plants will produce power and are expected to ‘improve upstream technologies for multi-fuel acceptance and higher availability’, Areva says.

SITA, the waste treatment and recovery operator, and R&D centres including the French CEA and the German Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have already agreed to partner in the project.

KIC InnoEnergy itself is part of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology which is an R&D centre for sustainable energy.

It is estimated that by 2020, Europe’s renewable heat and power production will make up 14% of all energy with the capacity for global biomass growing by 6.8GWe a year up until 2015.