Aalborg Energie Technik a/s Biomass Power Plant

Western Wood Energy Plant, Port Talbot, GB

The Western Wood Energy Plant is a biomass-fired power plant, which was originally built and owned by Western Bio-energy Ltd.

The plant has an annual fuel input of 160,000 tonnes, which is supplied to the site as residual forestry timber, bark, brash bales, wood chips, saw mill residues and wood chips from uncontaminated, recycled wood. The plant reduces the CO₂ emissions by 47,000 tonnes/year.

The biomass-fired power plant was successfully commissioned and handed over in OCT 2008: 18 days ahead of schedule.

A performance test showed that:

• The overall cycle efficiency was 30%
• The boiler efficiency was tested to 92%
• The in-house power consumption for the whole plant was only 2.4% of fuel heat input (1,150 kW).

GB’s Highest Availability

In 2009, a 6-month availability test was conducted and the overall availability for the whole power plant showed an impressive 99% (APR - OCT 2009).

The initial high availability continued for the first five years of operation and the plant still has the highest availability amongst all biomass-fired plants in the GB.

Increase of Electrical Output

The electrical output was increased by 1 MW_e during an improvement made in 2009.

Turnkey Delivery

The delivery was carried out in a consortium between AET and a partner.

AET designed, supplied, constructed and commissioned the following scope:

• Fuel storage and preparation
• Fuel feeding and AET Fuel Dosing System
• AET Combustion System with AET Spreader Stoker and AET BioGrate
• AET Biomass Boiler with superheaters and economisers
• AET Combustion Air System
• Steam air preheaters
• Feed water system
• Oil burner
• Ash handling system
• Bag filter
• Flue gas system and stack
• Piping and ducting
• Insulation
• Structural steel for boiler house
• Platforms and stairs
• Instrumentation
• PLC control and SCADA system for the full plant
• Heat balance optimisation
• 6 year’s operation and maintenance contract.

Additional Information

• A presentation was made at PowerGen 2011 and All Energy 2012 about the project, showing the unique performance: Please contact sales for further information
• The Western Wood Energy Plant is Wales’ first commercial scale biomass project which generates 14 MWe by burning forestry wood and clean wood processing residues in an AET state-of-the-art combustion plant: Read more
• To obtain more information about this biomass-fired plant and about AET: Contact AET sales.