Planning approval for Air Products

Air Products has secured planning permission for its Tees Valley Renewable Energy Facility.  The 49MW advanced gasification energy from waste scheme, located near Billingham on Teesside will convert pre-processed household and commercial waste currently going to landfill into baseload, renewable power for up to 50,000 homes in the North East.   It is Air Products’ first advanced gasification energy scheme to be developed in the UK and on the back of this success, the company intends to develop more advanced gasification projects in the UK.

The project was first announced in July 2010 and subject to the financing of the project and securing environmental permitting consent from the Environment Agency, work on site should start in the first half of 2012, with commercial operations starting in 2014.

Taylor Keogh managed the community and stakeholder consultation programme on behalf of Air Products (www.airproducts.co.uk/teesvalley)

IndiGo: affordable solar power for the developing world

Cambridge clean-tech company, Eight19, has launched IndiGo, a revolutionary pay-as-you-go, personal solar electricity system for the developing world.  By combining solar and mobile phone technology, the IndiGo solar electricity system is inexpensive to buy and allows users to light their homes and charge mobile phones as a service, paid for using scratchcards.  IndiGo consists of a low-cost solar panel, a battery unit with inbuilt mobile phone charger and a high efficiency LED lamp. Users put credit on their IndiGo device using a scratchcard, which is validated over SMS using a standard mobile phone

Customer trials are now underway in Kenya and will be extended to Zambia, Malawi and the Indian sub-continent over the next 3 months. The commercial roll-out of IndiGo will start early next year.

Steve Andrews, CEO of the Solar Aid charity said: “Solar energy offers huge economic, health and social benefits to the world’s poorest people; for lighting and mobile phone charging. Eight19’s technology opens up these benefits to many more people. This is a major breakthrough.”

“We are very encouraged by this new way of delivering energy to off-grid applications in emerging markets” said Simon Bransfield-Garth, CEO of Eight19. ‘Indigo enables a new generation of solar power products that are affordable, providing customers with access, often for the first time, to clean low cost energy that eliminates the health risks and carbon emissions of kerosene.”

For further information, please visit www.eight19.com or contact Bethan Halls at Taylor Keogh.

ALSTOM makes first-ever investment in wave energy

Alstom, a global leader in power generation, power transmission and rail infrastructure has invested in Taylor Keogh client, AWS Ocean Energy Ltd, one of the country’s leading wave energy companies. Alstom has acquired a 40% equity stake in AWS, enabling it to expand its operations and accelerate the development of its wave power technology. 

AWS’s lead product is the AWS-III, a multi-MW offshore wave energy generator evolved from the award-winning Archimedes Waveswing ™ technology, first deployed and tested in Portugal in 2004.  A 1/9th scale prototype of the AWS-III was trialled in 2010 in Scotland’s Loch Ness and the company plans to deploy and test a full size single cell of the AWS-III multi-cell prototype next year and aiming to deploy their first AWS-III in 2013/14 and a 10MW wave farm by 2016. (www.awsocean.com).