Award for Barnsley biomass initiative

Stoking
This residential heating scheme using biomass is one of many around Barnsley that has won for Barnsley Metropolitan Council the Ashden Award for sustainable Energy.
The use of wood-based fuel to heat community housing in Barnsley has won the top award of the Ashden Awards for sustainable energy. South Yorkshire has been developing a wood-fuel industry over the last two years. The system developed by Barnsley Metropolitan Council is the largest biomass-heating scheme for community housing in the UK By using wood and waste wood instead of coal, the scheme is reducing carbon emissions by around 3000 t a year. Barnsley reduced carbon-dioxide emissions by 40% in 2005 and aims to achieve 60% by 2010. Dick Bradford of Barnsley MBC is leader of the project. He says, we are delighted to have received this award, which in our eyes proves that biomass is a sustainable alternative-energy source and one that will, hopefully, be looked at in a wider context across the UK when they see what we have done here in Barnsley. ‘Putting ourselves in the position of being able to convert green forestry material into a fuel and then burning that in our own boilers has produced a “closed-loop” energy cycle, and one that we would encourage others to emulate.’ Dick Bradford presented with work at the recent CIBSE National Conference. A copy of his paper is available on www.cibse.org. Type Barnsley into the search engine and then select 2006 National Conference. His paper is called ‘The use of biomass applications’.



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