Southern Company’s 100 MW Nacogdoches Generating Facility – which the company calls the nation’s largest biomass plant – is now operational and putting electricity on the grid in Texas.

The plant, which occupies a 165-acre tract of land near Sacul in east Texas, is fueled by non-merchantable wood waste. This is a combination of wood-based biomass fuels consisting primarily of saw mill or other wood mill production waste, forest waste, precommercial thinnings of cultivated trees, and diseased and other non-commercial tree species. There is also the potential for the use of urban wood waste, tree limbs and branches produced by storms and other non-commercial logging-derived biomass, Southern says. (more…)

Between biogas, wind and solar, Anheuser-Busch generates about half of its electricity from renewable energy to make beer at its Fairfield, California plant.

The company is the largest in the US to use nutrients in its wastewater to make biogas, a process called bio-energy recovery systems (BERS).

They also recover the steam that heats boilers in the brew house to produce energy, in addition to retrofitting with more efficient boiler burners, air compressors and lighting systems.

They get another 4% of electricity from 6,500 solar panels that cover 6.5 acres. (more…)

Construction work has begun on a biogas plant in Bure, Switzerland that will provide heat for the local training barracks of the Swiss Army. The plant will use agricultural waste.

The plant is located in the French speaking Swiss Canton of Jura, which the company said boasts fertile soil and a lot of agriculture, and will be used to treat manure from the surrounding agricultural establishments and agro-industrial waste from the region, including liquid manure, dung, green waste, and grain waste.

The Bio Etique Energie facility will produce 370 kW of electrical output, while its entire heat surplus of 2.6 GWh will be used to heat the nearby barracks, which hosts up to 1400 trainees. (more…)

The doors have opened on a new biodigester in Wiltshire, UK following 12 months of construction and trails.

The anaerobic digester plant is, after trialling feedstocks for around four weeks, now fully operational and located at Bore Hill Farm.

‘We have now moved into the main building and the technology providers have completed all their pre-start testing work,’ says director Thomas Minter. ‘The end of the construction phase is a major milestone and having an operational plant to show after a year’s hard work by many local contractors is very rewarding.’ (more…)