The club was delighted to welcome David Stutchfield as speaker at the club’s meeting of October 31st.   David gave a most interesting account of the biomass plant being built, by St Andrews University, at Guardbridge.

The plant is designed to provide heating to the university site at North Haugh, some 6km away and to displace a £1M per annum gas-heating bill to the local economy.

It is a technically complex £25M installation involving 23 km of heavily insulated piping moving 1,000 tons of water at 95 degrees centigrade and 16 bar pressure along the 6 km in 15 minutes or so. Interestingly the water temperature is expected to drop by just 3 degrees Centigrade during that journey. Some 46 km of electrical cabling, laid alongside the pipes, will monitor for leaks: the location of every pipe weld being accurately registered via GPS.

The university has provided £5M of the funding with the rest from the Scottish Government and European sources. The plan is based on a cost payback over 8 – 10 years, although varying costs of gas and biomass will affect this.

The furnace and boiler plant is built within the old paper mill site at Guardbridge and has a capacity of 6.5 megawatts, with the same again stored as hot water. The plant is designed to burn chipped wood and can handle most species and a wide variation of moisture content. It is hoped that this project will help to kick-start a local biomass supply chain from within a 60km range.

The university’s carbon footprint is expected to reduce by 6,000 tons per year, increasing to 9,000 tons per year over the 40 to 50 year operating life of the system. 

David’s fascinating and thought provoking talk generated many questions and concluded with a vote of thanks proposed by Andrew Lindsay.