Radar delivers big water savings in EfW.

Cory Riverside Energy is a waste to energy plant to the East of London. With a population approaching nine million people, London has an incredible appetite for energy. Keeping the lights on in the face of increasing demand is one of the major challenges facing the city today. It produces around 22 million tonnes of waste every year. Or, to put it another way, enough to fill the largest skyscraper at Canary Wharf every eight days.

At this site they utilise this waste to help provide London with a safe, secure, affordable and sustainable energy supply, which also makes great environmental sense. The site at Belvedere uses these materials, that would otherwise have gone to landfill, as a feedstock to generate electricity. As one of the largest operations of its kind in the UK, this facility generates c.525,000 MWh of electricity each year from processing around 750,000 tonnes of waste.

What’s more, they use the River Thames as a ‘green highway’ to move the waste from the centre of the city to the facility on their fleet of tugs and barges, removing around 100,000 truck movements a year off the UK capital’s congested roads.

Of course creating energy from waste creates a hot ash residue that needs cooling quickly. This is achieved by quenching it in water via an ‘ash expeller’ system before stockpiling for disposal. Each system sits under one of the three main combustion chambers with a moving grates, the waste ash can drop into a water filled hopper below. The quenched ash is then scraped out by a ram and removed to the rear side via a conveyor into a stockpile chamber for loading out and disposal/recycling.

The water used in the ash quenching process needs a constant level to be maintained through replenishment of either recycled or fresh mains supplies, this is monitored in a small balance tank off the main chamber.