Member Article

Innovation award for Clarke Energy

Clarke Energy, based in Knowsley, has won the Innovation Award at the British Renewable Energy Awards 2014.

Competition was tight with a total of 39 companies short-listed under 12 categories.

The award is in recognition for the development of its first project with cutting- edge organic rankine cycle(ORC) technology that utilises heat to produce power.

The project has been developed by Agri-Gen in Suffolk, where an anaerobic digester produces biogas from agricultural materials using a GE’s Jenbacher combined heat and power biogas engine to produce renewable electricity.

The facility was not able to make full use of the heat produced from the gas engines and opted to install two of GE’s Clean Cycle generators. These ORC convert the surplus heat into additional renewable electricity, increasing the electrical efficiency of the biogas power plant from 43.0 to 46.2%.

The biogas engine and ORC units were supplied, engineered and installed and will be maintained by Clarke Energy.

In a statement, the company said it was “delighted” with the award, and thanked both the REA for this acknowledgement and Agri-Gen for supporting its bid.

Alan Fletcher, Main Board Director at Clarke Energy, said: “We are delighted to receive this award for the development of our first Clean Cycle project at Agri-Gen’s anaerobic digester in Suffolk.

“The facility is able to both generate additional revenues for our customer and convert energy which would have been under-utilised into a valuable source of power.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Simon Malia .