REG has completed 12 months of production at its Whitemoor plant – an 18MW facility powered by used cooking-oil.
The project in north Yorkshire is the first of its kind and uses 10 Finning Cat 3516 BHD engines to produce carbon-neutral power for the UK grid.
Cooking oil is collected from restaurants, food processing plants and households and transferred to a REG recovery facility where it is filtered into a biofuel called LF100
It is then used to fuel the engines. REG says one litre of used cooking oil can provide enough renewable electricity to make 240 cups of tea.
The Whitemoor plant can reach full capacity in four minutes.
Finning Project Manager Mark Radford said: “While the engines supplied by Finning are standard, off-the-shelf units, the fuel system is specially designed.
“Reliability is also a major concern for REG as the Whitemoor site has been contracted to supply the UK’s Short-Term Operating Reserve (STOR) programme, which is designed to supply the National Grid with enough power to cope with unexpected spikes in demand.”
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