Award for Barnsley biomass initiative

The use of wood-based fuel to heat community housing in Barnsley has won the top award of the Ashden Awards for sustainable energy. South Yorkshire has been developing a wood-fuel industry over the last two years. The system developed by Barnsley Metropolitan Council is the largest biomass-heating scheme for community housing in the UK By using wood and waste wood instead of coal, the scheme is reducing carbon emissions by around 3000 t a year. Barnsley reduced carbon-dioxide emissions by 40% in 2005 and aims to achieve 60% by 2010. Dick Bradford of Barnsley MBC is leader of the project. He says, we are delighted to have received this award, which in our eyes proves that biomass is a sustainable alternative-energy source and one that will, hopefully, be looked at in a wider context across the UK when they see what we have done here in Barnsley. ‘Putting ourselves in the position of being able to convert green forestry material into a fuel and then burning that in our own boilers has produced a “closed-loop” energy cycle, and one that we would encourage others to emulate.’ Dick Bradford presented with work at the recent CIBSE National Conference. A copy of his paper is available on www.cibse.org. Type Barnsley into the search engine and then select 2006 National Conference. His paper is called ‘The use of biomass applications’.