Barnsley Town Hall is an imposing Grade II-listed building, faced in Portland Stone, at the centre of the South Yorkshire town.
It has a strong history, and has seen many distinguished visitors pass through its doors in the past 74 years.
Unlike other town halls, though, Barnsley’s heat comes from a wood-fuelled boiler, part of an innovative scheme adopted by the Metropolitan Borough Council (BMBC) to employ biomass technology, supplied by Econergy Ltd and Rural Energy, to heat public and private developments throughout the town.
In June 2004, BMBC became the first local authority in Britain to adopt a biomass fuel heating policy to complement its environmental and commissioning and procurement policies.
Effectively, this means it has pledged to pursue this form of heat energy for future public and commercial buildings, or wherever major refurbishments take place: biomass will be the first choice for fuel.
“We recognised that the talking had to stop and effective action had to be taken,” said Dick Bradford, the council’s principal designer (building services) and energy engineer. “Biomass may be a new concept for Britain because, up until recently, we’ve been an energy rich nation.
“We decided to look for potential sites for development – whether newbuild or refurbishments – as well as develop projects for feasibility studies, and look for funding regimes that can help lessen the pain of higher capital expenditure.”
In South Yorkshire there are 13,500ha of woodland, with the potential to yield more than 60,000 tonnes of timber a year by effective management.
South Yorkshire Forest Partnership
Meanwhile, the South Yorkshire Forest Partnership, with whom BMBC worked very closely, identified a number of wood chip suppliers, with an estimated potential of 45,000 tonnes of material a year from a variety of different sources. It was felt that there would be more than enough material to fuel the Council’s immediate needs.
The first wood chip firing installation involved three, seven-storey blocks of flats (166 in total) known collectively as Sheffield Road Flats. Originally the three blocks were fed from two coal-fired boiler houses. To effect the change, a heating service had to be maintained during the works, which required a complete replacement of the heating systems within each flat, as well as the distribution network within each block.
A wood chip boiler plant was installed in one of the blocks of flats, with a 100% back-up gas boiler plant installed in one of the others. The whole site could be served from either boiler house.
Dick Bradford said the two boilers were installed for the “long-term security of tenants”.
“In an emerging market where the supply infrastructure is fragile the well-being of tenants could not be put at risk,” he said. “If, for any reason, fuel deliveries could not take place, or some technical problem prevented the wood boilers from operating, it was essential that an alternative heat source was available.”
Another wood chip boiler was installed at an office complex called Westgate Plaza One. Close to Barnsley Town Hall and the Central Library Complex, Westgate was able to provide enough capacity for the offices and the Town Hall itself.
And, said Mr Bradford, it’s good for the Council’s green credentials. “Replacing the existing boiler plant in the Town Hall with a similar arrangement of thermal storage provides for these civic centre buildings to effectively become ‘carbon neutral’ as regards heating,” he said.
Making use of waste
Meanwhile, another 500kW plant was commissioned at Smithies Lane Depot, where the existing solid fuel boiler plant was in urgent need of replacement. Biomass was the obvious choice, not least because a considerable amount of shredded arboreal material is gathered there in a year, some of which is converted to mulch, but most of which has no practical use: at a small cost, this can be converted to wood chip and provide cost-effective fuel.
The Council also conducted several trials using compressed sawdust pellets, which have proved to be a cost-effective and environmentally-friendly form of fuel at a number of former coal-fired sites.
It all means that, compared with government targets for reducing CO2 emissions, BMBC is light years ahead, quietly eroding its fossil fuel consumption in favour of wood-derived biomass. It hit the government’s 20% target for 2010 during 2001, while the 40% target for 2020 was reached during 2005.
“Only the target for 2050 remains to be met,” said Mr Bradford. “We all need to start taking biomass seriously. It can – and will – be making a practical contribution to energy delivery in the future.”
