News

Alex Norris, MP for Nottingham North, was given a tour of the site yesterday (Wednesday 20 September) to find out how the company uses anaerobic digestion to turn both waste and crops into biogas that is then used to generate electricity or to go into the national gas grid for homes and businesses to use.

He also had an opportunity to take a closer look at the company’s wind turbine that generates clean energy every day.

Mr Norris said: “It was fascinating to see the scale of the work that Severn Trent is doing to turn both sewage and crops into renewable energy.

“Building a sustainable future is really important and sewage treatment is something that most people take for granted – it’s excellent to see these innovative techniques turning waste into clean energy that can be used by local people and businesses here in Nottingham.”

Sewage and crops are turned into clean power through anaerobic digestion, where the waste is put into huge vats that digest it, like in a human stomach, to produce bio-methane which then goes through another process to be converted into gas suitable for use in homes and businesses.

Upgrades are currently being made to some equipment at Stoke Bardolph and when that’s complete the site will generate enough energy to power 13,000 homes for a year.

Neil Liddell-Young, from Severn Trent’s renewable energy team, explained: “We’re committed to generating green power across our whole region and we’re experts in anaerobic digestion, with more than 60 years’ experience of using it to create biogas that can be injected into the gas network.

“We’ve invested heavily in renewable energy in recent years and we’re constantly developing our expertise to generate even more clean power.“

Right now we generate the equivalent of a third of our energy needs through renewables sources and we’re aiming to increase that to 50% by 2020.”

By generating renewable energy Severn Trent is also able to reduce costs which helps to keep customer bills down – the company currently has the lowest combined average bill in the country.

To find out more about how Severn Trent generates renewable energy visit:
www.stwater.co.uk/about-us/climate-responsibility/renewable-energy.