Bio-energy plants to employ 100 in Cork and Dublin

Planning permission has been granted for two bio-energy plants in Cork and Dublin. These will convert waste food into electricity, cost €50m to build and employ 100 full-time.

The two plants, which will be built at Little Island, Co Cork, and Finglas, Co Dublin, are to be constructed by Irish-owned company, Stream BioEnergy.

The company will use anaerobic digesters, in which micro-organisms will break down food and first convert it into fertilisers and bio-gas and then into electricity and heat.

Stream BioEnergy’s development manager, Morgan Burke, said the company was delighted to have got both plants through the planning process.

140 jobs will be created during their construction.

Mr Burke said that both plants would be identical in design and would each be approximately the size of two-and-a-half football pitches.

He said the first plant to be built would be at a site at Huntstown, Finglas. “Construction should get underway on that one in the first half of 2016 and we hope it will be completed by mid-2017,” Mr Burke said.

He said the Little Island facility, which will be built on part of the former Pfizer site, at Inchera, would probably become operational by the end of 2017.

Each of the plants will be designed to handle 90,000 tonnes of waste annually.

BioEnergy envisages that its developments will divert many tonnes of waste from landfill.

It is estimated that 500,000 tonnes of food waste is being buried in landfills, or disposed of through incineration. “Both the facilities will deliver safer and cleaner energy to replace fossil fuels and will provide much-needed capacity to treat the growing volumes of separately collected organic wastes,” Mr Burke said.

BioEnergy plans to capitalise on the introduction of legislation that will ensure, from the end of next year, that the majority of Irish households use brown bins to recycle food waste.

The company says the overwhelming majority of the waste food it will process will come from households, restaurants, and hotels.

However, it also plans to take some byproduct organic waste from the food-and-beverage processing industries and also turn it into renewable energy.

Mr Burke said that the electricity produced from such waste would be sold onto the national grid.

It’s estimated that each of the plants will produce enough energy to power 7,500 homes annually.

Prior to lodging planning permission for the Little Island plant, the company held a public consultation day, last May, at the Radisson Blu Hotel and Spa.

It promised that all waste delivered to the Little Island plant would be transported in enclosed vehicles to avoid any odours, and that all this traffic would avoid local residential areas by accessing the site via the Jack Lynch Tunnel-Dunkettle interchange side. The company, which was formed six years ago and has its headquarters in Dublin, has already built a smaller plant in Co Antrim.