LONDON—The British government has approved Thor Cogeneration Limited's 1,020-megawatt gas-fired combined heat and power station project in northeast England, energy minister Malcolm Wicks said on Thursday.
The plant planned for Seal Sands in Teesside will supply local industry with steam produced during electricity generation, making it much more energy efficient than a normal gas or coal-fired fired plant.
"To secure our energy supplies and power our homes it is important industry brings forward new energy infrastructure to maintain a diverse energy mix," Wicks said.
"It's also important that as we face the challenges of climate change we move towards more efficient energy production and this power station is an example of that."
The cogeneration plant will burn natural gas coming into Teesside through an existing pipeline from the North Sea, with power output expected to begin within four years.
"We will now be finalising the financial and contractual arrangements for the project and we would expect land preparation to commence very soon with the full construction commencing in 2009 and power being supplied into the grid in the early part of 2012," Thor's director, Martin Green, said.
Environmental group Greenpeace supports CHP (combined heat and power) plants because of the much higher efficiency they offer over power plants that allow much of the energy from burning fossil fuels to escape into the atmosphere.
Wide-scale use of CHP and renewable energy technologies like wind, wave and solar would slash emissions of climate-warming carbon without building any nuclear power plants, they say.
"Obviously we are supportive of this," Greenpeace UK policy director Doug Parr said.
"If you are going to build gas power then this is a very sensible way to deploy it."
Greenpeace said the government should encourage more CHP projects by providing a clear framework for selling the excess heat to nearby industry.
"What we would like to see is the government shifting from 'we will let the market decide' to 'this is a good thing, we want to make it happen' and then using the various levers they can pull to make it happen."
More CHP plants could also cut dependence on imported gas at a time when relations with major suppliers like Russia are strained and fuel prices are rising.
"There is a clear security rationale," Parr said. "We are going to be burning this gas in CCGTs (power plants) and we are going to be burning it in boilers.
"If you can get the biggest bang for your buck out of your gas then that's less gas that you are going to import ... If we did all this industrial CHP we would have a halving of gas imports."
