Lakeside energy-from-waste plant hires and 'fires'

Slough, UK - Lakeside EFW has employed a mobile water treatment service to reduce maintenance downtime and increase revenues at its Colnbrook energy-from-waste plant near Slough.

Lakeside EFW uses waste fired boilers generating 45bar steam to drive a turbine at the facility, which incinerates 410,000 tonnes of household and municipal waste per year and exports 34MW of electricity to the National Grid.

When a boiler is drained for its routine maintenance it has to be refilled with demineralised water, with a limited flow from the make-up water demineralisation plant, this would take about three days - days of lost generation.

But hiring an Aquamove MOFI 35m3/h mobile plant from ELGA Process Water, has meant that the plant is up and running in less than a day, reports Martin Rogers, EHS manager at Lakeside EFW.

“An Aquamove engineer can be deployed, together with the necessary equipment, fittings and documentation within 2 hours of a call, and that’s reassuring,” said Rogers. “The increased generation revenue more than covers the hire cost.”

“If we think we might have a problem with our demineralisation plant, we can always have a MOFITM on standby at short notice.” The MOFITM is self contained, and regeneration is carried out at ELGA Process Water’s regeneration station in Stoke-on-Trent, so there is no chemical or waste handling on site.”

Lakeside EFW has placed a contract with ELGA’s Hydrex chemical treatment team to help optimise their steam cycle efficiency.

The contract covers a twice-weekly visit from one of its chemists to check the boiler water chemistry and to ensure that Legionella control in the domestic water systems meets current legislation.