The Renewable Energy Centre Of Excellence, currently under development at AFBI Hillsborough, coordinates research being conducted across AFBI in areas relevant to Renewable Energy. The centre will assist the agri-food industry to maximise the potential of renewable energy and support technology transfer activities
The Renewable
Energy Centre will provide visitors with a wide range of information on many aspects of renewable energy
production and its use in addition to conducting scientific research on the aspects most closely related
to agriculture. It is also planned that approximately 50% of the energy usage at the AFBI, Hillsborough
site will be derived from renewable energy.
Over the next two years the centre
will be developed
and the areas of particular interest that will be addressed include:
- Evaluation of Short Rotation Coppice (SRC) willow production with bioremediation of dirty water.
- Woodchip drying and storage.
- Biomass heating systems.
- Other forms of forest biomass production.
- Anaerobic digestion of animal manure.
- Heat recovery from cooling systems (freezers, milk coolers etc).
- Demonstration of other renewable energy technologies.
- Demonstration of energy saving design and technology.
A total of £3.7m has been allocated to this project from the Environment and Renewable Energy Funding Package.
