The past five years has seen a growing number of medium to large-scale facilities come into planning
and development from a wide range of energy companies (see spreadsheet 1), with capacities
having expanded substantially from approximately 30 MW in 2005 (MacLeod et al., 2005) to current
projects in development
reaching 300 MW (figure 7b).
Figure 6 shows the biomass
power plants currently in
operation in the UK (burning
approximately one million
tonnes of biomass (Bonsall,
2010)) and the maps below
display the medium and largescale
plants in the planning
stage (figure 7a and 7b). The
following boxes explore four
case studies in more detail:
two operational biomass
power plants as well as a small
and large-scale biomass power
plant in planning.