POWER May 2020 - 13

GLOBAL MONITOR
role, especially for islands and remote
areas, " Lee said. " There is deepening
support for diverse sets of DERs for microgrids
to create reliability and improve
the efficiency of our energy systems. "
Lee said power control technology demonstrates
how a software-based solution
can be configured to integrate wind, solar,
and storage to support energy demands
anywhere. " There have been, and we will
continue to see, shifts in regulation that
recognize distributed energy as a powerful
grid resource with renewables providing an
increasing percentage of that energy, " Lee
said. He noted that his company's technology
is among those " proving that microgrids
and DERMS will be the building blocks of
how we operate the grid of the future. "
-Darrell Proctor is a POWER
associate editor.
Coal Plant Conversion to
Non-Recyclable Plastic Waste
Combustion Advances
A hundred metric tons of innovative fuel
pellets derived entirely from biogenic and
plastic waste material-which would otherwise
be bound for a landfill-have been
successfully produced, marking a technological
leap toward large-scale combustion
testing at a coal plant in the UK.
It's a big step for SIMEC Atlantis Energy,
a UK-based diversified sustainable
energy developer, which has been working
to convert the 220-MW coal-fired
Uskmouth Power Station in Newport,
South Wales, to combust non-recyclable
waste for power generation by 2021. The
milestone, which it marked this March,
provides " further confidence that the energy
pellets developed as a high calorific
value, low cost alternative to coal are able
to be produced in commercial quantities
and can be milled using industry standard
designs, " it said. However, it's also remarkable
considering how ambitious the
proposal is and how quickly the company
has arrived to this point.
As SIMEC Atlantis Energy CEO Timothy
Cornelius notes in financial filings,
Uskmouth was built in 1959 as a project
designed to use the Welsh region's
abundant local coal supply. " A successful
conversion at Uskmouth could form the
blueprint for other power stations destined
to be decommissioned, providing
instead an extended period of valuable
service in compliance with up-to-date
emissions regulations and with materially
lower levels of CO2
emissions, " he noted.
" This project is expected to help the transition
of the local economy and workforce
in Newport from a historic reliance on
coal to a new, sustainable future, while at
the same time providing an economically
viable alternative to landfill of waste and
addressing the issue of non-recyclable
plastics. " The waste the project (Figure
5) could convert into power over its lifetime
would " require a landfill the size of
London to a depth of 73 meters or would
fill more than 46,000 Olympic swimming
pools, " the company claims.
Cornelius noted the company acquired
Uskmouth only two years ago, in
June 2018, as part of a merger between
SIMEC Energy, a subsidiary of Londonheadquartered
manufacturing and engineering
business group GFG Alliance, and
Atlantis Resources Ltd., a company which
is better known for its majority stake in
MeyGen, the world's largest tidal stream
project (and a POWER Top Plant in 2018).
Along with initiating front-end engineering
design (FEED) work for the conversion
project in November 2018, SIMEC Atlantis
Energy also formed a 50:50 joint venture
May 2020 | POWER
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POWER May 2020

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