BSkyB Studio to Get 40% of Energy from Biomass CHP

BSkyB, the U.K. satellite and telecoms company, will generate up to 40 percent of the energy for its new main studio campus through a wood chip-fueled combined heat and power project.

Steve Holford, head of engineering projects and energy at Sky, told BusinessGreen that the company hopes to turn on the London plant by the end of this month. The Turboden Organic Rankine Cycle turbine will use 32 tons of wood chips a day when at full capacity to generate power, hot water and chilled water, and some of its ash byproducts will be sold as fertilizer. The chips will come from companies within a 25 mile radius of the studios.

Holford said initially the studio is aiming to get 20 percent of its daily energy needs from the turbine. It is also erecting a 100 kW wind turbine, which it hopes to take online in March.

The company has targets of cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent and improving its energy efficiency by 20 percent.

Last June it was one of over 70 companies with European bases calling on the EU to target a 30 per cent cut in GHGs by 2020, from 1990 levels. Coca-Cola, Ikea, M&S, Unilever and Google were also signatories to the declaration.

And in April BSkyB had the third-best score of any non-financial company in the ET Europe 300 Carbon Ranking, by non-profit research group the Environmental Investment Organisation (EIO), which ranked Europe’s 300 largest companies by Scope 1 and 2 emissions intensities and by levels of disclosure and verification.

With a carbon intensity of 6.69 tons of CO2 equivalent per million dollars of revenue (tCO2e/$M), BSkyB was 13^th overall in the rankings. Among non-financial firms, the leaders were Switzerland’s leading telecoms provider Swisscom, followed by Nokia. U.K. investment and insurance firm Aviva topped the rankings overall, with a carbon intensity of 0.85, closely followed by Dutch insurance and finance firm Aegon, with 1.35 tCO2e/$M.

Picture credit: Sarah Cady