Sludge Powered Generator - Erith, Kent, UK
N 51° 30.346 E 000° 08.963
31U E 302173 N 5709923
In 1998 the Crossness 'Sludge' Powered Generator was built, at the cost of £165m, and now rather than just depositing all treated 'sludge' directly into the sea, some of it is converted into energy through the Crossness 'Sludge' Powered Generator.
Waymark Code: WMC9Y9
Location: South East England, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 08/14/2011
Views: 6
No it's not lens distortion - the building really looks like that. It's the Crossness, sludge-powered generator and it processes the equivalent of 1000 toilet flushes a second. Smelly, but a good looking building!
The six-megawatt Crossness sludge-powered generator is an architecturally stunning example of the benefits of centralised sewage treatment done right. The earliest part of the Crossness works, which treats the sewage of two million Londoners, dates from 1865.
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Harjeet Singh is the plant manager for the sludge-powered generator at Beckton. Before it, and its sister plant Crossness on the other side of the River Thames, was built in 1998 at the cost of £165m, the sludge was simply deposited in the sea.
"It was taken on big barges out into the North Sea and dumped," Mr Singh explained. "A tanker was leaving every two minutes. Now we only have about four lorries of ash [the only by-product] a day."
Mr Singh describes the process which every day turns tons of human waste into electricity as "totally green". The raw sewage comes into the plant and is filtered, with anything that is not excrement or toilet paper removed, leaving a mix of 95% water and 5% solids which is then pumped into industrial 50m (165ft) compressors where the water is squeezed out, leaving solid "poo cakes". These cakes, which still contain a large amount of water but burn easily, are fed into a gigantic hot furnace which produces steam that drives a large turbine, creating electricity.
"In the same way our domestic boilers work," Mr Singh explained
The electricity generated has the capacity to power 10,000 homes but here it is fed back into Beckton's own system to keep the sewage plant running.
Mr Singh said: "A computer monitors emissions so we don't emit any nasties. "That's not happened in the past 12 years, we've not exceeded [limits] since we opened. At the end of the process we're left with about 30% ash."
He said the firm was looking into ways of using the ash in the future. "We don't want it to go to landfill and one thing we are looking at making with it is concrete", he said, showing a small test block he "made earlier". He said they were also toying with the idea of using the fat in the toilet sludge to make lipsticks and other cosmetics. However a more likely use may be as fertiliser for farmers and gardeners."The sludge contains lots of nutrients and has a high calorific content. But you can see a difference during the school holidays and Christmas; there's less waste coming into the plant because people are away from the city. There is also a difference in the summer holidays in the calorific value of the sludge; it's lower because people eat more salads."
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