Putting it simply, All-Energy without a session aimed at the farming community would be like fish without chips.
This year the UK’s largest renewable and sustainable energy exhibition and conference, being held at Glasgow’s SECC on 4 and 5 May, features a 90 minute special conference session ‘Future of renewables and energy management in the rural sector’.
"Recent tariff and subsidy changes by the UK Government have shifted the emphasis to a certain extent from renewables to encouraging farmers and landowners to look increasingly at energy management in all its guises," explains All-Energy’s Event Director, Jonathan Heastie.
"This year under the chairmanship of Thomas McMillan of Savills, the session on 4 May, will start with an all-embracing scene-setter by Jim Campbell, Renewable Energy Team Leader, SAC Consulting: Environment & Design on what renewables farmers have installed to date, discuss what kind of projects show most promise with lower incentives and discuss how the Farming for a Better Climate programme is encouraging more efficient use of energy and the use of renewables.
"Then Adam Baxendine from Savills will provide an overview of gasification/ biomass CHP. Gordon Black of BabyHydro will be next at the lectern taking ‘One MEGAWATT of new hydropower for Scotland? One KILOWATT at a time!’ as his topic.
"As he explains ‘Most discussions about hydropower and interest in developing schemes lean towards the bigger opportunities, but there is a different way of looking at things: installing lots of very small (pico hydro) schemes’.
"With pico too the focus shifts from FITs income to savings from off-setting, so schemes are still potentially viable’.”
The next speaker will be Amanda Lyne, Managing Director of ULEMCo looking at ‘iWESH – Integrated Whole Energy System using Hydrogen for farms’.
She will present the latest results gathered at Springbank Farm in Cheshire, to demonstrate the feasibility of using a whole system approach to solve the problem of grid connection and maximising on-site use of energy generated from renewables.
Electricity generation, battery storage and hydrogen production are all used to maximise the amount of energy used on site for power, heat and fuel for transport.
Specifically Amanda will be presenting the results of ULEMCo’s work to look at the total cost of ownership of the whole system solution. Battery storage is also set to come under the conference spotlight.
There are stand-alone sessions for shared ownership of renewables schemes; bioenergy (biomass, AD, biogas and biofuel); onshore wind; solar; energy efficiency; decarbonisation of the food and drink industry; local energy economies; heat; energy storage; sustainable transport and much more; and the now-traditional Quick Fire Community and Local Energy Seminar Theatre.
As ever, all elements of All-Energy are free to attend for all with a business/professional interest in the topics under discussion.
One important aspect of All-Energy is the large exhibition with over 400 exhibiting companies providing good hunting ground for farmers and landowners eager to talk directly with manufacturers or their agents; and once again, there are 15 dedicated sector-specific trails to follow to make hunting out the right supplier easy for visitors.
There are eight trails that the farming/rural community might consider following – bioenergy, energy efficiency, energy storage, hydropower, low carbon transport, onshore wind, heat, and solar power.
Similarly, exhibitors are providing information for the All-Energy online “What we’re showing” preview, and just dipping into it provides an insight into the very varied exhibits that could be on a farmer’s trail round the show.
Naturally there are wind turbines, bioenergy plants, wood burning boilers of all sizes, but diving deeper there are many products and services that could be of use to the farming community
