University plans £25 million green energy centre at Guardbridge paper mill site

Backed by a £10 million grant from the Scottish Funding Council, which is supporting carbon reduction schemes across Scottish Higher Education, the University proposes to generate power through clean biomass at Guardbridge and pump hot water 4 miles underground to St Andrews to heat and cool its labs and residences. The University also hopes to establish a Knowledge Exchange Hub to provide “missing link” facilities which would allow research and discoveries made in University labs to be translated to working prototypes. It will also offer affordable accommodation to local companies, with the aim of attracting businesses and skills linked to the renewables sector. Work on the site, which is to be named the Sustainable Power and Research Campus (SPARC), will start in 2014 with the Renewable Energy Centre complete and operational by December 2015. [press release]

Geothermal energy in Scotland

The Scottish Government’s recently published 2020 Routemap for Renewable Energy in Scotland, part of Scotland’s Renewables Action Plan, identifies geothermal energy as an emerging technology for heating and potentially for power generation. This has highlighted the on-going research of Dr Ed Stephens of the Department of Earth Sciences into geothermal energy sources, notably within granite bodies in the Eastern Grampian Highlands. The elevated heat flow levels in these ‘hot rocks’ are the consequence of radioactive decay of uranium, thorium and potassium.