Sheffield ERF

Street CraneXpress Ltd have played a major part in raising the standards of the city of Sheffield’s waste disposal activities.

The newly built Energy Recovery Facility (ERF) based at Bernard Road is now fully operational, and this is partly thanks to the installation of some very important lifting equipment from Street CraneXpress.

The facility, built by CNIM, and now used by Veolia Environmental Services, is used to recover energy from the 235,000 tonnes of household waste generated by Sheffield’s households every year. Whilst 21% of Sheffield’s waste is recycled, the rest needs to be disposed of in an environmentally friendly fashion, and so this is where the Sheffield Energy Recovery Facility comes in.

The waste is brought to the facility, where it is fed into an incineration unit and burned at temperatures in excess of 850ºC. The thermal energy generated heats a huge boiler which in turn creates steam to drive a turbine. This then produces hot water for the district heating network, which heats nearly all of the non-residential buildings in Sheffield’s City Centre, and also generates electricity which is sold back to the National Grid.
The new facility produces up to 39MW of thermal energy and up to 20MW of electrical energy. This reduces the amount of fossil fuels burnt in powering the city, and significantly reduces the amount of waste dumped into landfills.

In order to allow the plant to operate efficiently, Street CraneXpress have installed some very important lifting equipment on site. This equipment includes several hoists on runways to transfer heavy equipment into the facility; a number of hand chain hoists and beams to aid in the servicing of electric motors and gearboxes; and a jib crane for lifting motors and other equipment 30m to the higher floors. As well as this, Street CraneXpress also installed a runway beam and chain hoist used for the de-clogging of the waste chute into the incinerator. Without this, the waste can get trapped and fail to be fed through to be burned, so slowing up and possibly even halting the entire process.
All of this equipment helps to increase the efficiency of the work undertaken in the plant, and thanks to Street CraneXpress’s installations, the Energy Recovery Facility is now able to run to its full potential, processing nearly 96% of all of Sheffield’s household waste produce.