Shrewsbury Club's Sustainable Future

The Shrewsbury Club, a health, fitness and tennis club, has demonstrated its commitment to slashing carbon emissions with a large-scale switch to renewable energy. The club has invested around £350,000 in the construction of a brand new, renewably energy centre which is significantly reducing its reliance on fossil fuels, whilst dramatically lowering its annual energy expenditure.

The new facility was officially opened by Shrewsbury Mayor, Councillor Beverley Baker, on the 11th June 2014 – making the switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy complete. She said: "It's stunning and the whole set up is a really good way of moving forward. This is going to help the environment, it's going to help the building and will also keep the costs down which means more people will enjoy coming here. I'm very impressed with the process. It's so simple but so effective."

Core to the club’s new system - which has been designed and built by the Shropshire-based renewable energy specialist Edge Renewables Ltd - is the construction of a purpose-made energy centre, which houses two 199kW biomass boilers that produce all of the site’s heating and hot water requirements from the company’s locally-produced wood chip fuel.

Replacing the existing natural-gas-fired boilers, the new biomass-fuelled system includes two, 5,000-litre insulated heat storage tanks that will help the system’s efficiency when supplying large demands for heating and hot water during the coldest months of the year.

In addition to the biomass boiler system, 960 square metres of solar photo voltaic (PV) panels have been installed onto the club’s roof,  which will generate some 120,000 kWh of electricity every year – all of which will be consumed at the site – to further offset the use of fossil fuels and largely eliminate the purchase of grid-supplied energy.

Steve Taylor, director with Mosaic Spa and Health Clubs Ltd, the owner of The Shrewsbury Club, commented: “With the club’s move towards renewable energy from traditional fossil-fuel-supplied alternatives, we expect to annually save the emission of around 215,000kg of carbon – which is the equivalent  to taking around 90 average family cars off the road(*).”

”Furthermore, there’s a strong economic case for shifting to renewable energy. With the savings that we’ll be making on our energy bills, the return on investment should be impressive.

“We chose Edge Renewables due to their professional and comprehensive approach. They are a local partner for us whose expertise and service is as impressive as anything available in the UK.”

The biomass boiler system qualifies for the Government’s non-domestic Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scheme – which pays system owners to generate heating and hot water from renewable sources such as biomass wood chip fuel.  Simon Lloyd-Jones, managing director with Edge Renewables Ltd, added: “Having a large swimming pool, health spa, gym and tennis courts the club has a steady demand for heat, which lends itself to biomass boilers. Couple this with the Solar PV panels on the roof and the carbon savings really start to mount up.”

“The boilers will annually recover the energy from around 300 tonnes of woodchip fuel – which is produced by us in the former Lea Quarry site at Wenlock Edge, so the whole process is very much in the spirit of local sustainability.”

The fully-automated energy centre (featured in the video below) cleverly incorporate an electrically-powered sliding roof so that wood chip fuel can be delivered to site and offloaded straight into the integral storage fuel hoppers,  – keeping the area clean and tidy.