Welcome to First London Power - the future of waste to energy

The European Union has set targets for the UK to meet 15% of it's energy needs from renewable sources by 2020. The percentage, currently about 2%, includes all energy used for heating and cooling buildings. However, heating and cooling, which make up a significant portion of energy use, are hard to achieve on mass scale with the more well known renewable energy sources such as wind, water and solar power.

The European Union has also set targets for the UK to reduce quantities of waste going to landfill, but this too is hard to achieve without either significantly more recycling or increased incineration.

First London Power believes it has the answer to meeting these ambitious targets and we are focusing our initial work in London, its boroughs, its people and businesses. As with the Mayor of London's ambitions described within ‘Powering London into the 21st Century’, published in March 2006, the cornerstone of First London Power's approach is decentralised energy (DE).

This entails generating locally a significant proportion of the energy consumed in homes, offices and shops. The approach does not require a dramatic breakthrough in technology: it relies on the use of existing, technically proven solutions, coupled with a re-interpretation of a gas source that powered the whole of the UK before the discovery of North Sea Gas in 1966. This modern ‘town gas’ is safe, clean, sustainable and can be generated from an almost limitless supply of base fuel stock, which includes Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF).

The Stein Gasifier has been developed as an efficient system to convert biomass and waste into a clean gas for use in CHP (combined heat and power) power generation plants without creating the typical dioxins produced by other technologies.

The Stein Gasification process can produce modern 'town gas' as a 'fossil fuel substitute' in existing power stations or in other large scale industrial processes. It provides a source of low-carbon, indigenous power generation that is central to reducing emissions and maintaining reliable future power supplies far beyond the capability of the UK's natural energy reserves.

We have started an ambitious programme of investments, and hope that our work will contribute to making the UK, and its capital city London, green exemplars for the world.

Daniel Donegan
Chairman, First London Power