£465 million biomass plant given the go ahead by Scottish government

SSE Plc (SSE), the U.K.’s second-biggest energy supplier, and Forth Ports Ltd. have won approval from the Scottish government to build a £465 million biomass plant to generate electricity and heat from wood.

The facility in the Port of Grangemouth, central Scotland, will be the largest of its kind in the country, Forth Energy, a joint venture between SSE and Forth Ports, said in a statement on its website. It will have capacity of 120 megawatts of power and 200 megawatts of heat using imported wood.

The project will help Scotland in obtaining a target for all of its electricity to come from clean sources by 2020, from about 39 percent now. Only biomass facilities of more than 15 megawatts that produce both electricity as well as heat are eligible for subsidy support from the region’s government.

Construction of the plant will take three years and create about 300 jobs. It’s expected to start working in 2017 and is forecast to deliver about 26 million pounds of economic growth a year to the area, according to the statement. Electricity will be fed into the grid and heat supplied to industry.