We are an Energy Services Company: a business that installs and operates heating and generating plant within our customers’ buildings. We make the necessary capital investment in the plant and sell the electricity and the heat we produce to the occupier of the building. Any excess electricity generated is exported to the local grid.

This type of service is known in the industry as Build-Own-Operate (BOO).

The way we meet customers’ energy needs is by using renewably fuelled Combined Heat and Power systems (CHP). This is the name given to the generation of electricity and useful heat from the same item of plant, sometimes referred to as ‘co-generation’. We use diesel generators converted to operate on biofuel as the basis for our CHP plant.

In our CHP installations, the electricity displaces some of the power which would otherwise be bought from the local supply network and the heat recovered from the engine supplements heat from the on-site boilers. If required, our CHP systems can also provide cooling through the use of an absorption chiller that utilise heat as an energy source. This is usually called ‘tri-generation’ and Cantium can also supply the necessary plant based on energy purchase agreements rather than capital payments.

• Improved efficiency of fuel use and therefore reduced emissions;
• Independence & security of electricity supply (and also heat because most boilers don’t work in a power cut);
• Assistance in meeting local Planning requirements and Building Regulations through the use of renewable energy;
• Improvement in the rating given to a building for an Energy Performance Certificate or Display Energy Certificate;
• For those occupiers affected by the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) renewable CHP can dramatically improve a position in the ‘league table’. 

Cantium is a fairly small company at present but our plan is to supply dozens building occupiers with a Renewable Power Station. This is a box (most probably the size of a shipping container) into which we have packed a generating engine, control systems, fuel tanks and a heat recovery plant. This box is fully sound-proofed and secure; operates automatically and can be monitored via the internet. There are connections for the building electrical system as well as flow and return pipes which supply hot water for heating. The Renewable Power Station would usually be placed near to the main electricity meter of a building.

The generating sets we use are supplied by the well known UK manufacturer, Perkins. These are modified to run on bio-fuel, usually locally sourced waste vegetable oil, so the electricity and hot water we supply is 100% renewable. It’s not simply that our CHP reduces greenhouse gas emissions by the use of renewable fuel, is also fundamentally a more efficient way to generate electricity. Power generated at an average UK power station only represents around 40% of the energy contained in the fuel. The majority of energy is wasted as heat. By the time the electricity reaches the consumer there have been more losses in the transmission lines and transformer stations. A Cantium CHP plant could be over 80% efficient.