Energy From Waste, Jersey

Profile

Hopkins' first Energy from Waste plant is now complete on the Channel Island of Jersey. The plant handles all of the island's waste for incineration with state-of-the-art flue gas cleaning systems to reduce emissions to the best European standards and produces up to 10MW of power. Located close to the island's capital, St Helier, and sharing a chimney with the existing Jersey Electric Company power station, a building of this scale is highly visible and needed to have an aesthetic appropriate to its site and use followed through with quality design. It needed to have a nobility of grandeur in the vein of the best industrial buildings.

Working for the States of Jersey Transport and Technical Services, we worked with the process engineers to densify the plant and arrange it so as to achieve a reduced building footprint of nominally 80m x 36m, with the whole of the waste-to-energy process undertaken in a linear fashion within a single cuboid enclosure. The eaves height of the building needed to be approximately 32m above ground level, so we have exposed the structural depth of the roof trusses above the roof so as to provide articulation to the many long views of the building, without adding to the perceived bulk of the plant 'container'. This is a strategy that we'd previously used for the fly tower of Glyndebourne Opera House in Sussex.

The gable ends to the enclosure are glazed. Apart from improving the internal environment of the plant with better daylighting, this also helps to reduce the perceived bulk of the building by articulating a thickness to the roof and walls of its enclosure, revealing it as an extruded cloche to the industrial plant process within. The metal profile cladding to the long sides of the cuboid extrusion was selected so as to fall within a clearly industrial palette of materials for the building, and to achieve the perception of a hierarchy of scales as one approaches the building from a long view to a closer one.