100 hours of established technology

Bill was leaning on the fence, studying the Daventry operating-hours chart.

Tom scratched his head.

“So this was meant to be two units, making electricity, running twenty-four-seven?”

“That was the plan,” said Bill.

Tom pointed at the tall bar in March 2024.

“And the longest continuous run we’ve found is a hundred hours?”

“About four days.”

Tom nodded slowly.

“Right.”

He looked further along the chart.

“Then it ran less and less, went down to one unit, spent months sitting idle, and now mostly gets used for short test runs?”

“That’s what the reports show.”

Tom stared at the graph for a while.

“Funny thing, the word established.”

Bill raised an eyebrow.

“How so?”

“Well, if a bloke tried to sell me a generator and said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s established technology — we once kept one running for four days,’ I might ask a few more questions.”

Bill smiled.

“You probably should.”

Tom nodded toward the nearly flat bars at the end of the chart.

“Especially if I needed the thing to turn up for work every morning.”

Dog wandered over, sat down beside them and looked up at the chart.

Tom glanced at him.

“What do you reckon, Dog?”

Dog scratched himself, yawned, and lay down.

Bill looked at Tom.

“Steady, dependable performance.”

Tom nodded.

“See? That’s established technology.”

What happened to Xetrov at Daventry in the UK?

I received the results of a freedom of information request a few days ago. I was chasing Xetrov emissions performance data from their Daventry operation. When you look on their website they list Daventry as one of their three operations so I thought it would be a good place to find some real information.

The data I received shows a slightly different story.

If you haven’t heard of Xetrov’s Daventry plant before, it matters because it gives us the best operating history we have for the Xetrov waste incinerator technology proposed for Glan Devon.

Daventry was originally being developed as a two-incinerator electricity-generating plant. Xetrov planned to operate both vortex incinerators together, install an ORC turbine to convert the heat into electricity, install the final emissions-control system, and move to 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week operation with electricity export.

That was the plan.

In 2023 the plant accumulated 539 operating hours during commissioning. Early 2024 looked like they were trying to push towards continuous operation: 43.83 hours in January, 107.88 in February and 139.37 in March. In March they achieved their longest continuous run that I can find: 100 hours — just over four days.

Then something changed.

By the second half of 2024 Xetrov was reporting problems with its emissions-monitoring system and saying operating time had been “greatly reduced”. Monthly operation fell to 5.95 hours in July, 70.29 in August, 60.09 in September, 22.33 in October and 21.45 in November.

From December 2024 to April 2025 the Daventry incinerator ran for just 36.23 hours in total — only 15 runs in five months. Xetrov said those short runs were being used for emissions investigations, testing different wastes and investor demonstrations.

This was no longer a plant moving towards 24/7 commercial electricity production.

Then came an even bigger change.

The original two-incinerator plant was cut back to a single Xetrov unit. Xetrov said Daventry was being remodelled so that the remaining unit would be used predominantly for R&D.

At about the same time Xetrov became involved with Tarmac, a major UK asphalt producer. Tarmac’s Harlow asphalt plant uses a large fossil-fuel burner to heat material during asphalt production. The Harlow project replaces that burner with a solid waste-derived vortex burner — exactly the sort of application Xetrov has been pursuing as an alternative to fossil fuel.

The evidence we have makes a very strong case that the Xetrov removed from Daventry became the Tarmac unit at Harlow.

And Xetrov’s own report says Daventry stopped operating after 19 May 2025 because staff were working on the installation and commissioning of the Harlow plant.

Daventry ran for 12.72 hours in May 2025.

Then:

June – 0 hours
July – 0
August – 0
September – 0
October – 0
November – 0
December – 0

Seven months without operating at all.

In the entire first half of 2026 it managed only 12.65 hours, spread across six short trials.

January: zero. February: zero. March: 5.23 hours. April: 2.86. May: zero. June: 4.56.

So look at the direction of travel.

Two incinerators became one.

The electricity-generation project disappeared.

The promised 24/7 operation never happened.

One incinerator appears to have gone to Tarmac as another development project.

The remaining Daventry incinerator became an intermittent R&D machine which has sat idle for months at a time.

There is a financial backdrop as well. Xetrov Group’s published accounts show a deteriorating balance sheet over the same period. Between 2023 and 2024 current assets fell from about £936,000 to £221,000, cash fell from about £6,100 to less than £1,000, and net liabilities increased from roughly £3.76 million to £4.59 million.

That doesn’t tell us exactly why the original Daventry plan stalled, but it is part of the picture.

Now bring that back to Glan Devon.

The proposed biosolids plant relies on a Xetrov incinerator to provide dependable heat day after day to dry large quantities of wet biosolids.

Yet the best operating evidence we have for the technology is a Daventry plant whose longest continuous run was only 100 hours, which never became the 24/7 commercial plant originally planned, lost one of its two incinerators, abandoned its electricity-generation concept and has since spent long periods not operating at all.

On this evidence, continuous commercial reliability has simply not been demonstrated.

And that leads to a fairly obvious planning question.

Why would you take an immature waste-incineration technology with that operating history and use rural Class A agricultural land at Glan Devon as the place to prove whether it can actually work commercially?

This isn't an established industrial facility being proposed for an established industrial precinct.

BYV is asking Council to approve a Material Change of Use for a high-impact industrial operation on rural land.

If the technology were mature, commercially proven and backed by years of dependable continuous operation, there would at least be an operating record to assess.

But Daventry shows almost the opposite.

Glan Devon should not have to become the commercial-scale experiment that Daventry never became.

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