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From Airfield to Energy Field: HoSt’s Spilsby Story

5 April 2026
On the edge of Spilsby, on the site of a former RAF airfield at East Kirkby, three green domes rise above Lincolnshire's flat fenland fields. For HoSt, these digesters represent one of our longest-running UK success stories: a farm-scale power station that has been quietly generating renewable energy for well over a decade. Thirteen years ago, this biogas plant was built for client A E Lenton (AEL), and it is still going strong. Completed in 2013 and equipped with a combined heat and power (CHP) unit, the installation processes 24,000 tons of corn and grass per year and delivers an electrical capacity of 1,200 kWe.

Turning an airfield into a power source

Built on our proven European AD technology, the 1.2 MW facility we delivered for AEL at East Kirkby’s disused wartime airfield turns home-grown energy crops into around 1,000 kilowatts of continuous renewable power, enough for roughly 2,150 households, about the size of Spilsby itself, plus heat for commercial and greenhouse use.

Delivering the technical backbone

Projects of this scale need more than farming expertise; they need a partner who can guarantee reliability year-round. With three decades of anaerobic digestion engineering behind us, HoSt lists the Spilsby plant among our UK case studies, alongside projects like Stanton Recycling in Ilkeston. At East Kirkby, we brought the technical backbone AEL needed to keep a farm-scale power station running reliably alongside a working vegetable and arable operation.

HoSt Spilsby biogas plant

A decade on: business as usual

More than a decade after commissioning, the plant is simply part of how AEL runs its business, sitting alongside cover cropping, over 400 acres of organic farmland, and a group-wide commitment to leave the land better than they found it. Looking back, the Spilsby story is less about grand announcements than it is about HoSt and AEL quietly getting the engineering right, and letting the households powered and carbon displaced speak for themselves.