New [¹] engineering often fails. No big deal. However, this is terrible:

The university has refused several Freedom of Information Act requests from local activist group The Norwich Radical in the past six months, saying releasing the information “would have a chilling effect on the development of new low-carbon energy projects in future” and a negative impact on the economic interests of the university and commercial partners.

We need to learn from failures and universities should be pushing learning. To try to cover such things up is just embarrassing.

[¹] Assuming there was something new here - otherwise not talking about the problems is even worse.

It is a shame that technology fails, but this was not exactly ground breaking technology and the knowledge about wood burning has increases since 2008 when it was installed.
Other things have also happened since. PV is about a quarter or the price and natural gas has reduced by about 30% in real terms.

http://www.engineeringsociety.co.uk/biopower_10.html

"biomass was woodchip waste from two local sawmills which contrary to expectation, was not burnt to release energy, but fed to a reactor under semi anaerobic pyrolysis conditions to convert it to a combustible gas.


At the heart of the UEA Biomass plant is a pyrolysis reactor; but it is worth mentioning that the unit at UEA is the first ‘commercial scale’ installation.... the input is dried before pyrolysis takes place in the steam atmosphere from the drying stage, after which injection of a controlled supply of preheated air oxidises the pyrolysed product to produce a char which then reacts with steam to form a combustible gas consisting of carbon monoxide and hydrogen,
The hot gas is fed to a 124 litre V20 twin turbocharged Austrian Jenbacher gas engine which is the power source.."

Edit. the scheme was a gasifier to turn wood chip into syngas to fuel a 1.5MWe electrical CHP generator. The generator now appears to be running on mains gas.