Weekend press round-up: Wind farm towers could be home win

In our latest review of sector coverage across the national newspapers, plans are reported for a £100 million factory in Scotland to create turbine towers for offshore wind farms. Meanwhile, nearly 1,000 “dark discharges” of untreated sewage from two water company treatment plants have been detected using artificial intelligence to map spills.

Wind farm towers could be home win

Turbine towers for the world’s biggest offshore wind farm could be made in Scotland under plans for a £100 million factory that would create hundreds of jobs.

The UK and Scottish governments are understood to be in talks over possible financial support for the Global Energy Group to produce some of the largest wind turbine towers ever made, at a new facility at Nigg on the Cromarty Firth.

The Times understands that these would be used in some of the General Electric turbines for the Dogger Bank wind farm that SSE and Equinor are preparing to build in the North Sea, which could supply electricity to six million homes. The facility could create about 300 jobs and more than 1,000 indirectly.

Last week General Electric announced it would build a new blade factory on Teesside that would supply Dogger Bank and create 750 jobs and 1,500 indirectly. It is expected to cost more than £100 million and has been supported by £20 million of government funding for port facilities.

Industry sources said they were hopeful that the go-ahead for the Global Energy Group tower factory could come within weeks, but cautioned that this could yet slip. Britain is the world’s biggest offshore wind market and the government has pledged to quadruple capacity this decade in a push to decarbonise the power system. Only 29 per cent of capital expenditure in recent projects has been in the UK.

Ministers have been trying to increase the share of turbine components made in Britain to deliver on a promised “green industrial revolution”. Government forecasts last year indicated that more than half of the £50 billion investment building offshore wind farms in British waters this decade would be spent overseas.

The Times

Shell appoints mining veteran Andrew Mackenzie as chairman in low-carbon shift

Royal Dutch Shell has appointed the former boss of the world’s biggest mining company as its new chairman.

Sir Andrew Mackenzie, a Scottish scientist who ran BHP until 2019, will succeed Chad Holliday after the oil major’s annual meeting in May as it embarks on a strategic shift to lower-carbon energy.

He will lead a Shell board that will be gender-balanced for the first time after the appointment of Jane Lute as a non-executive director.

Shell also disclosed that pay for Ben van Beurden, its chief executive, had fallen by two fifths to €5.8 million last year as it suffered losses and cut its dividend.

The Anglo-Dutch group is Europe’s biggest oil company and was hit hard last year by the collapse in crude prices caused by the pandemic. It was forced to cut its dividend for the first time since the Second World War and fell to a $19.9 billion annual loss. Shell had 87,000 employees at the end of 2020, but has said about 9,000 jobs will be lost over the next two years as it cuts costs and restructures for the energy transition. It has set a goal of reducing its emissions to net zero by 2050.

The Times

AI reveals 1,000 ‘dark discharges’ of untreated sewage in England

Nearly 1,000 “dark discharges” of untreated sewage from two water company treatment plants in England have been detected by scientists using artificial intelligence to map spills.

The use of machine learning to shine a light on the scale of pollution from untreated effluent being spilled into rivers could be a crucial tool in efforts to improve the quality of rivers, a paper says.

Prof Peter Hammond, visiting scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, who co-authored the paper published in the journal Clean Water, used artificial intelligence to analyse data from two unidentified water companies’ waste treatment works from 2009 to 2018.

The AI identified 926 “dark discharges” – or previously unknown spills – from the storm overflows at the two treatment plants.

Discharges of untreated sewage from storm overflows, or CSOs, are permitted only in exceptional circumstances, such as extreme rainfall, the European commission has ruled.

The spills identified by the AI included many during periods of unexceptional rainfall.

Of these spills of untreated sewage, 360 discharged into rivers for a whole day, often spilling for more than 10 full days in a row.

The impact of a full day of untreated sewage flowing into a river is particularly harmful, the authors said, because the spills involve the maximum flow of the most concentrated sewage, which creates the greatest risk of pollution.

Such spills over several days were even more harmful. “Worse still is the pollution potential caused by an unbroken series of 24-hr untreated sewage spills during which a receiving watercourse has no respite nor opportunity to recover,” the paper said.

Recent data from the Water Framework Directive shows the poor state of English rivers. Only 14% of English rivers are of good ecological standard, a rating that suggests they are as close to their natural state as possible.

“Depending on the characteristics of the receiving river and the weather, these [spills] might be highly impactful discharges,” the report says. “It remains to be determined whether these ‘dark’ discharges could help to explain why 80% of surface water bodies in England are assigned a bad, poor or moderate status classification within the Water Framework Directive.”

Hammond said machine learning could be helpful for water companies, the Environment Agency and for scientists to help reduce pollution from sewage spills.

“Our objective was to develop techniques for analysing daily flow patterns and EDM data that could detect spills of untreated ‘storm tank overflow’ discharges into watercourses. We have shown that we can retrospectively identify spills or likely spills from the flow of the sewage being treated at the works,” he said.

“This can inform the water companies which of their works are not functioning properly and it could help the Environment Agency identify gaps in compliance with permits to discharge wastewater. It can also help citizen and professional scientists interested in sewage-related pollution of watercourses.”

The Guardian

O2 Arena to install mini wind turbines that can harness even a breeze

The O2 Arena will soon use a new breed of “vertical wind turbine” to generate its own clean electricity, after signing a deal with a startup firm that says its turbines will generate power even when the wind is not blowing.

The London landmark once known as the Millennium Dome will begin by installing 10 of the 68cm (27in) vertical turbines. The breezy conditions at the site on the River Thames will help generate enough clean electricity to power 23 homes.

Although this is a small amount of the O2’s total energy consumption, the arena’s owner, AEG, expects to install more of the mini turbines across its stadiums worldwide.

The new breed of turbine is said to be able to spin from even a gentle movement of air, or a passing car. Each unit is made from recycled plastic and weighs about 4kg (9lbs), but the design could be scaled up to help generate as much electricity as 20 sq metres of solar panels, according to its developer, Alpha 311.

Lee Lacey, the facility director at the O2, said the arena had “been searching for a suitable wind-generated power source” to help cut its greenhouse gas emissions and reach its ambition to become a net zero carbon entertainment venue.

“The opportunity to provide a local on-site source of power generation is huge and we hope this trial provides the launchpad of many more installations, not only at the O2 and other AEG venues but across the Greenwich peninsula and throughout the UK,” she said.

Alpha 311 turbines were originally designed to be larger, at just nearly 2 metes in length, and installed on infrastructure with a connection to the electricity grid, such as streetlights, to help to reduce costs.

Installing the turbines on streetlights along motorways, for example, could generate eight times as much clean electricity as they are expected to produce at the O2 Arena. Motorways also offer the advantage of minimal installation time and no negative impact on the environment or local views, which can be a concern for traditional windfarms in some areas.

Barry Thompson, the chief executive of Alpha 311, said the company was already in talks with international buyers. He said: “The Alpha 311 turbine was born in Britain with international aspirations, so it’s fitting that we’re working with the world’s most popular music, entertainment and leisure venue.”

The Guardian

Utility Week’s weekend press round-up is a curation of articles in the national newspapers relating to the energy and water sector. The views expressed are not those of Utility Week or Faversham House.