Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 7TH - 13TH FEBRUARY 2020 | 19 Finance & Investment The first part of Anglian Water's scheme to boost resilience in the east of England by moving water across its region has been completed and trialled. The £28 million flow reversal scheme allows the transfer of treated drinking water in Anglian's Ruthamford network. The company called it a "major piece of the puzzle" to ensure resilient water supply WATER Anglian completes first stage of £28m drought resilience scheme in the west of the region. It used industry-first technol- ogy including specialist large- scale pumps that were trialled to reverse water flow within a single pipeline. Paul Valleley, director of water services at Anglian, said: "We knew the concept of transferring potable water through this network was always feasible, but the trial entailed a significant amount of work to ensure customers' water supplies were not affected or water quality compromised. Over the first half of this winter the trial has proven to be a complete success." Anglian supplies water from a reservoir in this part of its net- work to neighbouring Affinity, allowing the latter to reduce abstraction from chalk streams. £25m of maintenance for Heysham 2 reactor The reactor was shut down on 31 January and will remain turned off for two months One of the two reactors at EDF Energy's Heysham 2 nuclear power station in Lancashire has been shut down and the plant's 750-strong workforce doubled as part of a £25 million mainte- nance programme. The reactor was shut down on 31 January and will remain turned off for two months. The planned shutdown is part of the company's wider annual maintenance pro- gramme, which sees more than £500 million invested in its eight existing nuclear power stations across the UK. In total, EDF's stations provide up to 20 per cent of the country's power each year. Work on Heysham will include replacing gas circula- tors, which help cool the reactor, and also replacing some of the site's turbines. EDF says the two reactors generate enough low- carbon electricity to power around two million homes, saving around eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually. Mark Lees, station director at Heysham 2, said: "These eight-week shutdowns are a key part of station life and support our plans to run for at least another decade. "As engineers we look forward to getting our hands on the plant to safely carry out maintenance and inspections. "The shutdowns, which take around two years to plan, allow us to get into places we can't when we are operating – including inside the reactor itself. "But these things do not happen without lots of planning, investment and total commitment from a very professional team of people here at Heysham 2." AJ ELECTRICITY SSE gives go-ahead to subsidy-free wind farm extension SSE Renewables has given the go-ahead to its first subsidy-free onshore wind project – a 47MW extension to its Gordonbush wind farm near Brora in the Scottish Highlands. The wind farm currently features 35 turbines with a combined capacity of 70MW, to which SSE will add 11. Construction is scheduled to begin in March. The company's managing director, Jim Smith, nevertheless warned that merchant invest- ment is only viable for a limited number of the most attractive projects. He said onshore wind will not be deployed at the rate needed to meet Scotland and the UK's net zero targets without some form of revenue stabilisation, either through access to con- tracts for difference auctions or a more robust carbon price. "Onshore wind is the cheapest form of low-carbon generation and brings jobs and investment to rural communi- ties," said Smith. "Yet despite the climate emergency, onshore wind construction is at the low- est it has been in a decade. "We urge the UK government to ensure onshore wind can be developed at the pace and scale set out by the Committee on Climate Change by providing investors with more certainty over the income they will receive for generating zero-carbon power in the longer term." ELECTRICITY Huawei barred from supplying nuclear power stations The government has banned Huawei from providing 5G equipment for nuclear power stations as part of a wider crack- down on the Chinese telecom- munications giant. Following a meeting of the National Security Council on 28 January, prime minister Boris Johnson backed the introduc- tion of restrictions on high-risk vendors (HRVs), such as Huawei, in the rollout of the 5G telecom- munications network. These restrictions, which have attracted criticism from the USA for stopping short of an outright ban on the company, are outlined in guidance issued by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). They include "tight restrictions, including exclusions" on HRVs from 5G networks around "sensitive geographic locations" such as nuclear sites and military bases. It says such firms should also be excluded from all safety- related and "safety-critical networks" in critical national infrastructure. This is defined as assets, facilities, systems, networks or processes, the loss or compro- mising of which could hit the delivery of essential services or have a "significant impact on national security". Heysham 2: workforce doubled for maintenance Anglian said engineers originally planned to lay 37km of new pipeline to link the two areas, but instead were able to reverse the direction of flow through the existing pipes. The company has plans to build a £500 million pipeline to move water north to south from areas with surplus water to the water-starved parts of Anglian's network. This week

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