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Utility Week 4th December 2015

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UTILITY WEEK | 4TH - 10TH DECEMBER 2015 | 5 Last week, Dutch artists Mike Thompson and Arne Hendriks visited a London sewer to examine fatbergs in their raw form. The artists are involved in an ongoing design research project focused on turning fatbergs into works of art. As part of the visit, they extracted a fatberg from the sewer and took it back to Holland for future projects. Baggs to leave Thames Water next year Martin Baggs is standing down as chief executive of Thames Water in 2016, the company announced this week. Thames Water will begin the search for a new chief executive early next year, with the aim of having a successor in post by the end of 2016. Baggs will stay on until the new chief executive takes over. The company also announced its results for the first half of 2015/16 this week. Profit has fallen year on year to £205.2 million from £214.7 million. The dividend paid to the parent company Kemble Water Holdings was up by £5 million to £25 million, to "service its debt obligations", Thames said. Baggs said: "After spending all 30 years of my working life in the UK water industry, and having had the privilege of leading the largest company in the sector for the past six years, I have decided this is the right time for me to look for new challenges. "I am proud of Thames Water and of what we have achieved for our customers, but there will always be room for improvement. Taking this decision now means that my successor can be in post in time to oversee the crucial task of preparing the company's business plan for the next regulatory period." WATER "A tight situation" Drax chief executive Dorothy Thompson warns the government over its decision to ban coal- fired power by 2025, telling The Times that more flexible generation is still needed. 10 of the best The taskforce for water resilience has come up with ten recommendations for Ofwat to improve co- ordination of plans in place to ensure resilience in the water sector. The full list of recommendations is as follows: Agree a shared definition of resilience. Increase public engagement and education. Ensure clear routes for funding legitimate resilience measures. Ensure coherent planning for resilience at both a national and regional level. Establish wastewater, sewerage and drain- age plans. Improve understanding of risk and failure. Ensure services are resilient under different water sector structures. Develop benchmarking, standards and metrics. Ensure existing plans are stress-tested. Establish a water and wastewater resilience action group. (For more, see p11) This week the 2015 Paris climate conference brought 194 countries together to try to thrash out a global climate deal to reduce emissions and prevent dangerous levels of global warm- ing. But not all countries contribute to global emissions equally. The chart shows that China and the US lead the world in fossil fuel use, fol- lowed by the EU and India, Russia and Japan. Australia and countries in South America and Africa contribute the least to carbon emissions from fossil fuel use. The Paris talks will con- tinue until 11 December. (For more, see p12). Coal-fired capacity shows steady decline G20 carbon emissions from fossil fuel use in 2014 Source: BP statistical review, Bloomberg >6bn 5-6bn 3-5bn 1-3bn 500m - 1bn <500m Metric tonnes Canada 620.47m Argentina 199.38m Brazil 581.77m South Africa 452.19m India 2.09bn Japan 1.34bn South Korea 768.334m China 9.7bn Russia 1.66bn USA 5.99bn Saudi Arabia 665.02m Turkey 348.5m Australia 374.92m Mexico 499.91m EU 3.70bn

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