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utILIty WeeK | 19th - 25th February 2016 | 9 Interview W as Eggborough the start of the journey or the end of the journey? It was the start of the jour- ney." So says Neil O'Hara, chief executive of Eggborough Power Station, and of Czech owner EPH's burgeoning interests in the UK. O'Hara and his tight-knit group of colleagues have kept their vision alive despite some crushing setbacks, namely the government's last- minute decision in 2014 not to award Eggborough any subsidy for its planned biomass conversion, bringing EPH's plans to a sudden halt. That's history now, though. Today, O'Hara is calm, smiling, visibly in control as he invites Utility Week to his Mayfair office to hear about EPH's more recent acquisi- tion, Lynemouth, plus the company's grand plans to build and acquire new capacity in the UK; and even a foray into the small and medium-sized enterprise retail market with soon-to-launch online marketplace Energyscanner. First up, Eggborough. O'Hara, a former British Energy man who joined EPH when it bought Eggborough in 2014, rarely loses his cool, but the smile falters just a little when he's asked to recall how he felt when the carefully craed plan to build the world's largest bio- mass power station fell apart at the eleventh hour. "Sur- prised and a little perplexed," he says cautiously, aer a moment's thought. "There's no way we would have gone through the extent of the work that we had gone through in raising debt and equity if we thought there wasn't a very strong chance of success." All is not lost, however. As Utility Week exclusively revealed last week, O'Hara has just signed a deal with National Grid for Eggborough to provide 775MW of back-up capacity as part of the Supplemental Balanc- ing Reserve (SBR) over the winter of 2016/17. This will stave off the planned closure next month, and keep 235 jobs safe in the short term at least. "I've no idea what happens aer that," he says. "We're basically running a business now year by year, and it's up the powers that be in terms of looking at security of supply whether they want to create space for us to bid again." Eggborough dealt with, it's on to happier ground, with EPH's acquisition of Lynemouth power station from RWE in January. Unlike its ill-fated peer, Lynemouth has a cherished subsidy agreement, and having ceased coal production at the end of last year is set to make the tran- sition to biomass in the next 24 months. That means a huge investment in re-gearing the power station and its workforce. But for EPH, the deal was a no-brainer: "Dusting down all those relationships and contracts and capacity for biomass was very easy for us. There are not that many people who would feel comfortable just with the fuel angle of Lynemouth alone… It absolutely consol- idates all of the work and effort we put into Eggborough." O'Hara visibly relishes the opportunity to show that biomass can work, and to prove the naysayers of Egg- borough wrong. Critically, he has the full backing – not to mention the deep pockets – of EPH behind him. The company, an established central European player in traditional generation, is a rarity. It combines the nous and vision of pure-play financial investor with the opera- tional insight of an energy specialist. It boasts more than €10 billion in assets, €1.4 billion annual Ebitda and 10,000 employees. "I've worked in quite a few different places, and this "