Electricity North West Ltd has gone out to tender with a £9 million contract to protect its substations from flooding.
The power company is looking to appoint a maximum of three suppliers to the framework contract for flood defence works, which will run for eight years.
Electricity North West owns, operates and maintains the North West’s electricity distribution network, connecting 2.4 million properties, and more than 5 million people in the region to the National Grid.
The contract is to protect Electricity North West's substation assets against the risk of flood, in line with Environment Agency regulations. The firm has 56 grid and primary substations which require flood defence works and ongoing maintenance. Target date for complete flood protection programmes to be in place at these major sites to ensure higher voltage substations are protected against a 1-in-100-year flood risk is 2020. Time limit for receipt of tenders or requests to participate is 2nd October.
The firm has taken steps since 2007 to protect its network against flooding to ensure that more than 850,000 customers are no longer at risk from losing supply due to severe flooding of major substations – an area customers feel particularly strongly about.
According to Electricity North West, the most significant impact of climate change on its network will be from the increased frequency of extreme weather events, particularly flooding. Between 2010 and January 2014 the firm installed flood protection at 31 of its major substation sites.
Working with new data from the Environment Agency the firm has now identified a further 56 sites which are also now identified as at risk of flooding. The total projected spend is £10.7 million on protecting substations from flooding in RIIO-ED1, the investment programme for 2015-23.
Commenting on customers’ willingness to fund investment of this nature, the firm said that there is less appetite for investing to reduce the environmental impact of the network, but much more for improving the network’s ability to withstand extreme events like floods and storms.
In 2005, Electricity North West suffered the effect of severe floods at Carlisle, which cost £5.5 million to repair. This was the firm’s largest atypical event of the last few years and passed Ofgem’s threshold to be treated as an atypical 1-in-20 year event. The power generator has estimated its RIIO-ED1 Severe Weather costs by assuming that an event of this magnitude will occur once every 20 years.
Recent events such as the flooding incidents in 2005 and 2007, storms of Christmas 2013 and other companies’ experience due to extreme ‘one-off’ situations, have led to an increased focus on network resilience in the power sector and the network’s ability to withstand extreme events.
Click here to access the tender document.
Sulzer has launched a new global Center of Excellence (CoE) for Water Treatment Solutions - the CoE consolidates Sulzer’s wastewater treatment expertise in a unified and global manner.
“SAS (Surplus Activated Sludge) is a bit weird and 
Owen Mace has taken over as Director of the British Plastics Federation (BPF) Plastic Pipes Group on the retirement of Caroline Ayres. He was previously Standards and Technical Manager for the group.
PureTec Separations, the Ledbury-based water treatment engineering firm, has appointed Dan Norman as its new Sales Manager – Water Process Systems, supporting the company’s continued growth in the UK and international markets.
Hear how Scottish Water has completed its £235 million Ayrshire Glasgow Resilience Project - customers across Greater Glasgow, Ayrshire and East Renfrewshire will now benefit from a more secure and resilient water supply.
Hear how United Utilities is accelerating its investment to reduce spills from storm overflows across the Northwest.
Find out more about the remarkable career opportunities on offer at WSP - scroll down to watch the inspirational video.