LOW CARBON TRANSITION

A word from our Director, Danny Bonnett

On the 3rd of November we were treated to the Institution of Civil Engineers presidential address. The ICE President for the year is Rachel Skinner, a practicing civil engineer, working for WSP. I thoroughly recommend that you watch her address, following the link below. The theme for the address is Net Zero Carbon, and this will be her focus in leading the ICE over the coming 12 months. At Wood Thilsted, we've been thinking hard about how to play our part, as effectively as possible, in the LOW CARBON TRANSITION.

• We've sharpened our focus on offshore wind, extending our services with the aim of covering all the engineering skills a client would want from their consultant as they deliver their offshore wind projects. An example of this extension of our service offering, is our ability to now undertake energy yield analysis, supporting site wide layout optimisation.

• We have always majored on very efficient foundations and structures, and now we're quantifying the embodied energy and the embodied carbon in our designs too. Through quantification, we enable a progressive reduction of these metrics on a per unit of electricity basis.

• And……

….to ensure that we keep delivering solutions that make sense in the BIG PICTURE, we've been looking for the right metric to keep us on track well into the future. To do this, we're adopting Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) which measures the overall effectiveness of the projects that we work on. As an example of how this works: EROEI = (Sum of lifetime energy output from the wind turbine) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (sum of energy input into extraction, manufacture, transport, installation, operation, decommissioning of the wind turbine) This ratio should be positive for energy producing assets, and it allows us to compare the effectiveness of projects with dissimilar support structures (e.g. floaters, jackets, monopiles), different turbines, and in different parts of the world. EROEI is a great tool for renewables projects, where we expect a large surplus of energy exported, compared to energy input into manufacturing and construction. If you'd like to find out more about this, or any other part of the work we do at Wood Thilsted, then please reach out. In the meantime, I strongly recommend you watch Rachel's speech, if you can find the time. https://www.ice.org.uk/eventarchive/ice-presidential-address-2020