Our current climate change mitigation activities are centred around energy efficiency and renewable energy generation and purchase. To see how this fits in with our short and long term carbon targets please refer to the progress on our carbon strategy section of this report.
Understanding the carbon emissions from proposed capital investment solutions presents an opportunity to cut both costs and ongoing emissions. The use of a suite of assessment tools has allowed our future investment programme to be assessed on carbon impacts (see case study below). Our investment programme 2010-2015 (AMP5) is expected to reduce emissions by 21,000 tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e).
Our AMP5 programme increases our annual operational carbon emissions by 27,400tCO2e by 2014/15. To counter this effect we have developed a programme that uses lower carbon solutions where we can. We aim to reverse this rise in carbon and propose measures which will achieve gross annual savings of 48,270 tCO2e, thereby achieving a net reduction of 20,860 tCO2e in greenhouse gas emissions by 2014/15. This plan is currently under consideration by our regulator Ofwat.
Research and Development
Research and development is crucial to our efforts to improve the operation of our present assets and providing low carbon solutions. We have secured a research grant from the Carbon Trust to help us develop potential solutions such as Inverted Phase Fermentation (see case study below). Further innovations can be found in our innovations brochure – Innovating for the Future.