There’s something

 in the air …

Incinerator

to be built

near Grangetown

Photo by Mike Marrah on Unsplash

Scott Hunter

12 September 2023

Quietly, and without fanfare, an event took place on 20 July that will significantly affect the people of Grangetown and the surrounding area for many years to come. The event took place at the Planning Committee of Redcar and Cleveland Council where an application to build an Energy Recovery Facility (ERF) on the site now known as Dorman Point received final approval. An energy recovery facility, in plain English, is an incinerator, and this one has already caused a stink.



Now, the basic idea of an ERF is that [household] waste is incinerated and the energy released is used to generate electricity. This one, known as TV ERF, started life as a collaborative project between five local councils. This was the case when the plan received outline planning permission in 2020. But certain things have changed since that permission was granted.

In the first place, as has been reported to us, the collaboration now involves thirteen councils from Teesside to Northumberland. Secondly, in the intervening period, some key features of the design have changed. If the initial plan caused some controversy, the latest one is cause for a great deal more.

One of the main issues concerns emissions from the plant. The plan that received outline permission in 2020 involved emissions from the plant being siphoned off and dealt with through carbon capture and storage, i.e. piped to the Net Zero Teesside (NZT) facility at South Gare for processing there. The plan approved on 20 July 2023 makes no such provision.

Anyone who has visited South Gare in recent months may have observed that the NZT site is basically just a hole in the ground, a site where mining for scrap metal is ongoing, as well as scraping back of contaminated soil. At present that facility’s backers appear to be committed to it, and so we take it on trust, for the time being at least, that, at some point, a carbon capture plant will actually be constructed. But it is a major infrastructure project and just how long it will take to complete is unclear. Wherein lies the emissions problem of the ERF project.

The ERF is to be built on land that has been remediated, NZT, a much larger infrastructure project, is to be built on land where remediation is incomplete. The time lapse between the completion of the ERF and completion of the carbon capture facility could be a matter of years.

So, what will happen to the emissions from the ERF plant in the meantime? Essentially, they will be released into the atmosphere, which is undesirable in general, but particularly so given the proximity of the plant to Grangetown and South Bank.

Incinerators are also controversial, and unpopular with environmentalists, as they have been shown to lead to a significant reduction in the amount of waste that is recycled in their area of operation. In addition to that is the fact of the incinerator designs that are available, ERF is widely disfavoured on account of emissions standards – allowed in England, where environmental protections are weak, but banned in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and much of the EU.

All a little irresponsible, especially on the part of RCBC planning department, you may think. So how did it come about? 

The 20 July Planning Meeting

 A source who provided information on condition of anonymity has stated that the decision at the planning committee meeting in July was rushed, and those few members attending were pressured to approve the application. Part of the rush was to do with technical documents which should have been circulated months (up to two years) before the meeting but which were finally presented on the day of the meeting, thereby making proper scrutiny impossible. There is no rational explanation for this given that the applicant was not an outside agency but Redcar Council itself.

The meeting itself was poorly attended, with only five councillors present, along with planning officials who were very insistent that the application go through. The councillors were less than enthusiastic, and the motion was passed with two for, one against, and two abstentions.

In addition to this, as we later learned, information on costs was also not available at the time of the meeting (and a month later was still not available, according to documents seen by Tees Valley Monitor). The issue of cost is, inevitably, important.

Follow the money

The consortium of local authorities will pay for the construction and operation of the plant. The standard arrangement on the Teesworks site is for freehold on the land to pass from STDC to Teesworks Ltd when a client undertakes a leasing agreement. (That’s 90% developer-owned Teesworks). All of these costs are currently unknown, yet the planning committee passed the planning application despite the fact that a proportion of those costs will fall on RCBC.

Furthermore, objections had been raised by stakeholders earlier in the year regarding the suitability of the site itself given that the ground is contaminated, and construction involves piling where there is a risk of disturbing material that may further contaminate groundwater. Now, it’s true that all of the land at Teesworks is contaminated to some degree, and this does not preclude redevelopment. However the proposed site of TV ERF is of particular concern as it falls, at least in part, on the site of the former Cleveland Iron Works, as revealed by the maps submitted with the planning application.

Cleveland Iron Works, the background

The Cleveland Iron Works had its own coke battery, and it is this that will have been responsible for much of the ground contamination on the site. Here, the coke battery was built in the mid-1930s. It was therefore at least twenty years older than the recently demolished South Bank Coke Battery. As a rule of thumb, the older the coke battery is, the more polluting it is.

In a previous article (Poison Earth: How Teesworks Exports its Toxic Legacy)  where we discussed contamination levels in Tees sediment, we asked the question why one area of the estuary bed was much more heavily contaminated than the rest. That contamination was traced back to the site of the Cleveland Iron Works, which was still releasing contaminants into watercourses decades after the plant had been demolished.

Concerns over the risk of further contamination of groundwater were presented to the Council during consultation in April this year. By what sleight-of-hand they were set aside is currently unclear, and the standard (for such projects) application of a risk assessment is unlikely to resolve the issues. 

The Application is successful despite objections

It is remarkable that, given objections raised by councillors during the meeting, the application was given the green light, but such, it appears, are the intricacies of procedure at RCBC, especially in planning, where the relative powers of planning officers over elected representatives has been a running sore for several years now.

The issues around planning consent for an incinerator will always be fraught with difficulty given the multiple ways in which they remain controversial, but this one was particularly so, given that the application made in 2023 was for an incinerator of inferior design to that which gained outline planning permission in 2020. And there was no mitigation demanded as a condition of that permission (because the papers were submitted too late for anyone to formulate that demand. One such compensatory element could have been the stipulation that the chimney be higher than in the original design (this would mitigate some of the air pollution issue for the surrounding towns) but no such demand could be made.

Inevitably, this raises further questions. In particular, we have to ask, why the haste to grant this permission? Who stands to gain from it?

Answer, Teesworks. Because Teesworks has a long-running problem with electricity supply, one that should have been resolved much earlier.

The Problem of Power Supply at Teesworks

Providing basic utilities to the Teesworks site is, needless to say, a precondition of its redevelopment. Board papers for the STDC during 2020 show that the need to deliver high voltage power was high up on the agenda due to demand from potential clients:

It was decided that a joint venture partner needed to be sought to deliver the high voltage infrastructure. This went out to tender in the summer of 2020, and at the same time board papers indicate that TV ERF (described as a ‘power station’) and another company. P-Mac, had approached STDC with a view to supplying power to the site:

The paper states that it is expected that the name of the successful bidder will be presented to the board in November 2020. But the November statement isn’t published. The following year, in July, there is a further reference to the JV partnership which is also unpublished, but we assume that this must contain news that the joint venture company had just been set up.



The joint venture company is Teesworks Power, and it is shown in Companies’ House filings to be dormant …

… although, oddly, STDC was spending money on it, as this excerpt from the finance director’s report in December 2021 shows:

But the fact that STDC doesn’t have a JV partner, and it is the partner’s job to provide HV infrastructure, that presumably means that the infrastructure the need for which has been clearly identified by potential clients, is not currently being created. And, moreover, the existing electricity is being supplied by the National Grid, while the scheme as a whole needs to be able to provide its own power supply if it is to progress and attract those companies who will deliver the thousands of jobs that the mayor keeps talking about.



But now, as detailed recently in Private Eye (no. 1606, 8 September 2023), there is a renewed sense of urgency as STDC’s role in the venture will shortly draw to a close, and with it the public funds that have so far supported it. After that, responsibility for the site passes to Teesworks Ltd and the developers who have profited from it without bearing any of the costs. 

Now TV ERF can provide that power supply, or at least some of it. This week Houchen has been advertising the possible return of Steel making to Teesside, with plans to build an electric arc furnace. These facilities are known to be very heavy energy users. Whether or not the power generated at TV ERF will be sufficient to supply such a furnace we cannot say. That is for the experts, but we might question whether a plant such as this is feasible at all while Teesworks is dependent on National Grid supply as it is at the moment.

So is there a connection between the urgency in evidence at the planning committee meeting on 20 July and the forthcoming handover of responsibility for the Teesworks site to the developers? We have no direct evidence that pressure was brought to bear on council officials to rush this application through with a minimum of scrutiny, but the coincidence is remarkable.

To add to our suspicions, a recent article in the Yorkshire Post reported an incident in which it has been revealed that the TVCA bullied officials at RCBC (over planning for a roundabout, where they threatened to withhold funding to the council if their demands weren’t met).

The incinerator and the clean, green jobs of the future

Several issues relating to the establishment of TV ERF are depressingly familiar on Teesside. At one point in time STDC needs a joint venture partner to create the power infrastructure for the Teesworks site. When none is found, it turns out that they don’t need one after all. Compare this to events at Teesside Airport, which, when it was brought into public ownership needed a joint venture partner to provide airport operator expertise. When that partner pulled out of the venture, the airport company did not bring in new specialists. And the aviation business is floundering on account of it.

Net Zero Teesside is the centre piece of the clean, green revolution on the back of which thousands of jobs are to be generated on Teesside.  Or so the mayor would have us believe. But the project is novel, experimental and subsidized by government. Will that subsidy continue? Will the system actually deliver what it says on the tin? No one knows. No one appears to know what the timescale is for the project to go live either. Much of the industry around the Tees has a large carbon footprint. That is not set to change until NZT is up and running. So, the outline planning application for the TV ERF in 2020 was heavily reliant on the delivery of another project. An overpromised outcome.

And despite what was promised, TV ERF will not be delivering clean, green jobs. In fact, it will be delivering the opposite – power generation that will create air pollution as well as significant carbon dioxide emissions, and lower levels of waste recycling.

And who will suffer most from those emissions? Most of the time it will be the people of Grangetown and South Bank, but, depending on which way the wind is blowing, it will be users of the Teesworks Skills Academy, which is situated next door to the site of the new plant. At which point, we wonder, will Houchen abandon his office there?