Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen is proposing a giant waste incinerator to be built in Grangetown, next to one of he most deprived neighbourhoods in Europe. This project, known as the Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility (TVERF) will burn waste from all 12 local authorities in the North East of England, and will serve a population of over 2.4 million people, over 360% greater than the population of the Tees Valley itself.
But this horror show can’t be allowed to happen, can it? Well the bad news is that, regardless of whether the TVERF is ever built, not only has the horror show already happened, the situation is already far worse than the future proposal. The Tees Valley is already burning waste for 3.9 million people, an incredible 576% of the population of the area. How on earth did we get here? Ever heard of the ‘Boiling Frog Syndrome’? No? Well, you are about to:
Boiling frog syndrome
Boiling frog syndrome is a (since discredited) theory that you could place a live frog in a pan of cold water, then slowly turn up the heat. The frog doesn’t notice the water slowly getting warmer and warmer and remains calm until the water starts boiling and kills the frog. In this analogy, the people of the Tees Valley are the frog, and a slow unnoticed build up of incinerator capacity is the boiling water that is now killing us.
How it started
Back in 1998 a company called SITA (Now part of French company Suez) built an incinerator at Haverton Hill near Billingham to replace the Portrack Incinerator in Stockton-on-Tees. This incinerator, known as Teesside Energy from Waste (EfW) is operated on behalf of the four former Cleveland County Council local authorities. These authorities had become unitary authorities on 1 April 1996 after the abolition of Cleveland County Council, but they retained their partnership to manage waste. The authorities are Hartlepool, Stockton-on-Tees, Middlesbrough and Redcar/Cleveland.
The water starts to warm up
Soon after the Teesside EfW began operation, it began to accept waste from the first local authority outside of Teesside. This was (and still is) North Tyneside, one of the five unitary authorities of the former Tyne & Wear Council, abolished in 1986. The date that this happened is difficult to ascertain, but they still send their waste to the Teesside EfW.
2009 – Northumberland joins in
2009 saw a major expansion of Teesside EfW to accommodate a contract to accept waste from Northumberland County Council. The green credentials of energy from waste were strained by the concept of lorries making 200-mile round-trips from the Scottish border to Billingham loaded with waste, so Northumberland County Council and Suez softened the blow by announcing that a disused freight railway track next to the plant would be re-opened to allow waste to be delivered by rail. This was cynical greenwashing at its worst. Neither party had any intention of opening a rail facility, and it still hasn’t opened to this day. The local Teesside media were even celebrating this as a “green” success story.
The more the merrier
The next expansion of Teesside EfW took place within a year between 2013 and 2014. Firstly a 2013 contract to accept waste from Durham County Council. This also includes waste from the unitary authority of Darlington, which has retained the waste disposal arrangements that existed before it was split from Durham County in 1997. Then, in 2014, a contract to burn waste from the three of the former five Tyne and Wear local authorities that make up the South Tyne & Wear Waste Management Partnership – Gateshead, South Tyneside and City of Sunderland.
In my Liverpool home
So, by 2014, Teesside was burning all of the domestic waste from the edge of the North York Moors in the south, to the Scottish border in the north, with the exception of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. If the frog was getting uncomfortable in the now-simmering water it didn’t show, and things were about to get a lot worse. Suez, then known as SITA, signed a contract with the Merseyside Recycling and Waste Authority (MRWA) to remove all of the waste from Merseyside and Halton local authorities (with a total population of more than 1.5 million people) and move it by rail to be burned at a new EfW plant to be known as Wilton 11, sited within the former ICI WIlton complex on Teesside. The plant became operational in April 2017, contributing a small, but useful, 50MW of power to the National Grid. Except when it doesn’t. They’ve had to send a turbine rotor back to the manufacturers, and the plant hasn’t generated any power for the last six months. But at least, unlike Teesside EfW, they do actually move the waste to the plant by rail.
Burn, Baby, Burn
So the Tees Valley is currently burning the waste of 3.9 million people, due to increase to 4.2 million if we agree to accept the waste from Newcastle upon Tyne. And are the people of Newcastle happy about sending their waste down to Teesside to get burned? I guess not. If we are serious about sustainability and dealing with the impact of climate change, we shouldn’t be burning anywhere near this amount of waste, let alone trundling it all over the North East of England in diesel trucks.
So what is the point of the Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility (TVERF)?
I’m glad you asked that question, because there is a very simple answer: There isn’t one. Wilton 11EfW’s contract with MRWA isn’t affected by the TVERF.The facility at Teesside EfW is modern and efficient, so there will be no efficiencies gained by replacing it. The proponents of TVERF talk about the extra electricity that will be generated there (50MW, coincidentally the same amount generated by Wilton 11) but 89% of that electricity is already being generated at Teesside EfW. The only energy gain will be from burning of waste from Newcastle upon Tyne. This will be about 5.5MW. This is not a significant quantity of electricity.
The power game
To put 5.5MW in context, an electric arc furnace uses electricity at a rate of 200 MW per hour during an average 37 minute charge. This is 36 times the additional amount of power planned to be generated by the TVERF. More starkly, we can contrast the TVERF with the power generated by Hartlepool Power Station, which is 1,200 MW. Hartlepool generates 218 times the additional power planned to be gained from the TVERF. Houchen has never included this information in any of his press statements.
TVERF has been dead since March 2023
The latest press release central government press release was 30 March 2023 as an accompaniment to the 2023 budget. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt told energy secretary Grant Shapps that TVERF wouldn’t receive carbon capture subsidies in the 2023/2024 funding round, for projects to commence in 2026. This effectively killed TV ERF stone dead. The project leader, Hartlepool Council chief executive Denise McGuckin admitted as much, but the local UK media didn’t pick up on it. McGuckin may have been hoping for a carbon capture allocation in the 2024 budget last month, but the Department for Energy, as with most departments, has had its 2024/2025 budget slashed, and that was never a realistic proposition. So the earliest date that funding for TVERF could be released would now be 2027. But Rachel Reeves is expected to become Chancellor of the Exchequer in October 2024, and she mau deliver the coup de grâce to TVERF.
So if TVERF is stone dead, why is Houchen still talking it up?
I expect because he is up for re-election on 2 May.
Carbon capture caper
Incredibly over at Teesside EfW, which will be doomed to closure if TVERF ever goes ahead, they have been making plans for the carbon generated by the plant to be captured and sequestered under the North Sea as part of the East Coast Cluster project. Allegedly the project will generate an additional 50 new jobs.
But the pantomime continues
Although the lack of funding for TVERF has rendered it null and void, the bureaucracy it generates is keeping a lot of people in ‘gainful’ employment. Every cloud has a silver lining. Redcar and Cleveland Council have given the TVERF planning permission. The Environment Agency was on the verge of a decision about whether to issue a permit to TVERF, but its parent, DEFRA, has been thrown into turmoil, and has suspended the issue of permits for all incinerators for 50 days until 24 May 2024 due to the shenanigans of the man in charge of the department, Steve Barclay.
What if you don’t want an incinerator in your town?
Well I’m afraid that there is nothing that you can do about it. Unless you are Steve Barclay, MP for North East Cambridgeshire and someone is trying to build a massive, ugly eyesore of an incinerator in the town of Wisbech. If this happens, MP Steve Barclay can ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Steve Barclay, to lean on the civil servants in the Environment Agency, which he runs, to refuse a permit for this new incinerator. If you are caught out, say that you know nothing about it, pretend that you are recusing yourself from the case, then leave it to junior minister Mark Spencer to sort out.
Yet ANOTHER ERF for Teesside?
On 3 April 2024 Stockton Borough Council planning committee recommended permission for a 30 MW ERF in Seal Sands to be built by a company called Solar 21. A £500mn investment with 200 jobs which will burn domestic waste. This is a renewal of a planning application going back 11 years. Seal Sands has an incredibly long history of failed ERF projects. For some reason Houchen hasn’t been crowing about this yet, but we’ll give him time. Solar 21 has not stated where they will obtain the feedstock for their incinerator. But we know that all domestic waste in the North East of England is already allocated to Suez incinerators on Teesside, or the soon-to-be-doomed TVERF. Perhaps Solar 21 have struck up a deal with a local authority in yet another part of the UK to send their waste to be burned on Teesside. If this is the case, I think we should be told who they are. I doubt whether there is any such deal though. In my view this scheme has next to zero chance of ever happening.
Further reading
Statistical analysis of Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility
Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility – statistical analysis – Google Sheets
