Eye on Infrastructure
Nothing Will Drive Green Growth Better Than Low-Cost Green Energy “Cherish the natural world because you’re a part of it and you depend on it” Sir David Attenborough
Sara Venning, CEO NI Water
for energy and water. This presents a huge opportunity. One of the ways NI Water is already contributing to reducing carbon is planting trees. NI Water CEO Sara Venning says “Trees being planted near our rivers and streams helps reduce the effect of climate change by capturing carbon and slowing river flow. Using NI Water land to plant trees, offsets the carbon emissions from NI Water’s electricity consumption. Tree roots also act as a natural water filter. “As the second biggest landowner in Northern Ireland after the Forest Service, NI Water’s ambition is to plant 1 million trees over the next 10 years to improve
water quality, capture carbon, mitigate floods and enhance the natural environment. This NI Water initiative, supports the NI Executive’s Green Growth strategy by improving the landscape and environment and moving towards a net zero carbon economy.” As we decarbonise, most of our future energy requirement will be for green electricity. In the next ten years we will need to double our renewable generating capacity, just as our nearest neighbours plan to do. Most of this renewable capacity will be from cost competitive wind generation. This shift to high percentages of renewable generation will bring challenges that NI Water can play a pivotal role in addressing by acting as a pathfinder in establishing practical decarbonised infrastructure solutions. NI Water’s Director of Business
Services, Alistair Jinks says, “Our existing electricity system infrastructure is not currently capable of accommodating the level of renewable generation we’ll require in the future. As the cost-competitiveness of Electric Vehicles (EVs) versus internal combustion engine vehicles approaches, NIE Networks have confirmed that they will need much greater flexibility in their network solutions to reduce the need for traditional reinforcement and higher costs for customers.” NI Water already has generators connected to the electricity system services to help manage intermittency, provide resilience and system flexibility but there is significant scope to harness further resources. NI Water’s large number of electricity consuming assets hold remarkable potential. For example the major pumps in our
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s we emerge from the health pandemic and address recovery we have a once in a life time opportunity to reset our economy for Green Growth. In this endeavour NI Water’s extensive and largely unseen assets have significant potential to help Northern Ireland become self-sufficient in low-cost green energy. It is worth pausing to reflect on the phrase “self-sufficient in low-cost green energy” and how critical this is to a successful Green Growth economic strategy. Northern Ireland is extremely well placed to achieve a Net Zero carbon energy transition across all sectors. It has an abundance of wind energy resource, is geographically compact, and has a single Utility Regulator
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Planting 1 Million trees for a greener future. L-R John Joe O’Boyle Forest Service, Minister Edwin Poots DAERA, Ian McCurley Woodland Trust, Alistair Jinks NI Water.
