Just a few days before the start of COP26 - the UN Climate Change Conference - Northumbrian Water CEO Heidi Mottram says lessons can be learned from her own company's strategy.

When the Government committed the UK to a legally binding target of net zero emissions by 2050 - becoming the first major economy in the world to pass laws to end its contribution to global warming - Heidi took the responsibility fully on her shoulders and pledged that her own company will beat that deadline by a remarkable 23 years.

“This is a huge challenge, but we have come through so much already this year that I know we can get there,” Heidi told me.

“We knew the world had to reduce its emissions, so I suppose we were first-footers from that point. But it is only in the last four or five years that the urgency and crisis level of the situation has landed on a lot of people."

Read more: Get the full exclusive version of this interview here

It is already well on its way to that 2027 Net Zero target, having slashed its carbon emissions from 303,000 tonnes in 2008 to just 56,000 tonnes in 2020.

Northumbrian Water also already powers all 1,886 of its sites using renewable electricity saving 125,000 tonnes of CO2 each year and has plans for new solar installations in the next 18 months, as well as the deployment of onshore wind at more sites.

It has set a blistering pace, starting with being the first company in the UK to have a ten-year offshore wind Power Purchase Agreement to source around 30% of its electricity demand from the Race Bank offshore wind farm off the coast of Norfolk.

“Northumbrian Water has always been an incredibly environmentally-conscious business and the journey to Net Zero goes back almost a decade, whereas some people have perhaps only woken up to this more recently,” said Heidi.

“So by then we already had things like the biggest hydro turbine in England, up at Kielder and then invested in ground-breaking Advanced Anaerobic Digestion plants in 2009, which no one else was doing on this sort of scale.

“We’re the only water company in the UK to do that and although we initially used that power to power our own treatment process but we now inject the bio-methane gas produced into the grid so customers get it back as gas to cook their dinner.

“It’s the perfect circular economy.

“We have always been at the forefront which meant that we have now cut our emissions by a huge amount and the next thing we have to crack – along with a lot of work with solar power – is the conversion of our fleet of vehicles which is reliant on the market and how quickly companies are producing electric commercial vehicles.

“But then when we get to 2027 it is most certainly not ‘job done’ for us. We work massively with other supply chains and will see if we can help them in what they are doing, and we will look into things like how we construct the assets we use. There is still work to be done."

 

Read more in the full exclusive interview here where Heidi talks about:

  • The values that drive her business
  • The hugely successful Innovation Festivals
  • How to get power from poo
  • ....and a startling discovery at Hadrians Wall

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