ORE Catapult, ABP, Microsoft & Co To Create World’s Biggest Offshore Wind ‘Living Lab’ In UK
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on offshoreWIND.biz.
This is the sub-heading.
A consortium led by the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult has launched a project that will create the biggest offshore wind “living lab” in the world in the UK through the development of a 5G Testbed that includes Grimsby Port and the Lynn and Inner Dowsing offshore wind farm.
These two paragraphs outline the project, its aims and partners.
The GBP 2.8 million (approximately EUR 3.2 million) project, which will run until March 2024, involves setting up a 5G Testbed to allow technology providers to test and demonstrate their equipment in real-world conditions, with access to reliable, high-speed communications.
The aim is to kickstart a digital revolution in offshore wind operations and maintenance (O&M) and accelerate the development of a new generation of digital technologies essential for the expansion of offshore wind generation, according to ORE Catapult, which partnered with Microsoft, Vilicom, JET Connectivity, XceCo, Associated British Ports (ABP), Acceleran and Satellite Applications Catapult to realise the project.
This seems to me to be a very good idea and it is certainly well-backed.
Was Baldrick An Essex Man?
I have been looking at Network Rail’s page for Beaulieu Park station.
This is the heading.
Network Rail and Essex County Council are working together to develop proposals for the first railway station to be built on the Great Eastern main line for over 100 years.
These two paragraphs outline the project and where the finance is being obtained.
The new station is part of a wider regeneration of the Beaulieu Park estate in Chelmsford with new road infrastructure and up to 14,000 homes.
Essex County Council, in partnership with Chelmsford City Council, successfully secured £218m of funding from the Government’s Housing and Infrastructure (HIF) fund together with £34m contributions from the South East Local Enterprise Partnership and the developers of Beaulieu, Countryside and L&Q.
These features of Beaulieu Park station are listed on the page.
- Three platforms with a central loop line and new tracks to enable stopping services to call at the station while allowing fast trains to pass through unimpeded
- Step free access to all platforms via 2 lifts
- Accessible toilets, baby change facilities, waiting area and space for retail/catering
- Ticketing facilities, with ticket vending machines and a gate line
- Pedestrian and cycle access routes to the station
- 500 spaces for cycle parking and storage
- A bus interchange including bus stands for local services
- Pick up and drop off area with dedicated taxi bays
- Parking for over 700 cars, 5% of which to be designated Blue Badge bays, and motorcycle spaces, as well as dedicated parking for station staff, emergency services, and a dedicated space for service access.
Note.
- How many other parkway stations, other than Ebbsfleet International station have 700 parking spaces?
- The parking at Whittlesford Parkway can only hold 377 vehicles.
- How many other parkway stations have an overtaking loop for faster trains?
Beaulieu Park is not your average parkway station!
I have a few thoughts.
Which Of The Current Services Will Call?
The Network Rail page says this about services.
It will provide additional access to the railway with regular connections to the capital (only 40 minutes from London Liverpool Street station) and other destinations in the east of England. New tracks will enable stopping services to call at the station while allowing fast trains to pass through unimpeded.
Note.
- Trains between London and Hatfield Peverel station typically take under forty minutes.
- Two fast trains per hour (tph) between Liverpool Street and Norwich via Colchester, Ipswich and Stowmarket pass through.
- Only one of the fast trains stops at Chelmsford.
- Four stopping tph, one to each of Braintree, Clacton-on-Sea, Colchester Town and Ipswich pass through.
If all the stopping trains stopped, Beaulieu Park would have the following services.
- Braintree – 1 tph
- Chelmsford – 4 tph
- Clacton-on-Sea – 1 tph
- Colchester – 3 tph
- Colchester Town – 1 tph
- Hatfield Peverel – 1 tph
- Ingatestone – 2 tph
- Ipswich – 1 tph
- Kelvedon – 2 tph
- London Liverpool Street – 4 tph
- Marks Tey – 2 tph
- Romford – 1 tph
- Shenfield – 3 tph
- Stratford – 4 tph
- Witham – 4 tph
All trains are new Class 720 electric trains.
I also feel, that Network Rail could be being cunning.
Suppose, the Liverpool Street and Norwich express, that doesn’t stop at Chelmsford, stopped instead at Beaulieu Park.
- This would give an hourly express service between Beaulieu Park and Norwich, which stopped at Colchester, Manningtree, Ipswich, Stowmarket and Diss.
- It would also enable two tph between Beaulieu Park and Ipswich.
The 700 parking spaces at Beaulieu Park now start to make sense.
- Both Ipswich and Norwich stations are within walking distance of the town centres and the football grounds.
- Ipswich station has a shuttle bus service to the town centre and the hospital.
- Both stations have several local train services.
Beaulieu Park station appears to have been designed as a Park-and-Ride station for the Great Eastern Main Line and all its branches.
Services To And From Lowestoft
In Making Sense Of The New East Anglia Franchise, I looked in detail at Greater Anglia’s promises.
In a section, which is entitled London – Lowestoft – Yarmouth Services, I said this.
There are going to be four direct services between London and Lowestoft each day. This probably initially means two trains to London in the morning peak and two trains back in the evening one.
When, I first moved back to Suffolk in the 1970s, I regularly caught a diesel-hauled train from Wickham Market to London for the day.
This is all motherhood and apple pie for those in Lowestoft wanting to go to London, but I suspect it isn’t the easiest service for a train operator to schedule efficiently and make money.
Would a train operator really want to start a full train at Lowestoft at say six in the morning and then have it wait around all day in London before returning in the evening?
The service hasn’t started.
Services To And From Cambridge Or Peterborough
At some time in the last decade, one of the predecessors of Greater Anglia, used to run a service to Peterborough via Colchester and Ipswich, so that travellers in Essex could catch trains to the North.
Given too that Cambridge has an employment problem, if a service was run, it might attract passengers.
The Class 755 trains Could Serve Bury St. Edmunds, Cambridge, Lowestoft, Newmarket, Peterborough And Yarmouth
Consider.
- A pair of Class 755 trains would leave Liverpool Street.
- They would use electric power to run to Ipswich.
- The trains would run in one of the paths of the current hourly Ipswich service.
- Like their all electric siblings; the Class 745 trains, they would probably run most of the journey at near 100 mph.
- At Ipswich the trains would split.
- One train would go to on to Lowestoft and Yarmouth and the other would go to Cambridge and Peterborough.
If passenger numbers felt it was a good idea, I’m certain, it could be timetabled.
The Chelmsford Avoiding Line
In Will The Chelmsford Avoiding Line Be Rebuilt?, I described the avoiding line, that used to be between the two tracks at Chelmsford station.
It probably saved a few minutes, by allowing fast expresses to pass stopping trains.
Effectively, a new avoiding line is being built at Beaulieu Park, a few miles from the original position at Chelmsford.
So will the fast expresses save a few minutes?
Could The Elizabeth Line Run To Beaulieu Park?
Consider
- The end sections of the Elizabeth Line seem to be busy, as I wrote in Very Busy Lizzie.
- The City of Chelmsford is between Shenfield and Beaulieu Park.
- Paddington and Reading is 35.9 miles.
- Liverpool Street and Hatfield Peverel is 35.9 miles.
So Beaulieu Park is actually closer to London than Reading.
Perhaps, at some time in a few years, passenger traffic between Beaulieu Park and Shenfield will be such, that the Elizabeth Line will be extended to Beaulieu Park.
The ideal service from Beaulieu Park would surely be two tph to Heathrow, as getting to Heathrow from East Anglia by train needs a change at Liverpool Street.
The only drawback is that to work effectively on the Great Eastern Main Line, a sub-variant of the Class 345 trains will be needed with a 100 mph operating speed. I wrote about these trains in Extending The Elizabeth Line – High Speed Trains On The Elizabeth Line.
But they may have the advantage of being able to take the fast lines between Shenfield and Stratford.
Conclusion
Beaulieu Park may just look like any other station to serve a housing development.
But it’s a lot more than that!
- It’s a Park-and-Ride for the whole Great Eastern Main Line and London.
- It should speed up expresses between London and Colchester, Ipswich or Norwich.
- It should improve local connectivity.
- It could take a lot of traffic off the nearby A12.
- It could give the City of Chelmsford its own local metro.
- It could give Heathrow a direct link to much of Essex.
- How much carbon will be saved by passengers?
We need many more well thought out Park-and-Ride stations.
West Croydon Bus Station – 28th March 2023
This morning I went to West Croydon Bus Station, to catch the X26 bus between West Croydon station and Heathrow Airport.
This was to investigate TfL’s Superloop.
I took these pictures of the bus station.
It was nice to see a well-designed bus station, that had been built to a high standard.
English Motorway Gantries Get New, More Secure Design
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on The Guardian.
This is the sub-heading.
National Highways hopes design will prove more resilient to trespassers after last year’s Just Stop Oil protests
These two paragraphs outline the design.
National Highways has unveiled a new design for motorway gantries that it hopes will prove harder for protesters to mount and use to cause disruption.
The renovated structures, which are expected to become the standard design in England from 2025, will have their maintenance steps hidden inside their pillars and will be more difficult to gain access to without authorisation.
As a scientifically-correct non-driver, I wouldn’t support Just Stop Oil.
But I do remember a tale from a few years back, when a friend, who was travelling up the M1, towing two horses in a trailer behind his pick-up. A guy was on a motorway gantry, threatening to commit suicide and traffic was stopped for several hours.
At the time he was informed by the police, that increasingly, they were seeing suicide attempts from motorway gantries.
If these new gantries can stop a proportion of suicides, that must be a good thing all round.
Siemens Gamesa, Ørsted Link Up With UK Universities To Boost Wind Turbine Efficiency
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on offshoreWIND.biz.
This is the sub-heading.
A major collaboration between universities and energy companies has made “vital” improvements to offshore wind turbines, which could help them generate more renewable energy and reduce the UK’s reliance on fossil fuels.
This paragraph outlines the research.
The GBP 7.7 million partnership between the Universities of Sheffield, Durham, Hull, and two global energy companies, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and Ørsted, could help offshore wind turbines run for longer periods of time – boosting the amount of energy each wind farm generates.
We may not manufacture a large proportion of wind turbines, but companies do turn to UK universities, when they need important research to be done.
Floating Offshore Substation Project Secures EUDP Funding
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on offshoreWIND.biz.
This is the sub-heading.
Semco Maritime, ISC Consulting Engineers, Aalborg University, Energy Cluster Denmark, and Norway and Sweden-based Inocean have secured funding to further develop a floating offshore substation (FOSS) concept.
This is the first paragraph.
The parties announced their collaboration in 2022 and are now set to further accelerate floating offshore substation development through funding from the Energy Technology and Demonstration Program (EUDP).
These three paragraphs talk about the design.
The substation layout has been developed to fit the shape of a three-column stabilised substructure, according to the partners.
The floating offshore substation is a crucial component in the offshore wind farm industry as deeper ocean sites further from the coastline are to be utilised, the partners said.
Between 60-80 per cent of the world’s offshore wind energy potential is in areas with depths greater than 60+ metres, which presents a need for an alternative solution to bring the power to shore, such as a floating offshore substation, according to the developers.
That all seems sensible.
Apollo to Work On Celtic Sea Multi-Connection Offshore Substations
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on offshoreWIND.biz.
This is the sub-heading.
Celtic Sea Power has awarded the Aberdeen-based engineering consultants, Apollo, with the pre-FEED contract for the 400 MW Pembrokeshire Demonstration Zone Multi-connection Offshore Substation (PDZ MOS) and 2x 1 GW MOSs targeting The Crown Estate Refined Area of Search (RAoS) A offshore Wales
This is the first paragraph.
Located 19 kilometres off the Pembrokeshire coast, the PDZ MOS project is designed to allow offshore renewable energy technology developers easy access to a consented test site complete with a grid connection to prove their technology in the offshore environment.
Sounds like the sort of infrastructure that is needed, so you can tow up your experimental floating wind turbine, secure it and just plug it in.
National Grid Energise World’s First T-Pylons
The title of this post, is the same as that of this press release from National Grid.
These are the four bullet points.
- Electricity is flowing to homes and businesses through the first new pylon design in the UK for nearly 100 years.
- Major milestone in National Grid’s Hinkley Connection project to connect 6 million homes and businesses in the South West to home grown, low carbon energy.
- The T-design, with a single pole and cross shaped arms, is around a third shorter than the traditional design with a smaller ground footprint.
- The T-pylons, along with a new substation and underground cabling, are now incorporated into National Grid’s electricity transmission network delivering electricity in Somerset and across England and Wales.
This is the first paragraph.
National Grid has successfully energised 36 of the world’s first T-pylons between Bridgwater and Loxton in Somerset. The new shaped pylons have been constructed as part of the £900 million Hinkley Connection Project, a new 57 km high-voltage electricity line that will connect six million homes and businesses to new sources of home grown, low carbon energy and help the UK to meet its net zero by 2050 target.
There is a video in the press release, which is well worth a view.
- The size of the pylons certainly reduces their visibility.
- It appears there are seven cables on either side.
These pictures show the transmission lines to the Sizewell power station site.
Note.
- The lower height is very noticeable.
- There seem’s to be a lot more wires.
- I would assume, that the reduced number of components, reduces the cost of installation and maintenance.
The installation proved that even in the most mundane of applications, innovation can bring positive results.
The T-pylons are a design by Danish company; Bystrup.
This is the specification from their comprehensive web-page.
- Power – 2 x 400 kV
- Height – 35 metres / 114 feet
- Units/km – 3 (5 units/mile)
- Material – Hot-dip galvanised steel, painted
- Assembly – On-site and quick – less than 10 parts
- Installation – Simple monopile foundation
- Production possible anywhere in the world
- Developed – 2011-2014
They’ve also won several awards.
- 1st prize in int. competition for RIBA
- Nominated for the IET Innovation Award 2014
- Gold Prize, CIGRE Seoul 2017
- Award winner, UK Steel Awards (SSDA) 2017
I would hope to see more in the UK.
‘Lift-off’ – Project To Provide Step-Free Access At Bexley Station In Kent Kicked Off In February
The title of this post is the same as that of this press release from Network Rail.
This is the sub-heading.
Network Rail has kicked off construction of a new footbridge and lifts at Bexley station which will provide passengers with a fully accessible station.
These four paragraphs outline the scheme.
This project, which is funded through the Department of Transport’s (DfT) ‘Access for All’ scheme, is expected to be completed in late spring 2024 and will ensure there is step-free access to all of the station’s platforms.
Network Rail will be working with contractors BAM Nuttall to install two 16-person capacity lifts which will be located behind the existing subway and help passengers with impaired mobility or those travelling with luggage, children, or cycles to access the platforms.
Platform one will be widened to create space for the lifts and allow passengers to navigate through the station a lot easier.
Alongside this, a new footbridge will be built to allow passengers easily get from one side of the platform to the other.
I’m surprised that lifts are being added to the existing subway, rather than being added to the new footbridge.
Looking at the statistics for Bexley and nearby stations, I suspect that Bexley station has more traffic.
This Google Map shows Bexley station.
As there appears to be a lot more housing and the car park to the North of the railway, I suspect there’s a lot of crossing of the railway by passengers.
So it does seem that Network Rail have designed scheme for the number of passengers, which is something Transport for London haven’t done with the buses, where I live.
On a visit to the station on the 14th of March, I took these pictures.
This is a Network Rail visualisation of how it will look.
The visualisation is looking towards the East.
World’s First Offshore Vessel Charging System Completes Harbour Trials
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on offshoreWIND.biz.
This is the sub-heading.
MJR Power and Automation, together with Blackfish Engineering and Tidal Transit, have completed the harbour trials of the company’s platform-mounted automated offshore power and charging system.
Reading the article, this appears to be a very comprehensive system, that allows electric or hybrid wind farm servicing vessels to top up their batteries efficiently before returning to base.
Surely, it is better to do it this way by developing the charging network before bringing the battery and hybrid vessels into service.
The Anonymous Widower 