Opportunity knocks

My firm now works almost exclusively on renewable energy projects, after years in basic heating, ventilation and air-conditioning.

However, since entering the renewable energy sphere, I have found there is an unhealthy trend for companies to use government sponsored monies to produce useless feasibility reports that cannot be converted into workable schemes. I have numerous reports on my desk, paid for by government funding, which do little to enable a client to act upon the content in a positive manner. It seems to me that they just want to be paid for an unproductive, inconclusive, and sometimes expensive bundle of paper.

Equally, I am concerned over numerous failed biomass heating projects. They have failed as a result of a long lists of problems, including poor basic design, wrong fuel supplies, poor existing infrastructure, and a lack of equipment spares in the UK. And it is these poor installations, rather than the few good ones, that will influence developers, funders and users.

As a practice we have a number of biomass based projects in hand. What we do is not new, we are just doing it with cruder fuels, rather than the ones we have wasted over the last 30 and more years. For too long we have shied away from technologies that impact on our professional indemnity insurance. As your leader says, we have a window of opportunity, but this will only be open for so long.

On a final note. We moan about the US and its environmental policies, but is doing a lot state by state that isn’t necessarily led by central government. It makes you think.

Bruce Boucher MInstR, Bruce Boucher Consultancy