Diary of an engineer: More efficient = less profit

Submitted by AWL on 8 July, 2020 - 6:19 Author: Emma Rickman
Engineering plant

The new plant manager, who began work in February, has resigned after four months. His resignation email praises the professionalism and warm welcome from all staff, and offers no explanation for his leaving or details of his next job.

His message is also surprisingly poorly worded, with many spelling mistakes. I speculate that he’s unused to writing his own correspondence, and the “warm welcome” is meant sarcastically.

The control room gossip has always been “he won’t last long”. Being sandwiched between the Sheffield City director and the gang of plant Operators must have left him with very little power. When the plant tripped on an electrical fault last month, neither Northern Powergrid nor Veolia were able to resolve responsibility or cause — or at least neither would admit it to the maintenance team.

The ex-plant manager once proposed to the Operators that improving boiler efficiency should be pursued, so that the plant could extract more energy from the waste burned. The operators explained to him that the opposite was desirable — Veolia do not make money selling power and heat, they make it from the disposal of waste. Each kilo tipped on the site is paid for by the government, commercial or private customers. A private customer, such as the owner of a private GP surgery, will pay £300 per kilo to have sensitive medical records incinerated.

If the boiler were to made more efficient, each kilo of waste would transfer more of its heat into the feed water, generating more steam, driving the turbine faster for longer, and generating more power. The turbine and the generator are already kept running continuously at full capacity; with improvements to the boiler they could be kept at full capacity with less waste burnt. But Veolia want to burn as much waste as possible, filling and emptying the tipping hall quickly to make space for more waste and more customers. Waste is not a fuel to be saved, it’s a commodity on a fast-moving “low-carbon” production line; it would be more profitable to make the boiler less efficient.

My colleagues wonder if it was this absurdity which tipped our new manager over the edge. From working in steel and nuclear power where small efficiencies to huge processes save millions, he moved to a small scale bin-burner managed by petulant accountants. I didn’t like him, but sometimes I sympathise.

• Emma Rickman is an engineering apprentice in a Combined Heat and Power plant in Sheffield


Other entries in the “My Life At Work” series, and other workers' diaries

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