Tucked away in Electricity North West’s Blackburn depot in Whitebirk, storage tanks, pipes, a lab and a team of experts are working to keep power flowing to customers.
Oil is used to keep key equipment in electricity substations safe and cool, as up to 132,000 volts of electricity passes through transformers to reduce down to safe levels for use.
Electricity North West is the only regional power network operator in the UK to run its own oil reprocessing plant and reprocesses 1.5m litres of oil a year.
Kimberley Whitehead, department manager at Electricity North West, said: “We’ve been reprocessing oil from all over the North West here in Blackburn since 1980 – that’s around 57 million litres. All of which helps extend the life of key equipment from Cheshire to Cumbria.
“It’s a fantastic and critical part of the business, both for the environment in reducing waste, and in helping reduce costs on power bills. Reprocessing our own oil is much better value than buying new oil each time we need it and it’s better for our equipment.”
It is estimated that by reprocessing oil in this way electricity bill payers in the North West will save more than £32 million over eight years.
Graham Jones said: “It was great to be invited to Electricity North West’s Central oil reprocessing department (CORD) facility, based here in the Hyndburn constituency, to see first-hand how innovation is helping to make savings for our customers.
“The department recovers and reprocesses transformer oil which is put back into the network, recycling over 1.5 million litres per year. Following a recent investment of £2.1m, the upgraded facility includes an oil processing plant room, a laboratory, an automated tank farm and recently introduced new mobile equipment used for onsite transformer regeneration, an innovation project which extends the life of a transformer.
“I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to CORD and would like to thank Electricity North West and their staff for taking the time to show me around this fascinating facility.”
You can find out more about this and Electricity North West’s other innovation projects at www.enwl.co.uk/innovation.
