Green WIN secures funding from North West Europe’s (NWE) Low Carbon Priority. It addresses the problem of excess energy use and high carbon emissions Waterway Management Organisations (WMO’s) cause across NWE when pumping water around waterways.

The aim is to demonstrate improvements which deliver energy savings and reduced CO2 emissions from our pilots by the end of the project. We then make the case that if we can keep this rate of improvement up the long-term effects will multiply over time and subsequently deliver much greater reductions. We will work to increase take up of these new or improved technologies by WMO’s outside the partnership, encouraging them to install equipment demonstrated and to use the investment, procurement and business plan when their existing equipment approaches ‘end of life’.

Partners tackle this deficiency in 3 stages;

Assessing the scope for improvement and developing ways to maximise (new or adapted) pumping equipment’s effectiveness.
Piloting new technologies or processes. Trialling new pumping equipment (in our case four Trust sites across UK) and the potential for modifications to existing configurations (e.g building in renewable energy to these).
Developing investment, procurement and business planning guidelines. Other work includes researching and reviewing the regulations involved and what other barriers there are to a greater take up of this technology.

Partnership

Canal & River Trust are the Lead Partner and will work with nine other organisations from the Netherlands (Rijkswaterstaat), Belgium, Germany, France (VNF) and Ireland (Waterways Ireland) across a range of disciplines. We also will be working with the key pressure groups such as Inland Waterways International (IWI) Inland Navigation Europe (INE) and the Network of Inland Waterways Europe (NIWE – the network currently being led by the Trust).

Involvement from SME’s or their Trade Organisations is key to the project’s success and Green WIN will set up an Advisory Group to that includes these to help steer the trials and increase the likelihood of getting greener technologies, systems and processes to market.

This project was approved on 29 May 2018, should start in earnest in September 2018 and will be carried out over 3 years up to May 2021.