Blog: The sustainable progress being made at Tyseley Energy Park

The site’s heritage is long and fascinating. It dates back to 1720, when Joseph West Webster, an ironmonger, founded Joseph West & Co., an ironworks that would have a significant influence on Birmingham’s industrial scene.

Since then, TEP has cultivated tight links with the local community. Residents have been long employed as workers in the site’s ironworks, benefiting from the facilities that management developed over the centuries. Now, with the site turned into a world-class clean energy research hub, TEP is reigniting its relationships with the local community and the businesses and organisations that operate in it. How? Tommy Allsopp, Sustainability Manager at TEP and a recent graduate in Chemical Engineering at the University of Birmingham, has given us some interesting insights.

Nurturing environmental awareness in younger generations

When thinking of engaging the local community, schools are a natural starting point:

“This area of Birmingham is one of the most deprived nationally, in the top 20%, and it has quite a diverse community,” explained Tommy. “It’s quite difficult to engage due to divisions and just having such a vast range of languages and people. We found that the best way to get through a community like this is through school and learners. They’re able to travel that engagement up through to their parents.”

TEP has already organised opportunities for local youth to get involved in its activities and learn about the future of energy. This is crucial to  educate a new generation to be more environmentally conscious than in the past.

“The youth of today will probably be more affected by the environmental irresponsibility of the previous generations,” commented Tommy. “But they also have a unique opportunity to pioneer future solutions. We try to nurture that development.”

As part of this commitment, TEP offers sessions for primary school students and below. During these visits, students learn about climate change and the energy solutions being explored at TEP.

TEP’s commitment to educating future generations on the role of energy dates back to the origins of the site. In fact, the energy park still has a school room originally built by James Horsfall, one of the founding fathers of Webster & Horsfall, for the children of the plant’s workers. After falling into disuse, the room is now being redeveloped as a hub for school visits, reviving the link between TEP and the community engagement initiatives it carries on through local students.

A new, more structured programme for secondary school learners is also being developed. This leverages corporate partnerships, such as those existing with National Gas, SSE and EDF Energy, to allow students to explore career pathways in the green economy.

Supporting local regeneration initiatives 

During TEP’s industrial past, the local community provided the workforce for the site’s plants. As a result, much infrastructure was built to take care of the workforce’s needs – from schools to leisure facilities. Throughout the 70s and 80s, however, much of the work was outsourced to cheaper overseas locations, meaning that community investment started to decline – and with it the state of available facilities.

Luckily, with the community being once more at the heart of TEP’s activities, the energy park is in the process of regenerating some of the assets that had originally been built. One notable example is the Birmingham River Cole Community Commons project – £1.5M initiative in partnership with the University of Birmingham aimed at reviving green spaces and enhancing biodiversity in the area. The project, covering 55 hectares of previously underused space, is the first step in creating a Green Innovation Quarter in the Tyseley Environmental Enterprise District.

This initiative will help ensure that local residents benefit from net zero innovation and research carried on in East Birmingham. It also showcases the potential of having a sustainability-focused energy hub that connects businesses, public spaces and private homes with a common mission to create a more sustainable tomorrow.

Supporting energy policy-makers

As well as engaging local residents and businesses in its activities, TEP plays a crucial role in providing policy-makers with the necessary data to make informed decisions on the future of energy.

This is often carried out in partnership with the Birmingham Energy Institute, which is part of the University of Birmingham. Recent policy work done at the Institute has directly contributed in developing guidelines and best practice recommendations in fields as diverse as energy from waste, heat decarbonisation, hydrogen and more.

In this context, TEP acts not only as a provider of critical data and information, but also as the ideal setting to launch pilot programmes aimed at testing the latest energy innovations. One of these is the Ammogen project, a £6.7M initiative funded by DESNZ which will be researching the potential of generating hydrogen from ammonia cracking. The programme is expected to produce 200 Kg of hydrogen a day, and is the largest ammonia-to-hydrogen conversion project in the world.

Similar projects can offer essential data to policy-makers to decide whether to scale-up new energy initiatives nationwide. Interestingly, thanks to the community engagement work done by TEP, local residents are mostly on board with new research initiatives and support the work done by the energy institute:

“Having such close ties with the community, we’ve seen little to no resistance to what we’re doing,” confirms Tommy. “It’s a very cohesive network.”

Thanks to the involvement of the local residents and of businesses and organisations that operate in the territory, TEP is leading the way in sharing best practices that will hopefully change our energy future for the better. There is, however, one thing that would help in this mission: regulatory clarity.

“For us it’s about streamlining regulation,” concludes Tommy. “Looking at some really old legislative frameworks, simplifying them and making them more supportive of the change in all energy systems is going to be pretty crucial to speed up deployment of clean energy solutions.”

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