Say it quietly… electrification is back on the agenda
THIS July marks three years since the Government announced the cutting back of electrification schemes across the UK.
The Great Western Main Line from Cardiff to Swansea, the Midland Main Line from Kettering to Sheffield, and the Windermere Line were all victims of a curtailed electrification programme in the wake of rising costs on Great Western.
As then-Secretary of State for Transport Chris Grayling said in his Written Ministerial Statement at the time, the focus would now be on improving journey times with “state-of-theart trains, instead of carrying out disruptive electrification works along the whole of these routes”.
Three years later, the Department for Transport published its Decarbonising
Transport: Setting the Challenge Green Paper as the industry began the first week of lockdown due to the Coronavirus outbreak.
The document heralded a significant change in policy, a shift in the Government’s view of electrification. Contained within it, the policy said that the Government “recognise that electrifying more of the railway is likely to be necessary to deliver decarbonisation”.
On rail freight, the document said that “direct government intervention to roll out further electrification” will be required.
The shift in policy is clear. And when taken with the imminent Network Rail-led Traction Decarbonisation Network Study (TDNS, which is set to recommend a significant amount of electrification work) and NR Chief Executive Andrew Haines’ comments on the need for electrification ( RAIL 905), it is obvious the wind is changing.
The key question the industry needs to ask ourselves now is: how did we get here and, more importantly, what comes next?
The decarbonisation challenge
In the past, business cases for electrification projects were made on the journey time improvements and the lower long-term costs for an intensively used route. But increasing public awareness of the UK’s impact on climate change has meant a rightful shift of focus to electrification’s green credentials.
For transport, the need to decarbonise is becoming a bigger concern as other industries reduce their emissions.
As the Committee on Climate Change reported, transport continues to be the largestemitting sector in the UK, accounting for 27% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2016. And worryingly, transport is the only sector where emissions are still growing.
Of course, cars, vans and HGVs make up the most significant source of emissions. But while rail accounts for less than 1% of total transport emissions, there is a consensus in the industry that rail could be left behind if we become complacent.
The growing pressure on the Government to act on climate change was the likely reason for then-Rail Minister Jo Johnson’s announcement in 2018 that the rail network would remove all diesel-only trains from the network by 2040. The industry was set the challenge of assessing how this could be done, with an industry taskforce formed - led by Angel Trains Chief Executive Malcolm Brown.
Lower electrification costs
Meanwhile, the Government was under growing pressure to review electrification’s role in the future of the rail network. The Transport Select Committee had launched an inquiry into rail infrastructure investment, and its findings in the summer of 2018 were clear: “Electrification should be delivered through a long-term rolling programme in which the Department, Network Rail and the wider industry learn the lessons of earlier schemes and strive to reduce the costs.”
However, as the TSC highlighted, the ultimate barrier was cost, with cost overruns on the Great Western Electrification Programme (GWEP) in particular having had a damaging effect on the Government’s confidence in the industry to deliver. Throughout 2018 it was increasingly clear that if the Government was to sign off future schemes, that confidence needed to be restored.
That was the aim when the Railway Industry Association (RIA) began putting together its
Electrification Cost Challenge. The report, published in March 2019, sought to review past projects such as GWEP and assess how cost-effective electrification can be delivered.
Contrary to public perception, the report found that many electrification schemes in the UK were being delivered to time and budget. While the problematic schemes are often the most well-publicised, 75% of the schemes analysed across the UK and internationally
were being delivered at the right cost.
The report showed that around £0.75 million to £1m per standard track kilometre (STK) for simple projects and around £1m to £1.5m/STK for more complex ones should be the benchmark for appropriate overhead line cost. And there are examples of recent schemes that have been delivered at that rate - including most Scottish projects, the Midland Main Line and the Bristol-Cardiff section of Great Western.
The report also had a lot to say about GWEP, where novel technologies had not been sufficiently tested before use and where insufficient planning and premature cost estimates had led to an increase in cost.
In particular, a ‘high output’ system was developed for GWEP to maximise productivity of delivering overhead line electrification through a ‘factory train’. However, this overlapped with design and delivery of the
“Increasing public awareness of the UK’s impact on climate change has meant a rightful shift of focus to electrification’s green credentials.”
scheme, leading to poor productivity that could not be recovered due to a completion date which had been set before the scheme was fully planned.
The report identified the lessons and good practice from the Great Western programme and other contemporaneous projects and demonstrated that if these are applied electrification can be delivered efficiently.
The Rail Industry Decarbonisation Taskforce reported back in July 2019, setting out how the industry could meet the Minister’s challenge of decarbonising by 2040. Its report set electrification in context, looking at what solutions would be necessary on different parts of the route. The report set out three different types of rail line:
■ Category 1: The core network, where traffic is most intense and thus there is a business case to electrify. Delivered via rolling electrification programme. ■ Category 2: The parts of the network for which, due to lower traffic levels or long distances, there is unlikely to be a business case for continuous electrification. On these lines there is an opportunity to introduce new zerocarbon technology in volume within five years, as existing fleets come due for replacement (such as in hydrogen technology).
■ Category 3: The parts of the network between so-called Category 1 and 2, served in the medium term by bi-mode trains that draw power from the OLE in electrified areas, but which are self-powered ‘off the wires’ currently by diesel. Here a rolling programme of electrification would be needed, with new low-carbon technologies such as batteries used for ‘hopping’ between wired rail.
The report, alongside RIA’s Electrification
Cost Challenge, provided a clear path to decarbonising the network.
Changing political consensus
A new Prime Minister in July 2019 led to a Government reshuffle and a change to the Ministerial team at the Department for Transport.
When the General Election was then called in December 2019, it was a welcome surprise to see all main national political parties commit in their manifestos to the continued electrification of all transport modes, marking a considerable shift in view (particularly from the Conservatives).
However, the shift in policy should perhaps not be a surprise, with the Government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda focusing on regional growth and with a strong impetus for green growth - both make further electrification work particularly attractive.
Of course, the Coronavirus pandemic will have an impact on our rail network, but for a Government seeking an environmental economic bounce-back, electrification remains a worthwhile investment.
What comes next?
The industry is clear that any future electrification work needs to be delivered in a rolling programme where investment is predictable and smoothed over the medium to long term, so that the industry can build up capabilities to deliver cost-effectively.
Last year, Network Rail began work on its
Traction Decarbonisation Network Study (TDNS), with an interim report to be published in July and the full report in October. It is expected that this will recommend a rolling programme of work that will result in the frontier of electrification being extended across the UK, without repeating the ‘ boom and bust’ approaches to electrification that the UK has experienced in the past.
Simultaneously, there is also pressure from political leaders in the Midlands and Wales to reinstate plans that were cut back in 2017, as well as to fully electrify projects like the transPennine route and East West Rail.
The sooner the Government moves on, the better. Work concluded in January on BristolCardiff and work to electrify the Midland Main Line is almost complete. Without further work, the current expertise that the sector has built up will dissipate as skilled workers move to other sectors.
On the other hand, an early decision creates the opportunity to both retain these jobs and create many more, as the industry ramps up to the decarbonisation challenge ahead.
There is a ‘burning platform’ to get the rolling programme established, particularly given the time required to plan for work. There is always the threat of ‘paralysis by analysis’, where reviewing plans leads to projects getting postponed indefinitely.
Conclusion
The prospects are good for electrification, and there has been a considerable shift in Government and client attitude to projects. Industry also recognises that it has a responsibility to continue to deliver efficiently.
Now we need to proceed at pace with getting new schemes to market, so that we can achieve the Government’s aims of decarbonising our rail network by 2040.