Clean Tyne – UK Blueprint for Decarbonisation Demonstrator

The North East is home to a unique and comprehensive asset base that innovates, demonstrates, and delivers solutions to global energy challenges. The maritime and ports sector, crucially, lies at the heart of this vibrant ecosystem. The region has significant potential to lead on the transition to net zero for maritime, building on significant opportunities across multiple renewable energy vectors. Together with Siemens, Newcastle University, the Local Enterprise Partnership and the Connected Places Catapult, the Port of Tyne will lead an innovative project to support the transition to net zero for the maritime sector, delivering the digital foundations to an optimised, multi-vector approach to available renewable energy sources in the region.

Leveraging significant previous collaboration in the region, the partners will jointly consider the justification and investment case for an integrated, multi-vector digital energy platform to manage the balance of supply and demand in the maritime sector, ensuring the optimisation and resilience of clean energy supplies for shore power, land-based infrastructure and other use cases. The partners will consider these use cases and potential renewable energy vectors from an economic, technological, environmental, and societal perspective. This will build wider context around the core trial element of the energy data platform as the foundational digital route to net zero transition, supported by multiple renewable energy vectors.

The Port of Tyne has won multiple awards for its work in the green energy sector and looks to build upon those successes with this joint venture bringing in regional expertise and proven industry experts. Through the 2050 Innovation Hub, the first maritime hub of its kind in the UK fully aligned with Maritime 2050, the port will share the knowledge gained through this collaborative process with other UK ports and their associated supply chains for the benefit of the UK port sector as a whole.

The project will establish future use cases and explore the potential for analytical functionality built on the digital foundation and smart port technology to reduce energy costs at the port and support decision making in future infrastructure. Outcomes of the project will be used as a data-driven evidence base to establish how a multi-vector renewables port can drive operational transition and wider compliance to deliver on the Governments Clean Air Strategy (2019), Clean Maritime Plan (2020), and the Maritime 2050 Strategy.