A Teesside power station exploded without anybody noticing
Tees Renewable Energy Plant has encountered many issues since construction in 2022
Thank you so much for your patience while The Teesside Lead took another break. We’re now back to weekly editions each Sunday, with the work being shared between myself and Sarah Sinclair.
I’ve been busy working for BBC Radio Tees and BBC Radio Newcastle. A report I made about Northumbrian Water’s plans for a discharge pipe for treated wastewater to be built into the North Sea off the coast of Redcar was broadcast on Monday (listen here), and the very next day people were told not to swim after a sewer started leaking straight into the Tees. Talk about timing.
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Thanks as always for reading.
Leigh
If a power station explodes and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?
It’s not a question you normally have to ask yourself. Of course it does. BANG! But I’ve been left scratching my head over the last few weeks after making a discovery on Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council’s planning portal. I’m certain it happened, but nobody else is talking about it.
At some point - probably last winter - the world’s largest purpose-built biomass power plant exploded.
The Tees Renewable Energy Plant (also known as Tees REP), situated on the banks of the River Tees at Teesport (how many times can we fit the word ‘Tees’ into a single sentence?), has encountered multiple issues since construction was complete in 2022. There were problems in testing and getting the site online (that is, producing electricity) from day one. I was told at one point, three years ago, the plant’s boiler had been sent to Denmark to be repaired.
These delays in operations have caused massive financial consequences for the plant’s owner, MGT Teesside, which is itself owned as a joint venture between Danish pension group PKA and Australian financial giant Macquarie.
Tees REP is a tenant of PD Ports, but Macquarie also has an interest in the neighbouring Teesworks site.
Long-time readers of The Teesside Lead will be familiar with Macquarie as the company which paid £90m in cash to Teesworks Ltd for a 40-year lease on the SeAH Wind site, which it then leases to the public Tees Valley Combined Authority at a cost of £3.65m a year. SeAH Wind has itself entered huge operational problems before producing a single product, laying off half of its staff this year. If SeAH goes under it leaves the public sector on the hook for huge amounts for decades to come.
SeAH became tenants of their plot at the last minute after GE cancelled plans for Teesside in favour of relocating to Humberside. Anthropic are due to build the proposed Teesworks datacentre only because Google pulled out.
Is this whole plot of land cursed to failure?
MGT Teesside’s latest accounts, for the year to March 2025, show a loss of £298m. That follows losses of £226m in 2023-24 and £219m the year before that. The huge losses are largely because of impairment charges on fixed assets, meaning a huge loss in value of the power plant itself.
However, revenue increased from £42m to £195m in the latest set of accounts.
Those accounts describe the plan for “full commercial operation” to begin in the second half of 2025. At full capacity the plant could generate 299MW of power, enough for 600,000 homes (or basically all of Teesside).
But that “full commercial operation” came to a halt last year.
It’s the sort of you-couldn’t-make-it-up misfortune that’s plagued the site since the early days of operational delays. Two different restructures of the business have taken place over the last few years to raise an additional £165m in cash to maintain it as a going concern.
Emergency fundraising took place in summer 2023, with most jobs at the site being lost, while parent company MGT Teesside raised £85m in cash with a corporate restructure of its own in late 2024.
As part of that particular restructuring, MGT Teesside renegotiated its deal with Enviva, the US company which manufactures and ships the biomass pellets to Teesside for burning.
In May this year MGT Teesside left a public breadcrumb of acknowledgement that something else had gone wrong at the beleaguered power plant. They applied to the local council for permission to demolish two silos at the plant which were “damaged in an under-pressure event.”
Redcar Council told MGT Teesside they in fact didn’t need planning permission to go ahead with the demolition, perhaps negating the need for the company to have left a public record of the incident. Everybody I’ve spoken to seems to be in denial about it, though.
Stockton-based px Limited was chosen as the power plant’s operator around 18 months ago. They refused to comment on the apparent explosion at their site, saying only that they “do not comment on the details of site-specific operational issues or incidents.”
The Health and Safety Executive say they haven’t been informed of any safety-related incidents at the site.
A freedom of information request to Cleveland Fire Brigade shows they were only called to the plant on one occasion in 2026, which narrows down the date of the “under-pressure event” to some time at the end of 2025.
The fire brigade were called to Tees REP on 19 May - less than two weeks after the application to demolish the silos was made - to deal with “a fire at top of generator at silo”. Six fire appliances attended, and it took around 21 hours for them to get the incident under control.
The work on demolishing the two silos was expected to begin this week, and is planned to last until the end of September. The two damaged silos will be removed and their concrete bases left in order to potentially re-build them at a future date.
Elsewhere in Teesside…
There was a great article in this week’s FT from Chris Smyth and Jen Williams who visited Hartlepool. She looks at the fact £96m of regeneration money has been spent in the town, but it meant nothing at the ballot box for incumbent parties, with Reform surging ahead. You can read that here.
Meanwhile problems with TVCA’s accounts continue to rumble on, with a member of the scrutiny committee worried the issue is being “kicked into the long grass”. You can read the write-up on that meeting here.