Water company United Utilities has put its renewables energy business up for sale.
The decision to market the group’s renewable energy business, United Utilities Renewable Energy Limited, was taken in April and the sake process is expected to commence during June 2021. United Utilities said it will involve the sale of assets – primarily property, plant and equipment – with a carrying value of £65.5 million.
The company said the sale will mean it can continue to benefit from the output of the renewable energy assets over the long term, while being able to reinvest sales proceeds in other low carbon projects. The company said in its annual report, “Our portfolio of renewable energy assets is operating satisfactorily and our investment has delivered the returns that we targeted. Having maximised the opportunities to date and established long-term contracts to secure a proportion of our renewable energy out to 2045, we are now looking at how we can recycle our investment in order to achieve further strong returns and take the next steps in our plans to achieve net zero by 2030”.
In 2019/20 UU generated the equivalent of 191GWh of renewable electricity, an increase of 18GWh on the previous year. It did this with a mix of generation from wind, hydro, solar photovoltaics and energy recovery from bio resources (using sewage sludge to power combined heat and power generators).
The renewables business includes a 1MW floating solar array at Langthwaite reservoir near Lancaster, installed in 2018. Last year it installed a 2MW battery alongside solar panels at its Clifton Marsh wastewater treatment works near Preston. The batteries at were provided by Zenobe Energy.