Gigafactories and dashed dreams: the parable of Blyth
What one port town says about the British economy
The little port town of Blyth in north-east England holds up a mirror to the British economy. For much of the 20th century it was a home to heavy industry. By the 1960s it was exporting more coal than anywhere else in Europe and had built the Royal Navy’s first aircraft-carrier. In the 1970s it was importing the raw materials needed by the smelting furnace a short train ride away. Then, as the collieries, shipyards and metalworks all closed, the town spent decades in decline. Its long search for a new act has made it a crucible for the policies of the previous Tory government and the new Labour one.
When Blyth’s power station was demolished in 2003, it left behind a desirable plot of land abutting the coast. The site is the terminus of the North Sea Link, a cable sending clean energy to and from Norway; it also benefits from existing sea and rail links. As part of Boris Johnson’s “levelling-up” agenda to reduce regional inequality, the land was to be the home of Britishvolt, a government-backed battery startup that would build a gigafactory there. But Britishvolt, which lacked customers, investment and expertise in battery manufacturing, collapsed into administration in 2023. “We don’t feel very levelled up,” is the verdict of Julie Amann, a case worker in the Citizens Advice bureau in the town centre.
That phrase was consigned to political history by the election of the Labour government in July. But Blyth is still caught up in some grand political ambitions. Labour’s first two “missions”, as the government’s five overarching objectives are known, are to boost economic growth and make Britain a green-energy superpower. Among other things, that means setting up a national wealth fund, whose objectives include upgrades to port infrastructure; and establishing Great British Energy, a new national energy company whose aims include crowding in offshore-wind investment. If these plans work, Blyth ought to benefit. It is, after all, a port, and Dogger Bank, the world’s largest offshore wind farm, sits just off the coast.
Blyth is already home to the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult, a government-backed facility supporting the offshore-wind sector, which opened in 2013. On its campus, the ORE validates and tests the designs of giant offshore turbines and blades for global firms like General Electric, Siemens and Vestas. Before the election it won £86m ($109m) of government money to upgrade its facilities.
Companies have started to coalesce in the facility’s orbit. Tony Quinn, who is in charge of technology development at the ORE, cites the example of JDR Cables, a Polish company that makes the subsea cables needed to hook wind farms up to the grid. JDR is building a new factory nearby, to manufacture the cables required by bigger, more powerful turbines, which will head to nearby sites like Dogger Bank. Private firms are drawn to the ORE‘s state-of-the-art facilities to test and develop drones and robots for unmanned offshore maintenance in the dry dock that was once home to HMS Ark Royal.
To return Blyth to its heyday as a thriving industrial town would require more than a handful of small, high-tech companies, however. Speak to the locals fishing on the quayside and few can tell you what takes place in the ORE’s colossal blue hanger across the water. But many do voice their disappointment over the 3,000-or-so permanent jobs that Britishvolt was meant to have directly created.
The parcel of land once destined for battery manufacturing is now earmarked for another industry of the future. Unfettered access to clean energy makes the site a no-brainer for power-hungry data centres. Plans to build a £10bn “hyperscale” artificial-intelligence data centre, backed by Blackstone, a huge private-equity firm, are working their way through the planning system. Sir Keir Starmer trumpeted the project on a recent visit to New York.
Not everyone likes the idea. The data centre would create fewer direct jobs than a gigafactory—around 400 of them. Chris McDonald, a Labour MP with a background in business, has warned that not exploiting the location for its unique industrial properties could create “long-lasting economic damage for the region”.
But planning reforms are also central to the new government’s growth agenda. It quickly signalled its support for other data centres whose applications had become mired in bureaucracy; in September it designated data centres as critical national infrastructure. A short drive out of town to the derelict Britishvolt site serves as a cautionary tale of grand designs that fail to materialise. An early test of Labour’s ambitions will be its ability finally to turn Blyth’s imagined future into a real one. ■
No comments:
Post a Comment