Green WIN

Greener Waterway Infrastructure (Green WIN) is an Interreg North West Europe (NWE) funded project, tackling excess energy use and high CO2 emissions caused when pumping water around rivers and canals. The project partnership is made up of Waterway Management Organisations (WMO’s), Universities, Public Service Organisations and Inland Waterways experts from across NWE and is committed to working together to find solutions to this problem. Partners will carry out laboratory trials to check how well current pumping technologies, systems and processes are performing and to see if these can be adapted to optimise performance, use less energy and produce fewer emissions. This research stage is followed by live testing of the strongest solutions developed, at 11 pilot sites across the UK, Ireland and France to check how they work in real operational conditions. One of the project aim is for the solutions progressed in Green WIN to be developed further, or adapted, by SME’s and pump manufacturers. Their commercial insights will give us a better understanding of the industry’s needs and help ensure we focus on the things that should increase the chances of our greener technologies, systems and processes getting to market. Persuading others to adopt Green WIN’s solutions as good practice is vital if the project is to achieve wider efficiencies and carbon reductions. We will be working hard to ensure our tested solutions are applied across more NWE waterways and want to encourage WMO’s outside the partnership to install equipment or adopt the improved systems and processes demonstrated. A ‘Greener Waterways Network’ will be set up to promote and sustain the findings from Green WIN long in to the future, teaming up with other inland waterway organisations and environmental groups to champion this initiative and encourage more WMO’s across Europe to use them to help ‘make their waterways greener’.