Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the our Voices Oral Histories podcast, coordinated by the common room and presented by Dr. Andy Clark, research associate with the Newcastle Oral History Collective. In this episode, we talk to civil engineer James Hollander about how he got his start in engineering.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: I started off my engineering career working for a steel fabricator. So we built steel frame buildings, a lot of agricultural sheds, but also sort of commercial and commercial sort of properties. I did that for a few years, then again decided to get a bit more experience. I went to work for a local council in the highways department, looking after the bridges, the bridges in Newcastle. So we looked after the time bridge, the swing bridge, and the multitude of smaller bridges that were around the city. So I think if memory serves right, it was sort of in the hundreds, two or 300 bridges altogether.
So that was looking at the condition of the existing assets and scheduling maintenance for them. So making sure that they're still serviceable and obviously don't cause any risk to the public.
[00:01:16] Speaker C: Tell us what we don't know about the time bridge, because I'm fascinated with the bridges of the time.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Okay, so the big one, which is actually something I learned in university, not when I was working on the bridges. So the time bridge has two huge towers on either side. And from a structural perspective, those towers don't do anything.
They're almost an aesthetic to the bridge. So the arch of the bridge is what does all the work structurally and all the forces go round the arch down to the foundations.
Those towers essentially do nothing. I mean, they do hold elements of the road, but yeah, somebody would look at it, and if I took those towers away now, the bridge would still stand, right. And a lot of people would look at that and think, all those towers are holding up the bridge.
But the towers were originally built to be bonded warehouses, right? But they never got to be bonded warehouses.
And I think to this day, they're completely empty inside. And I know a few developers have looked at it to, can they make a restaurant there? Can they make a hotel or something there? But no one's ever done anything with them. So when I worked for the council, there was even telephone lines connected into the towers, because there was lifts in the towers, which I think have never been used, but you have to have a telephone line in case somebody gets stuck in a lift.
So, yeah, they just fascinate me, the towers that they're.
[00:02:57] Speaker C: What was it like working on the bridges when you started working for the council?
[00:03:02] Speaker B: It was a great thing to sort of shout about. You know, you could sort of say to your friends, well, you know that those bridges. I look after those bridges. So it was. It was a nice thing to talk about, but to be honest, the bulk of my work was with all the minor bridges. So thing with the bridges is they have a maintenance schedule which is every. Well, it was at the time, anyway, you had inspection regimes which were every. They call it a principal inspection, which was every seven years, and a general inspection which was every year, and then a maintenance cycle built into that as well.
If you take the two or 300 bridges across the city, you're inspecting one of those bridges almost every week.
So the bulk of the work. Yeah, was really just the minor bridges. So things like Jesmondine. It's got a ton of bridges in Jesmondine that people walk across every day and don't actually appreciate that they're walking across a bridge.
Even things like subways are classed as bridges. So there was a lot of subways and Pilgrim street which came under our remit.
There's a lot of bridges which are associated with old railway tunnels which are all now filled in, but this bridge structure is still there.
So around manors, there's quite a few old bridges which the council was still responsible for but weren't really used as a bridge anymore. So you sort of find out, like the historical side of a city as well. Things like the pandan service tunnel. There's even an appreciation group.
So it's literally a tunnel which has services in it. So gas, power, telecoms, I think it was possibly used during the war as an air raid shelter. And you've got the. Is it the Victoria tunnel as well? Yeah, I think it's very similar to the Victoria tunnel, but there's sort of local history appreciation societies set up who want to go and visit it once a year. So we had liaison with them to make sure that they could access the tunnels when they wanted to, that it was safe to do so, because a tunnel sat there for the best part of a year unused. There's all sorts of.
There could be sort of noxious gases that build up over the year. So you can't just open the door and let people in.
You've got to do some preparation work for that as well.
And unfortunately I never got involved in it, but my boss at the time used to host a visit from the RAF once a year. So it was.
I don't know what the proper term is, but fighter pilots who had graduated fighter pilot school, they were given a tour of all the bridges in Newcastle because it's the one place in the world where you can see almost every different type of bridge construction all in one place. So you've got reinforced concrete bridges, you've got steel lattice bridges, you've got arch construction, you've got cantilever, you've got all sorts there.
And the main aim of that visit is that they can all go and have a look at them and then they go away to discuss how's best to bomb those bridges.
But because it's the one place in the world that you can see everything together, it was the ideal place for the RAF. So, yeah, you pick up sort of little nuggets like that throughout the years. So it's sort of great. It's really interesting. I mean, particularly from historical side.
Yeah, it was probably the most interesting job I had in terms of.
[00:06:57] Speaker C: That was the high level of one of the bridges you looked after.
[00:07:02] Speaker B: Let me think, which one is that? The one with the trains and the.
So I think that one was strange as in Network Rail looked after the top deck. Newcastle council looked after the road deck, but then, yeah, because they were all split up. So I think Nexus looked after the metro bridge. I think it's the. Is it the Queen Elizabeth bridge? I think it's called Gateshead looked after. The red youth say the high level I think was split. Newcastle looked after the swing bridge and the time bridge and then Gateshead had the Millennium bridge. And at the time we also had the time tunnels, the pedestrian one.
Not sure about the traffic tunnels then, but then since the new tide tunnels being built, all three tide tunnels are now looked after by a different party.
[00:07:56] Speaker C: In terms of the Millennium bridge tunnel, you weren't kind of directly part of that because it was gates. From an engineer's point of view, how impressive is it over the way it opens or is that.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: I think I was doing my MSc at the time and our tutor had said the bridge is being built today. Go down to the keyside and see it. So I did. I went down to the keyside and it wasn't the bridge that impressed me, it was the crane that put it in place that impressed me, just the sheer size of it. I mean, I think at the time it was the world's largest floating crane. So to see a piece of engineering like that floating down the tine with bringing a big bridge with it.
Yeah, it was amazing. And I always remember watching the news afterwards that night and as they were floating the bridge down the tine, they were inches off boats. And the big joke was, well, if the bridge had hit the boat, it would be. What would you say, on your insurance claim that the bridge hit me rather than I hit the bridge, but, yeah, you've got huge hydraulic presses, so you've got the mechanical side of things and obviously the electrical side that operates that, but the structural side as well. Again, it's one of these projects that it's not just a single discipline, single discipline of engineering or a single sort of set of people. It's a huge sort of multidiscipline project and it's, I think, a beautiful looking bridge from an aesthetics point of view, but from very lean as well. From a structural point of view, it's amazing. Yeah. Very lightweight, but quite imposing at the same time. For all that said and done, the bridges are sort of well maintained and well looked after. Although I do often drive past the time bridge now and think it could do with a coat of paint. It really could.
[00:10:03] Speaker C: I wonder when the last time it was even painted.
[00:10:07] Speaker B: I think it was maybe just before I started for the council, which. So that's got to be over ten years ago. Yeah.
The layperson would think that painting is very an aesthetic thing, but for a bridge like that, it's actually a structural task, because your coat of paint, sorry. Is providing a protective layer on the steels, so it's protecting it from rust and the elements, et cetera. So, yeah, it is an essential thing to do, really.
[00:10:40] Speaker C: It's quite a bit of rust in the time.
How long has the time does you got then, in your honest opinion, how much longer will it stand?
[00:10:47] Speaker B: Well, I think. Was it 150 years design life?
1920s. It was opened up and so, yes, it's still got a few years left.
I doubt we'll see it come down in 20 years, 50 years, though. I think it's probably got more than that.
When everything's designed, it has a design life that it's designed to at the time, but with good maintenance throughout its lifestyle, you can extend sort of design lives, because where I live, it's just down the road from Corsi Arch, which is the oldest surviving railway bridge in the world. And it was 17 something, it was built.
Think I'm getting that right after check now. But, yeah, that's a masonry arch bridge, and it doesn't take any railway traffic anymore, any sort of mining traffic, but still open to the public. You can walk across it, but it's amazing how long something can actually last if it's looked after and maintained.
[00:11:53] Speaker C: After this fascinating conversation about the bridges across the town and James'role in maintaining those, I asked him about how he shifted career track and began working in renewable energy.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: And I was sat there one day thinking I wanted to do, looking at one of these bridges, doing my job, and felt that it was great what I was doing, but I wanted to feel like I was really doing something to give back to society. And I don't think back then, sort of the green movement, let's call it, was as big a thing as it is now, but it was still a concern of we're building lots of things, but is it the right thing to do? Keep building and keep building, or. That's what made me want to get into renewable energy.
I had that sort of epiphany at my desk one day and then literally the next week I saw an advert for a job working on wind turbines. So I thought, well, that's fate. And, yeah, the rest is history, as they say.
[00:12:52] Speaker C: What was the transition like in terms of the skill set that you had?
[00:12:59] Speaker B: So it was quite, I mean, I, I did before I, before I started, I did quite a lot of reading.
[00:13:05] Speaker C: Up.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: On renewable energy, sort of how, how it works, how a project sort of is developed and what the aim of the project is, because it's always important. I think that for an engineer to understand what you're actually trying to achieve at the end of the project, it's all well and good saying build a building or design me a building, but what is that building intended for? How long is it going to be there? Who's going to use it? How are they going to use it? So it's always good to understand that. And particularly with the renewable energy, the end goal is to provide energy and they have to have routes to market. So the financial side, somebody's not going to build them just for. Because it's the right thing to do. There is always a commercial side of things as well. So it's understanding how the clients are going to use that project to make money, essentially. So, yeah, I did a lot of reading up there, but it was an awful lot of learning on the job. My role initially was all about the geotechnical side of things. So looking at the ground conditions, you're going to plant a hundred ton wind turbine on this piece of land. What's that going to do? Is it going to fall over or sink and fall over? Or is it going to sink and then fall over? Is it going to slide down the hill? So, yeah, it was sort of going back to all that theory that I'd done at university, which was a few years, few years back by then, and trying to then apply that to a new type of work.
But, yeah, I think because I'd been working for a few years, you get into that way of working as an engineer. I've got a problem, right. How do I overcome it?
You've got a toolbox of how to solve a problem.
What do I need? Who am I going to need to consult on this? How am I going to bring in other people to help me? And what's the end use of the project, like I just said? So it's applying all those different logic, that logic, to a problem and getting it done.
[00:15:31] Speaker C: Yeah.
Even in the time that you've worked in the renewable sector, what have been some of the kind of main changes?
[00:15:39] Speaker B: The main change, I may say it started in 2004. So that's 16 years now. The size of the turbines now think as when I started, what they call a v 52 was about the norm at the time. So that had a 52 meters diameter rotor, it was about a 50 meters tower. So probably about 75 ish meters to tip.
Now people are talking about turbines, 200 meters to tip. So, I mean, they've more than doubled in size.
They're huge things. So the blades are the big issue.
I don't think, yet anybody's cracked a composite blade. So these blades have to come in one piece in these modern turbines. Now we're talking about 80 meters long. So imagine transporting an 80 meters long blade around the roads. I mean, it's great down a motorway. They're fairly big and open and straight, but none of these sites are right next to a motorway. They're always sort of in the highlands of Scotland somewhere. So it's driving that turbine blade down these nice, windy, narrow roads, which can cause some big engineering headaches, especially the tons.
Yeah, we have software now that simulates the blade delivery vehicle, so you can get a nice map and drive your vehicle around. And that will show you where you're going to come off the road and where you need to reinforce the road, or where you need to build even a new road, maybe in some cases.
And also gradients as well, because not the blades, but what they call the nacelles, which is the big box that sits on the top, which has all the generator and the gearboxes. It's quite a heavy piece of equipment.
60, 70, 8000 tons. Some of them put that on the back of a low loader. It's not going to go up a very steep hill. So you're then looking at the route to get into sight of you, then come up with a road which is a series of chicanes and switchbacks.
So you're not going up very, very steep hills, which is great for that piece of kit, but it's not so good for the blade, which is very long, which can't get around these tight hairpins. So, yeah, it's all very interesting. It's great that you get planning permission for a site and you can build a site on this hillside, but how do you actually get everything from the docks all the way up to the top of this hill? Yeah, it's very interesting.
[00:18:18] Speaker C: I mean, what's the biggest project you've been involved in since you've been working in renewals?
[00:18:25] Speaker B: Biggest in terms of size was a project called Dornell.
Now, I think I'm going to get this right at the time. So it's an onshore wind farm, and it was 174 mw, which is round about 60 70 turbines.
So I wasn't involved in the original sort of design or development of it, but the owner was trying to get an extension to it to make it 200. Put that into context, I suppose, before then, probably average size of your onshore wind farm was maybe 20, 30 mw. Well, 50, getting quite big, but anything over 50, different planning regime that you had to go through.
So it was central government that decided that. So at the time, the developers tried to keep things below 50 mw, so that it was determined at a local planning level rather than central government, because they felt it was a far easier process to manage. It's not to say you didn't get sites which were above that, but, yeah, generally 20, 30 mw, maybe 50 mw, possibly sometimes above. So this was huge compared to them, 200 mw.
So we.
Yeah, so the client was trying to extend it to 200 mw, but was also trying to sell the project as well. So we worked for a company which was interesting in buying the project. Right. So we go through this, what they call the due diligence process, where you just effectively kick the tires of the project to see is everything as it's meant to be. Is it being consented correctly? Has it got a correct grid connection?
Would the layout work? We talked about gradients on site. Are you going to get your big heavy vehicles up those gradients?
Yeah. So you go through this whole process of just scrutinizing somebody else's work, which is interesting because you get to see how somebody else would do something. There's the old saying that lots of engineers will tell you, you get one problem, two engineers will look at it, will approach it a completely different way. It's not to say either one's wrong. It's just a different way of getting to the same solution. So, yeah, you get to see how somebody else has done all this work and, yeah, you pick up ideas and you maybe sort of suck your teeth and say, well, I wouldn't have done it like that, but there's nothing wrong with the way that you've done it.
But then to actually go out onto the site and see the site, and I'm a bit of a whiskey buff as well. And it was actually directly adjacent to the fiddic glen, so where the whiskey gets its name from. And then I don't think they use the glen or extract the water from it anymore. But, yeah, it was great to sort of see the famous Glenn Fiddick Glen and, yeah, just to sort of see the size of the site and the scale of the site.
Pretty amazing thing to go and see. That was the biggest in scale, probably on a personal level.
Again, it's not a big project, but one of the first projects I was actually in charge of constructing was a two turbine project in Cumbria.
But it was putting two turbines on an operational chemical plant. So that in itself presents lots of alarm bells.
You've got an operational chemical plant which has lots of. The way that they work is you've got to have a permit to do absolutely anything on the site.
And we wanted to come in there and put two huge turbines, which at the time were the biggest turbines in Cumbria.
And I was put in charge of everything. So I did the foundation designs for the project, but I managed the construction as well, on behalf of the owner.
So I would manage the contractor on site, make sure they're doing everything that they're supposed to be doing, that all the health and safety criteria that they've got to comply with, that they're doing everything that they should be doing.
I was even interviewed by BBC Cumbria about the project because of a. Because it was the biggest one in the county at the time, but also just because of the complexity of it.
And, yeah, we managed to build these two turbines in the plant without any issue. Wow.
No accidents.
Yeah. We have complaints from members of the public. But you always do with wind turbines. Unfortunately, yeah. It was just a really interesting project to be involved in.
[00:23:46] Speaker C: I was actually just going to come with that. In terms of the public, have you had much experience of people protesting or complaining about the development of Wooden farm?
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I've never seen it to the extent of, say, the recent footage you see on the news about fracking, where you've got people camped outside a site and placards and protesting. So I've never come across it to that extent with onshore wind. And I think over the years, the public opinion has changed on them, and particularly now with sort of climate crises being declared.
I think the latest statistic is 80% of the public are now accepting of onshore winds. So it's definitely changed over the years. But we have had people complaining over the years in a very sort of british way. They're ever so nice about the way that they complain, but, yeah, never sort of had any sort of direct animosity.
Nobody's sort of been threatening about it, about them.
[00:24:55] Speaker C: I mean, what have been the kind of main. The reasons or the justifications for people complaining? Has it purely been aesthetic or is there anything else?
[00:25:02] Speaker B: I think a lot of it is just the unknowns, because when I first started working in the industry, there wasn't very many wind farms in the country at all. So it's just the fear of the unknown, I think, is somebody knocks on your door and says they're going to build a big wind farm next to you, what is that? What does it look like? What's it going to do to me? How is it going to affect. A lot of the concerns are always, what does it do to your property price?
Does it devalue my house? Is there going to be issues with noise? Am I going to have health problems because of a constant irritant shadow flicker as well? So the way that the blades rotate, if the sun is behind them and your property is in front of the turbine, as the blades turn, you get this sort of flicker strobe effect. It only happens at certain times of the day and in certain directions, orientations, but it is a phenomenon that's still not truly predictable, although we know exactly where the sun's going to be, but it's how it affects people, so that's a real concern of people.
Yeah. And aesthetics is probably.
It's still something people complain about, but it's probably the least complained of aspect and just disruption. I suppose that's the same for any construction project. It's the temporary disruption.
Lots of hgvs going past somebody's house. Is that going to mean there's cracks in my walls are going to be kept up late at night because of vehicles going past?
And again, with any construction project, you put measures in place to make sure that you're not becoming an irritant to people. You only work at certain times of the day, that you'll route all the traffic a certain way. So it's as far away from these properties as you can.
And, yeah, just communication with the people. So it's engaging the people. So they've obviously got real concerns. I don't think anybody's complaining for complaining sake. They have got legitimate concerns. So engaging with them, and a lot of the time just talking them through how things are going to work and what it is you're going to do and how it's going to look and how it's going to sound.
Probably eight, nine times out of ten, that would be enough to sort of allay a lot of people's concerns. Yeah, that's not to say that they're not then just. That's it. They're quiet and then they go away.
[00:27:38] Speaker C: What's the future of renewables? What are some of the main changes that you looking at your crystal ball from experience, what do you think is going to be the agenda setting changes over the next decade or so.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: In terms of decarbonization?
The general feeling is electricity is being decarbonized really is almost as much as it can be.
Coal power, fire stations, I think, well, were due to close 2025, so five years from now, saying a year earlier. So in four years time, we shouldn't have any sort of dirty generation on the system.
And gas gets cleaner and cleaner, but that might eventually disappear as well.
But transport is the big one at the moment.
How do we decarbonize that? So electric vehicles are a sort of up and coming thing, but hydrogen is also a fuel which is not yet fully exploited. But hydrogen, it's an infrastructure solution, if you like. So you've got people at the moment looking at how they can extract hydrocarbons from all the plastic which doesn't get recycled. So all your plastic that currently goes to landfill because it's contaminated or it's not the right type of plastic, you've got people looking at how they can extract hydrocarbons from that and make hydrogen.
So that sort of facility has to be neighbored with a recycling center or sort of a waste center, and then you need the offtakers quite close to that. So you need that to be fairly close to some infrastructure that can take that hydrogen to a city center for buses, or it can go out to some salt caverns for it to be stored. So hydrogen, I think, is a lot bigger than just saying, let's build a Hydrogen, let's build an electrolyzer there, and that's it done.
It's got to have all the infrastructure and the offtakers around it, whereas wind turbines, for example, you can put them in a hill in Scotland somewhere. And as long as that electricity gets onto the grid, it can be used anywhere in the grid, all the way down to the south of.
Yeah, and I think that will happen. Hydrogen will happen. It just needs that support from government, that financial support from government to get it kick started. And that's the same with any technology. It's always expensive when it first comes out, and unless it has that support, it's never really truly going to get going.
And people have looked at renewable energy. So renewable energy like wind and solar?
Well, solar will only generate during the day. Wind will only generate once it's windy. That's not always the time that the electricity is needed. So a sunny weekend in the middle of summer, everybody's probably out and about enjoying the great outdoors. That's when your solar farm is probably at maximum output. So nobody's at home putting the heated on, putting the kettle on, or anything like that. So there's a disparity there. So it's all about how you can store that electricity. So the big thing at the moment is people are looking at batteries and how they can store that generation and use it at the time of peak demand.
You sometimes have constraints on the network as well. So, again, with wind, you've got, the very windy areas are usually sort of north of Scotland, where the infrastructure isn't great. So you've got lots of potential generation trying to get onto the network, but the network's just not big enough or doesn't have enough capacity to get that on. So, again, you can use batteries to store that generation and sort of trickle feed almost the network.
So I think in the next few years, it's going to be all about sort of the constraint management and how you better use that renewable energy, how you better get it to the end consumer.
Offshore wind is still a big thing at the moment. I mean, onshore wind has taken a bit of hit with sort of recent government policies, but offshore wind is quite big, and I think it will continue to be so again for the next 510 years.
But there's always going to be a capacity issue. You're always going to get to a point where you've just got no more sites to put that.
So I think as a society, we need to look at better management of everything but of energy. So we don't always want to be looking at how do we get more, how do we get more energy, how do we expand, how do we use less, or how do we use it more efficiently?
So, yeah, there's lots of different things happening.
The network itself as well, it was never designed to operate in the way that it's now operating. So in the 1920s, when the national grid was built, it was based on the fact that you had four or five big at the time, big coal fire power stations, they would export onto the grid.
Grid would distribute it. You go into a distribution network and then that would get to your end customers, whereas now you've got what's termed distributed generation. So the generation is hundreds of different wind farms, solar farms, biomass energy from waste, they're all over the network, then are connecting to the distribution network, which was only ever meant to provide power to the customers, whereas now they're exporting power onto that grid. Right? So you've got a two way power flow on a grid which was only ever really meant to be flowing in one direction. So the grid itself, I think, is going to have to change. And it's always been designed to have big rotating machinery providing constant power, and that's now changed. I say coal fire, coal fired power stations are going to disappear in the next four or five years.
So it's just less and less big rotating machines on the network, which causes a frequency issue.
So networks are now looking at how they provide what they call synthetic inertia on the system. So that's providing just clever power electronics on the system to sort of replicate what used to be there so they can keep voltage correctly balanced and inertia, et cetera. So it's more a technology adaptation or technology, what's the word? A technology solution? I think for the future.
I've maybe rambled a bit there. No, that's great.
[00:35:34] Speaker C: Professor, I know nothing about.
I just put the light on. Non comes alight.
In terms of the northeast, what do you think has to happen, if anything, in the northeast, to expand the role of engineering in the region in terms of manufacture or design, what current changes should be made?
[00:35:58] Speaker B: Changes?
I think it's all for any engineering. You need the different levels of engineers and technicians, and that can only come out of sort of more vocational types of educational courses. So it's great having your people who go to university and do your engineering degrees, but you need the guys who can actually implement that as well, who can build whatever it is that the engineers have designed or specified.
There is a move now to have these apprenticeships and modern apprenticeships and vocational courses, but I think we need to provide more of that.
And there is a definite shortfall in all disciplines, mechanical, electrical, civil.
So, yeah, more apprenticeships, more vocational, and the northeast, like many ex industrial areas, has really suffered.
[00:37:09] Speaker A: Our voices is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund in association with the common room and Dr. Andy Clark. To find out more about the work of the common room, please visit ww thecommon.org uk or email program at.
