Plant in Dunbar handed over to client more than a year late

energy from waste 2 shutterstock

Interserve has finished the first of four energy-from-waste plants which have dogged the contractor for more than two years and cost it over £220m.

The plant in Dunbar, Scotland, was built with JV partner Babcock & Wilcox and has now been handed over to client Viridor – the same one that kicked Interserve off a similar job in Glasgow back in autumn 2016 and which claims the firm owes it more than £60m.

Dougie Sutherland, executive director at Interserve and the main board director in day-to-day charge of the EfW contracts, said: “This is an important milestone in the transformation of Interserve.â€

The original handover date for the plant was in December 2017, later than the deadline for three other schemes which are built but still in a commissioning stage.

The remaining jobs are with Babcock & Wilcox in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, and Margam in south Wales – as well as a plant in Derby being developed with Renewi, which started taking in waste in January last year.

Babcock & Wilcox has previously told investors that each of the three plants it was building in the UK, including Dunbar, would be finished by July. 

In 2016 Interserve put aside £160m to finish its EfW contracts, adding that it would not take on any more work of this type. But the firm has now lost more than £220m on the initiative.

The handover comes as Interserve continues to negotiate the future of the business with creditors, with an update on a second rescue package expected to be made in the next few weeks.