Co-ordinating the Design of South Clyde Energy Centre (SCEC), Glasgow

Challenge

A pre-existing planning consent established the SCEC building’s complicated landmark form and elevational treatment, which presented a key challenge. The consented design could not comfortably accommodate the required process equipment and included external envelope materials incompatible with the current regulation.

Project delivery comprises complex multi-disciplinary design scope with numerous design interfaces. These include the process equipment supplied under separate contracts awarded by Fortum and GIG and with AFRY Energy Consulting’s ‘balance of plant designers’. Whilst AFRY has significant Energy from Waste (EfW) project experience, a partner with more extensive UK industrial construction experience was required. 

A demanding design, procurement and construction programme associated with a fixed operational date and an associated key milestone for the start of boiler installation constrained project delivery. The programme also imposes significant challenges and time constraints on the conventional package procurement and contracting strategy.

Solution

Our specialist, multi-disciplinary team is vastly experienced in UK industrial building design and EfW projects specifically. We successfully reworked the design and negotiated with Glasgow City Council to streamline the process of amending the consent to avoid impacting the project programme.

By proactively collaborating with other project team members, we developed fully coordinated civil and building designs, ensuring a reflection of AFRY’s construction sequence and methodology in the design.

Our in-house fire engineering team was instrumental in thoroughly detailing the complex strategy required to ensure compliance with statutory regulations and insurance requirements.

We’re also providing lift engineering consultancy services from lift traffic analysis and project design through to witness testing and handover.

Our design and commercial management team structured the packaging of the civils and building work to suit the project delivery methodology and programme, and the Building Warrant regulatory process particular to Scotland. The packaging was also specifically tailored to the UK market, ensuring tendering contractors were comfortable with the work scope within each package. We worked closely with AFRY and tendering contractors to ensure the procurement of early works packages was pragmatic and flexible.

Due to the technically complex nature of EfW projects, our previous experience is providing an invaluable baseline for design development. To readily identify project challenges and solutions, we hold internal workshop sessions. Interfaces between design disciplines are discussed and resolved, within the Tetra Tech team and the wider project team, including the process equipment suppliers and civils/building package contractors with design responsibility.

Our team are establishing rigour in the exchange of technical information and definition of requirements via a documented request for information (RFI) process. Within our design workshop sessions, review and close-out of RFIs became a regular focus.

As the design develops, we’re effectively liaising with AFRY to ensure coordination between the building and civil Building Information Model (BIM) and process equipment. We agreed upon a regular exchange of models and are resolving critical issues in focused coordination meetings.