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435
Manufacturers supported
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6
Zero Carbon Hubs developed
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550
Businesses into a Low Carbon Cluster
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1st
National Virtual Zero Carbon Hub
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Repowering the Black Country set out to turn the world’s first industrial region, more than 3,000 energy-intensive manufacturers across Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall, and Wolverhampton, into a world-leading net-zero cluster. Led by the Black Country Consortium and Black Country LEP as one of seven cluster plans in Innovate UK’s industrial decarbonisation programme, it aimed to give local businesses access to competitive zero-carbon energy well ahead of national 2040 targets. The programme ran from 2021 to 2023.
Pro Enviro is a specialist energy engineering, carbon abatement, and process optimisation consultancy with over 30 years working alongside energy-intensive industry. As the project’s business engagement partner, we brought both the shop-floor engineering knowledge to find real carbon savings and the digital capability to share them at scale, pairing hands-on low carbon strategy with the tools to reach thousands of manufacturers at once.
We built the UK’s first national Virtual Zero Carbon Hub, a knowledge platform where Black Country manufacturers could share data, collaborate, and find the carbon reduction opportunities open to them. It is still powered by Pro Enviro today.
We engaged around 435 manufacturers, 400 SMEs and 35 larger companies, collecting metered energy data from the intelligent meters on their sites, tracking energy use, cost, and carbon savings, and sharing Zero Carbon Best Available Technique across the cluster.
We developed six regional Zero Carbon Hubs, each built around an anchor industrial process with complementary businesses sharing energy and waste flows, a circular, minimal-waste model designed to cut emissions across a whole hub rather than site by site.
Working with the Black Country LEP, we also helped establish a public funding programme to bring 550 energy-intensive manufacturers into a Low Carbon Cluster, with access to grants and soft loans alongside our low carbon process optimisation and net-zero action planning.
Repowering the Black Country brought together industry, academia, and regional government:
By 2023 the programme had delivered the data and knowledge infrastructure the region needed, and a working blueprint for zero-carbon industrial clusters. Repowering the Black Country has since been succeeded by the Centre of Manufacturing Transition, but the Virtual Zero Carbon Hub Pro Enviro built, and the collaborative approach behind it, live on.
Turning industrial data into collaborative, cluster-wide decarbonisation is what Pro Enviro does, at single sites and across whole regions. We help organisations measure and report emissions through carbon footprinting and accounting, build low carbon and net-zero strategies, and track progress with SEE Change monitoring, so the savings keep coming long after a programme ends.
Whether you are a business, an industrial cluster, or a regional authority, Pro Enviro can turn energy data into practical, collaborative decarbonisation journeys.
