Commissioned and funded by Somerset County Council, the Somerset Energy Innovation Centre is a hub of support and innovation for the businesses that share its space and drive towards a low-carbon market. It has become central to the South West’s long-term economic vision and their goals to grow the availability and accessibility of both nuclear and renewable energy resources.

All of the businesses that set their base here have a core ambition of creating a more sustainable economic legacy within their local area. To support this, the centre provides support and advice to help companies develop their capacity, engage in innovation and form partnerships to help them reach their end goal.

The Client and The Project

As a business hub, The Somerset Energy Innovation Centre set out to become as favourable and attractive to like-minded companies as possible. In a bid to improve the services they offered, they needed a new professional kitchen and server space for the office workers that fit their specifications. The building itself is BREEAM Excellent – the highest environmental accreditation for new buildings and all of the operations running from within it are accredited to ISO 14001 and 9001.

With our wealth of knowledge and experience in the industry, Aspen Services were contracted to design, supply and install a kitchen that met all of these environmental specifications. With a lead time of just 4 weeks, our team had to design a space that could meet the expected capacity requirements while ensuring that SEIC was fully completed by the 25th of December.

The Journey

This job presented a number of unique focuses, including the need to ensure that all equipment chosen met the ISO and BREEAM requirements. Our team spent a number of very long days and nights in the design office, researching and collaborating together to produce a design and equipment spec sheet that was suitable. The build itself required the support of multiple subcontractors with varying skill sets. This is one of the key specialisms of our Finance Director, Gary Druitt, who managed to organise and book all of the trades team required to get this job running on time and to specification.

The Challenges

The main challenges with this job surrounded the need for all aspects of design and build to meet the requirements for the BREEAM Excellent accreditation. This needed to take into account a vast array of technical and HACCP requirements – something that the team here at Aspen Services excel at. As such, and despite the multitude of different parties that played a role in the installation of this project, we were able to deliver the final professional kitchen installation on time and on budget.