Wild Land News no 55, Spring 2002

Large-scale hydro development returning to the highlands? Article

John Digney reports on a proposal for a £50m scheme for an undisclosed location.

Although Scotland's post-war flurry of hydro-electric dam-building ended nearly half a century ago, there is now the possibility of a new large-scale £50m scheme, proposed by Scottish and Southern Energy, for an undisclosed location somewhere in the north of Scotland. It is understood that the scheme is one that was shelved in the post-war period and that it would have a capacity of between 30 and 100 megawatts.

While declining to reveal the site, Scottish and Southern's chief executive, Jim Forbes, spoke of "minimal environmental impact", yet appeared to anticipate opposition when he said ".this will also be a significant test of the sincerity of the environmental movement." Members of the environmental movement, however, were quick to point out that other considerations, such as impact on communities, landscape, biodiversity and freshwater ecosystems, would have to be balanced against the advantages of clean energy generation. Without further details we can only make general comments, but this proposal has certainly come as a surprise, as large-scale hydro did not even figure in the Scottish Executive's recent renewable energy study on which we reported in the last issue of WLN.

Any site in northern Scotland which is topographically suitable for a hydro scheme is likely to be of high landscape value. So what differences might we expect between modern hydro schemes and those of fifty years ago in the name of "minimal environmental impact"? We should certainly expect the undergrounding of transmission lines and pipelines. We should also expect concealed turbine-houses and landscaped dams, to avoid the monstrous bare concrete structures which disfigure many glens.

What cannot be avoided, however, is the visual effect of drawdown - the shoreline scarring that results from exaggerated fluctuations in water levels. We have all seen the appalling ugliness of partly drained reservoirs after a spell of dry weather. The more gentle the slope of the shore, the wider the scar for any given drop in water level. And the longer the loch, the less localised the impact.

Scotland's glens are peppered with these schemes, and hundreds of miles of loch shorelines are marred by the effect of drawdown. Do we really want more?