Wild Land News no 66, Spring 2006

The Dissuaders Article

Another small-scale hydro scheme threatens the north-west. Alistair Cant reports.

On occasions, the Wild Land Group is consulted, at an early stage, to give its views on a possible development project. Typically we will get a large envelope from an Environmental Consultant, who is keen to hone their project by including the views of people such as us who might be against it.

Sometimes we do not have the time or resources to study these proposals in sufficient detail, but sometimes we do. One such project was that for the Reay Forest - the area to the east of Kylesku, and the north and east of Loch Glendhu (that runs eastwards from Kylesku).

The proposal is a hydro scheme in two parts: one extracting water from the Maldie Burn where it leaves Loch an Leathaid Bhuain; the second through damming the burn leaving Loch Srath nan Aisinnin thus creating a bigger water catchment.

I quote from our submission to the Consultants one section which sums up our approach to schemes such as this: "In general we do not support such small scale hydro schemes in wild land, due to the landscape and ecological impacts being relatively significant compared to the very small output generated by the scheme - 8 MW. We believe major sources of renewable energy generation should be sited much closer to the major demand sources and not on wild land, e.g. on brownfield sites in the Central Belt. The penetration of a scheme like this in relatively unspoilt wild land means the qualities of such wild places are lost or degraded and it could hasten other degrading developments in the locality or elsewhere of a similar nature. We and others fought successfully against the Shieldaig hydro scheme predominantly for these key reasons."

We made some more detailed comments about aspects of the scheme. We also shared our views with like-minded organisations who also then could look at the details of the scheme and make comments of their own. This collective set of responses built a stronger case against the proposal.

We shall await and see whether the developer (RWE Npower plc and Grosvenor Estate) modify or even withdraw their scheme in the light of the collective comments.