Monday
Sep032012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Ridley prize winner
Sep 3, 2012 Matt Ridley Media The Spectator has announced the winner of the inaugural Matt Ridley prize for environmental heresy (on which I was one of the judges). The winner is Pippa Cuckson, whose uncovering of the environmental disaster of in-river hydro power was an eye-opener to all of the judging panel. Fraser Nelson's eulogy is here.
Unfortunately the essay itself is paywalled, but was undoubtedly a worthy winner.
Reader Comments (20)
Did any of the judges find occasion to recuse themselves?
in the spirit of Climate Change science, let me congratulate myself for having been classified SECOND in this year's Ridley Prize!
PS or possibly, third
PPS alongside everybody else
The article can also be found (free) at
http://www.powerengineeringint.com/news/2012/08/29/something-s-fishy.html
Scroll down to the bottom half of the page.
From Pippa's essay:
"At Gunthorpe, most of the river's flow will be directed through the turbines, slowing it from 45 cubic metres per second to under 12 at the exit. This is slower than the worst flow recorded here in the famously dry summer of 1976. A Nottingham Angling Club committee member, Dave Turner, bitterly observes that in the name of green energy the Environment Agency has successfully ensured that this stretch will face 'drought conditions all year round'. "
Yes, this is all very worrying!!!! Wonder where they're going to store all that water?
Actually, the scheme is tiny - about 700 kW from a fag-packet calculation - from the River Trent! It's a fleabite! The turbine head will be about 1-2 metres, which means the turbines will rotate at very low speeds so I really can't see the fish being bothered.
The author of the essay, as a case study, discusses plans to add hydropower turbines to the weir on the River Trent at Gunthorpe. She states:
"At Gunthorpe, most of the river’s flow will be directed through the turbines, slowing it from 45 cubic metres per second to under 12 at the exit."
To a hydrologist that sentence is nonsense. The principle of the conservation of mass applies and if 45 cumecs enters the turbine then the same volume must exit.
There are valid concerns about low-head turbines. Other things being equal, energy generated is proportional to head across the turbines and flow rate. When you only have a head of a few metres, as with in-river schemes, you generate very little energy for your cumec.
Good to see that an essay on the negative aspects of hydro has come to prominence.
Having grown up in the Highlands, son of a senior NOSHEB/SHE/SSE engineer, I have been a long term advocate of hydro-schemes. However, there is a big difference between the large 20th century storage schemes (mostly post-war) and the current fashion for run-of-the-river. The upper Tay catchment has seen dozens of applications for the latter in recent years, most are 500-1000kW, and fairly benign. (except that being small schemes, the landowners make the profits and there is no obligation for community benefit). However, the developers high on subsidies are now looking to gorges where hydro schemes should never have been considered, let along granted permission.
For example the scheme as proposed in the Birks of Aberfeldy, a woodland gorge made famous for its waterfalls by Robert Burns no less. This application went to SEPA who thought it was fine - likewise Perth & Kinross Council (who's planners likewise did not consider the impact the flows would have on the waterfalls, which are the main tourist attraction in the area, and who's planning committee members thought that the intake was BELOW the falls, or worse that the water after it had been through the turbines would be magically transported up to the top of the gorge and flow over the waterfall again!). SNH also thought it okay, provided some rare plants that needed humidity from the waterfall spray were not adversely affected by the reduced flows, so they stipulated that the turbines should not operate for 8 weeks in the spring. So permission was granted for the scheme which SEPA calculated would have the following impact on the flow regime:
As things stood at approval in 2009, the developer (the neighbouring landowner) was expected to make about £400k in revenue (the head is about 250m and it is a 850kW turbine irrc), while the community which owned the gorge was being offered £10k p.a. 'rent' for the use of the land he needed for the outflow and turbine house.
Thankfully, the local community still have the final say on all this, as they were gifted the whole gorge (for recreational purposes) many years ago. It is still a mystery why the community were not properly consulted at the outset. There was general astonishment when news circulated that SEPA/SNH and PKC had granted permission for a scheme which would take up to 73% of the flow away from the falls (and typically 50%). Since then I am glad to report that there has been a right stushie and many public meetings, and those against the proposed scheme have won every vote and both the community postal ballots organised by the Community Council. Though the authorities in Perth refuse to tell the developer to go away and not come back. So the threat to the waterfalls and SSSI and SAC is still there, and now the developer has suggested that the scheme goes forward as a 50/50 community project, which few people want considering the risk and bad feeling that has already been generated by this very inappropriate proposal.
I am still in favour of most hydro schemes, but the subsidies have skewed the system so far that many run-of-the-river schemes which make very little electricity, are being developed at significant cost to the environment and amenity. But few have picked up on this given that windfarms are the main focus of what is wrong with the FIT and ROCs.
Its a worthy prize-winner highlighting the seedier aspects of concealment and spin on yet another dungheap on the renewable subsidy farm. But as pointed out above, its a pity it wasnt given a full technical 'peer review' and edit before hitting the street.
It seems to be written a a slightly hyperbolic fashion. I'm sure run of river hydro is probably very limited on a small island like Britain but in my recent travels I've noticed quite a lot of river hydro in places like the Colombia River in Oregon and also quite a few small scale power stations on the Dordogne so there must be some merit to them. I'm sure there are real environmental issues regarding them but this article doesn't seem to do it in a very good way.
"Besides being at least as unpredictable and costly as solar, within our small island hydro power turns out to be every bit as environmentally damaging as wind. It kills and mutilates fish, trashes historic spawning grounds and wipes out dependent ecosystems"
Surely run of river hydro is a bit more predictable than solar (and wind) energy in Britain, rather than less predictable as implicated in this statement, though I'm sure it would be very small scale energy production here.
From the essay:
"The purchase price was exempted from disclosure in a Freedom of Information request, but British Waterways has revealed that it hopes to make £370,000 a year from hydro power."
This might be the FOI request and response:
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/small_hydro_and_british_waterway
My thoughts are that BW are wasting their time with this. Run-of-the-river schemes are only worth it if you have a decent head - I know of a single scheme (but with a 450m head) on a very small Tay tributory which makes about £600k p.a. for the landowner. The 2MW installed capacity makes an almost worthwhile contribution to the grid, better than a windmill anyway.
But it is another symptom of this renewables madness that run-of-the-river schemes are being developed on the slow and meandering rivers of Albion's Plain.
"run of river hydro"
Surely conventional high-pressure turbines are the wrong technology? Something more like tidal generators (like underwater windmills) might be more appropriate...
Except that they would make peanuts worth of electricity. You need a decent head for it to be worthwhile. Even if every drop of the Tay at Perth (which has an annual average flow of about 150cumecs, greater than the Thames, Severn and Trent combined) could be squeezed though a low pressure generator with a 1m head, the average output would be 1.5MW. The dam and power station at Pitlochry with a 15m head and average flow of 50cumecs averages 7.5MW. Decision-makers have got to realise that renewable energy densities are a joke compared with conventional thermal and nuclear plants. Handy though it is at times of peak demand, we are not blessed with Norway's expanse of high mountains and snowfields so hydro will always be a small-time player in the UK.
"The dam and power station at Pitlochry with a 15m head and average flow of 50cumecs averages 7.5MW."
Pitlochry ! Now we know what drives the dark satanic mill that spin this thread into the wide spread collars of bondage
http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2012/02/in-hope-that-its-manufacturer-will.html
Who would have suspected the power behind Viscount Monckton was Brussells mandated low head hydro?
Congratulations to Pippa Cuckson on her excellent detective work from another entrant in the Ridley Essay Award.
James Delingpole has written a typically trenchant piece about property rights, renewables, David Cameron - and Pippa Cuckson's excellent article.
Russell
Just what the f**k are you talking about? You really are becoming a tedious little man. If you have anything at all useful to say then say it so it makes sense.
You've been warned about forgetting to take your pills.
Hmmm, interesting. The conventional "environmental" wisdom here in the US has long been that hydro is bad, or at best grudgingly tolerable. Indeed, California doesn't typically classify large hydro projects as "renewable." Apparently "small hydro" is renewable, but large is not, so California says.
Would be interesting to know whether small hydro (which might be more likely to be 'in river') would be worse for the fish than large hydro (which tends to be a large dam with a significant lake behind it -- starting of course initially as a river, but becoming a large lake with the dam).
".... local anglers were aghast to find that the supposedly fish-friendly turbine had a license to chop up to 100 fish a month ...."
Has anyone counted the thousands of (dead) fish thrown back into the sea from trawlers, simply because their size or species was outside EU standards?
Sep 3, 2012 at 6:24 PM | Eric Anderson
I've only been to one dam:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinzua_Dam
About Allegheny Reservoir:
The reservoir provides deep, clear water free of most surface obstruction, like rocks and tree limbs. The reservoir is about 27 miles long and provides 90 miles of shoreline with ample public fishing access. It holds a number of state records for fish caught in its waters, like a 35-pound pike caught in 2003, and a 17-pound, 9-ounce walleye caught in 1980.
The fish hanging around in the reservoir near the dam were huge and hundreds of them.
think i've heard of this bit before, but thought it was a joke -
"These are so generous that even the Queen's business advisers have been unable to resist: the Crown E state is spending £1.8 million on an Archimedes Screw turbine on the Thames near Windsor Castle."
found 2 refs on google from fishing sites, is this for real anybody ?
ps. hydro is fine if topology is right, but not for UK S/E which seems to be the focus of the TV weather geeks.