No corrie will be safe, no classic Munro round will remain sacrosanct, if they approve “Earba”. This is the developers’ secretive codename for a mega-pumped storage hydro scheme (PSH) which is with the equally secretive Energy Consents Unit to fast-track under some barely-accountable Energy Minister’s pen in amongst a sheaf of routine death warrants for our mountain heritage. Is this hyperbole? Read on and decide. Act, even.
“Ardverikie” might ring more of a bell – the Ardverikie Three for sure, and what I am terming the Ardverikie Hill Lochs, to get a bit more cut-through than Lochan na h-Earba (what a mouthful) or Loch a’ Bhealaich Leamhain (can I ever spell that right, let alone remember it?). Oh, and Monarch of the Glen, and film locations such as Mrs Brown.
Here can I bend a knee to Nick for his ‘born rebel’ dogged perseverance in ferreting out all the stuff that threatens our National Parks and wider. And one or two other hound-dogs. Because, like most of you – like most of us – I would far rather be out up in the hills, or delving into pleasant spin-offs like placenames and birdlife, than drudging through Appendix 7.27 or writing letters of objection that will carry no more weight than their 5 KB. Only by getting dragged kicking and screaming to camp on the shores of a mere faint name of a loch never previously glimpsed let alone visited have I found myself…… defending it ? And all the rest.
THE BIG FIVE
What my ppt shows is that we have an entirely new wave of mega-PSH breaking on our rocky hill-shores. To give an idea of scale, there are only two operational schemes – Foyers at 300 MW and Cruachan, well-known as the Hollow Mountain tourist attraction – 440 MW and heading for upgrade to 1040 MW with no change to its reservoir size.
The Big Five proposals over 1000 MW include Coire Glas – where? I didn’t even know till last month, above Loch Lochy – already consented and in progress. Although it will sit below one of the Lochy Munros, it fits inside a bleak trough and doesn’t interfere with the usual ways up the mountains. It attracted minimal objections.
Two more schemes are in rugged, little-visited moorland but far removed from corries and bens – Earrach above Loch Ness and Ballimeanach above Loch Awe.
But two are crudely plonked right in the bosom of classic Munro rounds, and destroy lovely hill lochans, not to mention blocking or blitzing historic hill paths:
- Fearna – (in scoping) another secretive codename, a pretty wee tarn on a shelf above the vast Quoich hydro scheme – dominating the Gleouraich-Spidean Mialach round and blocking the return route;
- Earba – breaks new ground (drowns it?) in not using a large loch such as Ness or Awe as the lower reservoir, but damming a through-glen twin-loch at either end, essentially writing off a lovely valley with its prime wild camping and swimming spots (and drumming snipe at dusk for company).
The developer of both proposals – Gilkes of Kendal, until now the promoter of Run-of-River (Death-of-River?) schemes a hundred times smaller, takes magic thinking to surreal heights describing them as ’sensitively designed to fit their settings’ , with artists’ impressions as if they were sleek Italian sports cars, casually omitting the often more intrusive industrial-scale access roadways, stark dam crests, and daily draw-down to near-empty. These will never be pretty sights – and will sit there until the next ice age comes along.
SACRIFICES : NECESSARY – OR CULT ?
We hillgoers and lovers of the wilds nearly all admit that burning off the Earth’s stock of precious hydrocarbons in a blip of geological time, just to keep taxes down and airfares to the sun cheaper than bus tickets (true, this month, Berlin-Edinburgh 14 euros, Strathblane-Stirling £14), might need a sacrifice or two. And – our own magic thinking – if we let these Big Five get the nod, the climate gods will be appeased. Dream on, follow the money, follow the electricity bills and aviation fuel duties, follow the votes…..
The demands on our mountain heritage are actually insatiable – so long as there are vast profits to be made in supplying endless power to the electorate – and the tech giants: the bulk of Ireland’s energy consumption will soon be by massive data storage centres (a European-scale one is planned for Blyth, Northumberland – so handy for Scotland’s greenergy). And quite how exporting wind, rain, and topography to England and beyond actually benefits the Scottish economy, I have yet to see, you can’t stick tariffs on it at the border, and the planning permissions are free. Job creation – trivial. Sounds good though – the Energy Economy.
Indeed given the Royal Society dismisses (see here) PSH as a poor option ( with uncalculated carbon releases to build them) and advocates hydrogen storage, for which caverns abound in England, we will probably be incentivising greenergy developers to invest in Scotland, not taxing them.
Let us just recall the huge sacrifices already made. Every single one of the great ‘Western Glens’ has a major trad hydro dam, from the Garry up past Cluanie and Affric and Mullardoch and Monar to Ross-shire and Sutherland. The losses of natural lochs, best wildlife spaces, glen habitations, access to hills, all hardly bear thinking about (so we don’t). Now we are still reeling from the spate of Run-of-River schemes, trivial amounts of megawatts for often horrific destruction, never properly restored, community wind(water)falls withheld as suddenly unaffordable (Etive, a glen we will never bear to revisit). I recently had to Google-fly the major ravines of the NW Highlands – a search process made easy by the hydro track scars.
Not to mention wind – the entire Monadhliath, that unsung quiet back country of so many intricate pleasures, changing moods – devastated. Not by government fiat or expropriation as with the Big Hydro schemes – wind and hydro are now entirely landowner and developer-led, creating highly-marketable gold-plated guaranteed-income long-life capital assets to augment investment portfolios, or flog.
WHEREVER NEXT?
Given Scottish Ministers’ gung-ho attitude to greenergy, Earba and Fearna will almost certainly be waved through, two more glorious places off-limits for a decade of construction, never to be revisited. But that will not be it. There exists a secret list – ‘commercially confidential’ – of we don’t know how many alternative locations, supposedly showing that only these two sites fit the bill, but more likely the next to come forward. Follow not just the money but the power lines – Beauly-Denny, and then every spur to Skye or the north-west.
No corrie will be sacrosanct. Whether for pumped storage, or routine hydro – how many serene hill lochs have been tamed and even raised with weirs for supposed Run-of-River?
After visiting Ardverikie, I took a hike up Coire Ardair and onto the swelling Meagaidh range. This is a National Nature Reserve, owned by us. Just as we own, via The Forestry, sites such as Gleann Cia-aig (Arkaig) (see here) and Affric (see here), crudely exploited for Death-of-River, actually some of the worst schemes we have seen. I began to imagine the unthinkable – Scottish Ministers dictate to NatureScot that it must promote vast Coire Ardair for a scheme like Cruachan and Coire Glas – because NatureScot ought to be ‘saving the planet’ not to mention boosting public funds.
Very interesting, lots of research. Well done. Some thoughts:
To comparing these sites we need to know Storage Capacity in GWh as well as Power in GW, or alternatively the time they can generate full power, Traditional schemes have a duration of ~10h (Cruachan is 16h), However, it seems that the drive now is to fill-in the dips in wind power, which would require days of storage, not hours.
The boffins know this, and it gets translated into how much the grid is prepared to pay for the stored electricity. Coire Ghlas is still on hold because the sums don’t add up yet, but I guess it will go ahead eventually.
Its not just a case of blackouts or pumped storage; wind intermittency can be mitigated in other ways, so its more a case of choosing the best mix of options, based on price and performance.
Other ways:
Continue to have gas powered stations as a back-up, perhaps using stored Hydrogen
Building more turbines than you normally need
Long distance balancing with separated wind farms (>500km)
Managing demand : paying folk to switch things off
Finally, there is a climate emergency. Unlike my own crusade topic the SRN: there isn’t a 4G emergency!
Hi
After many years of wanting I managed to visit Ardverikie estate in February 2024 on a ski touring meet. During this visit I visited the beautiful area mentioned above, two lochs and a third above the glen. Walking and skiing in the hills was a wonderful experience as it almost always is when visiting Scotland, but finishing a walk from loch Pattack to end in this wonderful glen now threatened with flooding makes me very sad, but angry too, not just for myself and many other visitors but for the wildlife.
I hope this scheme is not given the go ahead so it remain the wild area it has been for all to appreciate.
Kind regards
Sam
Thank you for this reflective contribution.
One topic never appears in modern “delevopment-speak.” The same question today merits response in so many other aspects of modern life… politics ..banking….population growth …waste disposal What is the purpose, where does the planning “intention” lead us? How do the proposals fit with how descendents of this uniquely selfish generation will experience things in 50 , or 100 years, even in future centuries?
We all must know the question is inconvenient. But this generation was convinced enough that the planet might survive better if we change all lightbulbs for “energy efficient, light emitting,versions transported to us after being made in far away lands ( This super sell of a reduction in energy demand did not work ! People just installed an ever greater numbers of the newer ones. ?)
We are also pursuaded that we need instant mobile communications and fast echargers for all sorts of convenience things …..indoctrinated to admit that in future cars must only be driven by electricity…but the salepeople fail to concede that no technology exists to power larger aircraft or cruise liners or even containerships this way, as yet.
So ..almost through a careless accident of technological “progress”.. carbon burning foreign holidays and world leisure travel are left alone ..still activily promoted .
What I am getting at is this: If energy consumption is to continue increasing exponentially in every nation on earth, what difference is it going to make if ever more energy is “captured” in wild places such as the pristine Scottish glens now.
Why should our self-obsessed choices, now, mean that within these next few decades every remaining wild place there today is also left totally trashed? It becomes a bequest with no vestige of natural place for to our descendents if ‘we’ carry on this way.
So….What is the “end game”? Or are ‘developers’already at ‘play’ with it, just for a mirage through their own lifetimes enjoying private, personal dead-end profit?
That’s a very, very good question to which I suspect none of the leading players have any kind of answer. The concept of enoughness, of sufficiency, of balance and proportion, does not enter their heads, is not on their radar. As with essay writing, the hardest part is always the structuring of the argument and the leading of it to a reasoned conclusion; it’s tough and a chore, but it has to be done. We haven’t had anything like that in this non-debate, and if the politicians and their multinational pals have it their way – which is almost certain, since in Scotland we have veered towards Putinesque repression of dissent, achieved for now by simply refusing to engage rather than by more violent means, although it’s early days – we will not get it, ever. There is an insatiable appetite for energy under the green banner and unless more people wake up to that fact, our landscapes, our wildlife, habitats and history will all be toast.
The negative ecological and visual amenity aspects of this form of hydro power generation are likely to be even more acute and long term than described in this Parkswatch article parkswatchscotland.co.uk/2018/08/23/the-hidden-horrors-of -hydro/? fbclid=IwAR3cgH7KRq-Fyf2c.. The radical impacts on the aquatic environment will stretch all the way through from aquatic plants, invertebrates and fish all the way up to avian and mammalian piscivores
I am finding the above points and your website, in general, fascinating. I lean towards net zero, fixing climate change and less development of our countryside etc. I used to think Hydro was the good guy of Scottish/UK electricity production and I like to thing is was, historically. I see your point that new hydro has little impact on storage for a lot of damage to the actual landscape and visual amenity and high carbon release during construction.
I will follow further.
Do you try to get media(for example newspapers) to take up these points? Would be a good one for the Heralds “In depth” reports that they do.
I am also fascinated by the arguments for and against onshore wind farms.
There is certainly a political sensitivity aspect in the various agencies against raising objections, as opposed to providing commentary within consultation responses. I have my doubts that the powers, or voice of the agencies (in addition to the significant constraints on resources/(headcount), is adequately supported with legislation to ensure the actual technical challenges are raised in a well structured integrated holistic manner. Its too easy to outwit the existing system by constraining the view to per development basis. We need a way to relate regional demand to regional production otherwise we will couple exploitation of our limited remote wilderness resource directly to unboundaried national consumerism.
Pump storage to me seems a waste of time and money. In the near future, I expect every home will have some form of battery storage (possibly just their car), which will automatically drawdown the spare capacity on the grid at a cheap rate when available. So the question is, where will the spare capacity be to pump water to the high corries. It seems to me the Highlands will be left with another white elephant waste of money. Remember, the last one – a certain cross country canal, which failed to see how things were changing. Typical lack of vision of the future by the corporations and government who seek to rule our lives. The Highlands has enough hydro let’s leave it at that.