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Brian Shaw stood at the water’s edge of Loch Ness and pointed to a band of glistening pebbles and damp sand skirting the shore. It seemed as if the tide had gone out.
Overnight, Foyers, a small pumped storage power station, had recharged itself drawing up millions of litres of water into a reservoir high up on a hill behind it, ready for release through its turbines to boost the UK’s electricity supply. That led to the surface of Loch Ness, the largest body of freshwater in the UK, falling by 14cm in a matter of hours.
Shaw, an expert in freshwater salmon who runs the Ness District Salmon Fishery Board, believes this is a warning of things to come. “I had a complaint about the level of Loch Ness dropping by a foot overnight,” he said, gesturing at the shore. “It’s actually dropped six inches over the course of the day. That wouldn’t happen naturally.”
Foyers power station was built in 1974, and after a 40-year absence, pumped hydro storage is back on the agenda and with it fresh questions about who the water belongs to.
Power companies are racing to meet one of the biggest challenges of the green energy revolution: how to store excess power from the large windfarms being built around the UK to provide an energy reserve to cope with peak demand and wind-free days.
Developers hope to build 11 pumped hydro storage projects with the combined capacity of 10GW, equivalent to 10 large nuclear power stations, to help meet a government target to install up to 8GW of long-duration energy storage by 2030. Most of the projects are in the Scottish Highlands, with two in north Wales. Not all will go ahead.
Loch Ness has been earmarked for three of these projects – the most of any waterbody in the UK. Two are of a similar size to Foyers. However, the third, at Glen Earrach on the north side of the loch, will be one of the most powerful envisaged, offering up to 30GWh of electricity.
Building the power station will cost about £3bn, but its backers argue that the 2GW plant has a great advantage over local competitors: it makes the best use of gravity.
Glen Earrach’s storage reservoir is Loch nam Breac Dearga, tucked under a rocky mountain nearly 500 metres above sea level, flanked by banks of snow and iced-over peat bog. Because it is close to Loch Ness and high up, they say its “head height” – the distance its water has to travel to reach the turbines – makes it one of the most efficient on offer.
Roderick MacLeod, whose family owns the estate where the project would be built, said: “For the same amount of water, for the same size of tunnels, for the same size of machines, you are getting three times more power, three times more energy stored and so you’re getting three times the consumer benefit. That’s the key selling point.”
Glen Earrach’s proposals have fuelled significant amounts of anxiety locally. It is the third such plan proposed for Loch Ness but also the largest by far.
More than a dozen agencies, conservation bodies and local businesses have lodged objections or raised questions about Glen Earrach with the Scottish government’s energy consents unit, which oversees power station applications.
Its critics fear that if all four plants are approved, that could significantly affect the loch’s delicate ecology, its migrating salmon and trout, the loch’s leisure cruising firms and its archaeological sites, including a prehistoric crannog, or human-made island.
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Shaw estimates that if all the plants simultaneously refilled their reservoirs, the surface of Loch Ness could fall by up to 1.2 metres, or by 27m cubic metres. If all that water was suddenly discharged, it would upset the loch’s delicate hydrology and water temperatures, affecting juvenile salmon.
The invertebrate charity Buglife said Glen Earrach alone could lower the loch’s surface by nearly half a metre when it recharges its upper loch. It raises concerns about the risks to insects such as northern damselfly, the brilliant emerald dragonfly and a species of cranefly.
Glen Earrach Energy is in a fiercely fought contest to persuade Ofgem, the energy regulator, to award it the electricity supply agreement it needs to raise the billions of pounds to build the plant. Ofgem’s evaluation process starts this spring. Meanwhile, Glen Earrach has been lobbying Labour ministers, MPs and policymakers, urging them to study its numbers.
MacLeod said the firm would soon publish a detailed environmental impact assessment to answer ecological concerns and has funded a joint survey with Shaw’s fisheries board to investigate environmental threats to Loch Ness’s juvenile salmon.
MacLeod said the loch was naturally recharged by its surrounding rivers, making any reductions in its surface level short-lived. Shaw, meanwhile, acknowledged that the Scottish Environment Protection Agency set legal limits on pumped storage schemes that prevented firms drawing water when levels were too low.
In an attempt to prove how seriously it takes its social obligations, Glen Earrach Energy is offering to make community benefit payments of up to £25m a year – the largest ever proposed by a power company.
“The landscape is kind of everybody’s,” MacLeod said. “I think it’s only right that it should provide a return to the community, because it has an impact on the community and in this particular context, that’s got to do with water. We’re essentially paying for water use, as a rent on the water we use.”
