By Paul Homewood
A surprisingly balanced article in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/12/loch-ness-hydro-storage-schemes-scotland
The article discusses plans to build hydro storage schemes in the Scottish Highlands, but also looks at the genuine environmental concerns, not least the effect of rapidly changing water levels in lochs on salmon. The Guardian report:
“Brian Shaw stood at the 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.”
Glen Earrach’s proposals have fuelled 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, its leisure cruising firms and its archaeological sites, including a prehistoric crannog, or human-made island.”
Glen Earrach is by far the biggest of the proposed storage schemes, with capacity of 30 GWh at a cost of £3 billion. There are the usual claims that such schemes will “provide an energy reserve to cope with peak demand and wind-free days.”
But how much difference will 30 GWh make? (To put it into perspective, Dinorwig, the main storage we have currently, has capacity of 9 GWh).
The CCC’s 7th Carbon Budget wants 88 GW of offshore and 32 GW of onshore wind by 2040. This would on average offer about 48 GW.
To cover for those “windless days”, Glen Earrach’s 30 GWh would only cover that missing wind power for 37 minutes..
In reality, Glen Earrach would only ever be used for managing peak demand, as with Dinorwig. You can forget about it covering for days and weeks of low wind.
And we will have to fork out £3 billion for something that we only need because of overreliance on intermittent wind power and the maniacal drive to close gas power stations.