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Hydropower: blueprint for supplying energy to social tenants?

An ecologically sensitive National Trust hydropower project could provide landlords with a blueprint for supplying energy to social tenants, as Jess McCabe finds out

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Pristine is the word that springs to mind as the sun rises in the Great Langdale valley, glinting off the snow-covered mountain caps. Narrow and fast, the sound of the Stickle Ghyll stream rushing down the mountain is deafening, the water perfectly clear.

To the untutored eye, the awe-inspiring valley, dotted with the occasional sheep, does not seem to be an ideal location to build anything, let alone a hydropower plant. Indeed, the plan brings to mind the words of local poet William Wordsworth, who in protest at plans to build a railway through this area in 1844, wrote: ‘Is then no nook of English ground secure, from rash assault?’

Yet this is exactly what the National Trust is planning to do, to supply electricity to tenants and neighbours in the valley - and to Sticklebarn, which is not a location in the Lord of the Rings, but in fact a pub run by the historical protection charity.

Appearances can be deceiving - the choice of location turns out to have the force of logic and history behind it. The National Trust has selected Great Langdale as one of its first experiments with hydropower, as it strives to meet a target to generate 50 per cent of its energy from renewables by 2020, in part because of its history of industrial use dating back to the Neolithic era. It has a lack of sensitive plant or fish life, meaning the site fulfils the trust’s requirement that any work done on its land respects the ‘spirit of place’. 

And the National Trust’s experiments with one of the lesser-known technologies for generating renewable power could be a model for social landlords, who until now have mostly stuck to solar power - the staple energy crop of the sector.

Garry Sharples is easy to spot in his jumper, emblazoned with the National Trust’s leafy logo. Environmental practices advisor at the charity, Mr Sharples has the job of shepherding the £500,000 project that will generate 100 kilowatts of electricity from concept to reality.

We climb the ghyll to check out exactly where the hydro system will be installed - 80 metres up, an ‘intake’ will slice off a small amount of the water. It will then slosh into a pipe, buried invisibly in the hillside, which drops down into the valley. As it drops, the water accumulates pressure that will turn an iron turbine, generating electricity. Once complete, the system will be barely noticeable.

Historical precedent
Mr Sharples is quick to dispel my illusions that the vista in front of us is in any way a Wordsworthian ‘wild secluded scene’ about to be spoilt. In Neolithic times, the valley was a hub of stone axe-making activity. The earliest known human effort to tap the power of the water rushing down the gorge is in the 1600s, when a mill was used to clean wool. As recently as the 1950s, most locals were supplied with electricity from small hydro plants - before the electricity grid was brought into the valley and everyone effectively switched to coal. ‘Back to the future, we like to call it,’ says Mr Sharples.

HYDRO_2

Sheep are more of a threat to the landscape than the proposed hydropower plant in the Great Langdale valley

The ghyll looks lovely but is ecologically speaking almost lifeless. No fish swim up or down, says Mr Sharples - an ecologist in a previous life. ‘This waterfall is five or six metres high. You’re not going to get any migrating fish up there. With us putting the intake high up, we know we’re not going to cause any further obstruction,’ he explains. It’s the sheep - which are apparently some of the most efficient lawnmowers in the business, and have munched away much of the landscape, - that have reduced the ecological variety on offer.

The intake is located on a stretch of the ghyll with a bridge across it, and the banks are shored up with stone walls. ‘We chose this place because we’re not messing with something a human hasn’t before,’ he notes.

‘Is this fresh, drinkable water?’ I ask.

Mr Sharples, originally from Wigan, looks sceptical. ‘It depends how many sheep have been up the top. You can probably drink it and get away with it - I’ll let you decide.’

English debut
The charity has already installed at least two hydro projects in Wales, but Stickle Ghyll - already having received planning and environmental permissions - will be the first in England. A geographical survey identified 167 potential hydropower projects just on the National Trust’s own land in the Lake District. ‘What we did then was we applied various sensitivity checks to all of them, and also applied with the National Grid to see if we could actually connect up to the grid itself - a fairly crucial part of a project from a financial angle.’

Stickle Ghyll was chosen as the first project 18 months ago, as it would be the cheapest to connect to the grid.

Mr Sharples is about to put the project out to tender, inviting local hydro providers to come and help design the 100 kilowatt project, which will supply enough electricity to power about 80 to 100 homes. This will be a ‘run of river’ scheme - which slices off a small percentage of the water high up the ghyll, nothing like the massive dams that stop the normal flow of a river and have given large hydropower projects such a bad ecological name.

‘It’s not a supply that will give you 365 days of power. It will occasionally be off,’ Mr Sharples explains. But it will displace the use of electric, oil and propane-burning heating systems. 

The project will attract subsidies from the feed-in tariff - hydro projects of this size can get just in excess of 20p for each kilowatt hour of electricity they generate - and will be paid for by the trust’s own fund, as part of a pilot which redirects investments out of the stock market and into sustainable projects on the charity’s own land.

Hydropower still only generates a tiny proportion of the UK’s electricity supply - 1.5 per cent, much of which is in Scotland - and that includes large dams, as well as the domestic-scale turbines such as those about to be installed at Great Langdale. Until recently the potential in England and Wales was understood to be small.

Identifying potential
Hitherto hydro enthusiasts had to rely on a study from 1989, which identified potential for about 34 megawatts of small projects in England and Wales. But a 2010 report by the Department of Energy and Climate Change found that the picture has changed dramatically - mostly because technology has improved and become less expensive, and the start of financial incentives such as the feed-in tariff subsidy. That study found 1,692 potential sites in England and Wales alone, with the potential to generate between 146 and 248 megawatts of electricity.

Few, if any, social homes draw electricity direct from their own hydro plant - no figures seem to exist tracking the number of projects by tenure of the homes they supply. But that could change.

Kirk Archibald, associate director in the environment team at architect PRP, says there are obstacles - obviously the technology will not be suitable in the centre of a city, and for social landlords with homes close by a river with potential for hydropower, permits would be required to use the resource.

‘There’s quite a lot of untapped potential, using fairly small-scale turbines which are getting more cost-effective,’ he adds. ‘The kit will likely last a good while - you’re looking at 100 years. It doesn’t have a lot of fancy technology - it’s a turbine, it sits in the water and turns. Where it makes sense, it makes a great deal of sense.’

The most common renewable technologies used in social housing

Partner, HTA

Social landlords have been building affordable housing that incorporates some form of renewable energy system for some time now. In my experience, there are some systems that have worked well for them and some that haven’t, and the reasons for landlords’ preference of one technology over another aren’t always technical.

At present, I would say that photovoltaic cells are the favourite. They are relatively cheap, are a mature technology and are relatively painless to maintain. They are popular with contractors for the same reasons and, because they are a fairly flexible technology, it is easy to increase or to decrease the area of cells being installed, even at a late stage in the construction process.

Many of our clients have tried biomass systems in one way or another and most of them won’t do it a second time. The systems that have been installed have been unexpectedly expensive to maintain, perhaps because they didn’t work as well as they should have, or because that’s the nature of the technology and no one researched this well enough before making the decision to purchase.

Solar thermal is not popular because it requires a lot of plumbing to install and when it goes wrong it can be difficult to identify where the problem lies, with the array, the cylinder, the pump and whose problem is it to fix?

Heat pumps have worked well in some cases but rather badly in others, with a lot of unevenness in the quality of their installation.

We need to see a second generation of most of these systems that are easier for landlords to install and maintain, cheaper for their tenants to run and easier for them to understand.

Rory Bergin is a partner in the architecture and design consultancy HTA

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