Scotland has a significant history of hydropower generation. In the early 1900s estates started building small hydro schemes to produce electricity to provide power to the main house or castle.  Then in the 1950s and 60s there was massive investment through the North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board (NoSHEB) and the building of many large dams and the flooding of glens.

The benefit of this historical investment though is that Scotland now has a production capacity of 1,388 MegaWatt representing some 12% of the total UK’s electrical capacity requirement.

The beautiful thing is this electricity is completely ‘green’.  It is genuinely a zero carbon source of power – if we ignore the concrete used in the construction of the weirs.

The biggest and ‘best’ glens have already been developed, mainly by the North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board in the 1950s and 60s where they dammed the river and created storage schemes. But there are many, many more schemes that can be developed as ‘run-of-river’ solutions where only a weir is required to abstract the water rather than store it.  In fact through the use of Hydrobot the location of some 7,000 commercially viable schemes have been identified (as reported by the Scottish Government in ‘The Employment Potential of Scotland’s Hydro Resource - 2010’).

The commercial viability is to a large measure based on the attractive Feed-in Tariffs launched by the UK Government in April 2010. If you have the rights to a stretch of water then you are in a position to:

a)   Contribute to the reduction in the production of carbon and thus global warming

b)   Take part in the renaissance of hydro in Scotland

c)   Create a significant income stream that will endure for 20 to 30 years

Please take a look at the rest of this website and then give us a call for a chat.