Small scale hydropower could provide new jobs to rural regions
Micro-hydro, the generation of electricity from small streams, has begun to take off in rural Wales. The country’s geography makes small-scale hydropower a viable alternative source of energy and, for struggling rural areas, a source of income and jobs.
Wales has long exploited its natural advantages in waterpower, from pre-industrial mills to six large hydropower schemes today. The vast Dinorwig plant alone generates 1,728 MW, meeting peak-time electricity demand across the country. A typical micro-hydro installation, by contrast, will produce well under 50 KW, although some run as high as 0.5 MW.
At present, some 23 micro schemes are in operation, with another 30 or more due to come onstream over the next year or so. The potential for expansion beyond that is significant, with the Welsh government estimating that 1,000MW could be installed by 2020 a small but not negligible contribution to Wales’ target of generating 22,500 MW of renewable energy by 2025.
What makes the technology interesting, however, is not so much its potential to meet renewables targets, important as these are, but as a driver for regeneration in otherwise deprived and excluded areas.
The very nature of the technology involved, with a comparatively low capital investment and dependency on particular geographical features, makes it ideally suited to community ownership. The price of a typical installation varies, depending largely on size, with a typical installation costing GBP 5,000 to GBP 8,000 per kW. For anything but truly tiny schemes this will be out of reach of all but wealthy individuals.
However, it is within the grasp of of community ownership. And it is this community ownership that offers the key to unlocking the economic potential of hard-to-reach rural areas.
Wales has a long tradition, relative to the rest of the UK, of collective and co-operative ownership. This ranges from small-scale producers to a shining example of large-scale success in the form of Welsh Water, brought under community ownership after its privatised owners went bankrupt in 2000. And while larger renewables schemes, often commercially run, have attracted local opposition on environmental grounds, smaller-scale hydro has attracted far less.
New research by Cardiff Business School points to a potential economic windfall from micro-hydro. On the basis of existing installations, researchers estimate that every 1 MW of community-owned micro-hydro installed generates an additional 10 full-time equivalent jobs in every year of its operation. This, again, is significantly ahead of other generation technologies, including the next-best performer, community-owned solar photovoltaics, generating 3.3 full-time jobs per 1 MW installed.
This economic windfall comes from two sources. The first arises because micro-hydro is an embedded technology. Whereas larger schemes, wherever located, rely on significant imports of material and expertise, successful micro-hydro installation requires a close knowledge of local geography and suppliers. It helps generate clusters of activity, sustaining micro-economies of its own. These will be jobs and incomes created in communities and areas that otherwise remain beyond the reach of more conventional regeneration initiatives.
The second windfall is payments for every kilowatt hour (kWh) of power generated through the government’s feed-in tariff (FIT) scheme. This provides additional payments to renewable producers, acting as a subsidy to generate additional revenue from production.
Source : The Guardian