Photos: Preserving Beauty, Providing Hydropower in Scotland

Tunneling Forward for Energy

Photograph by Toby Smith, Getty Images Reportage

An engineer inspects the shale dam's internal structure and valves at Loch Breaclaich (map), near Perthshire, in a mountainous region of deep glaciated valleys with peaks more than 3,000 feet (900 meters) high. Confined spaces are treated with great respect as any injury or accident would require a tricky rescue operation; Breaclaich itself is almost 2,000 feet above sea level and is nearly 6 miles (9 kilometers) from any road.

The energy potential of the Scottish Highlands was recognized early in the history of electric power. Scotland's first public hydro supply was built here in 1890 to serve a village of 800 people—just eight years after Thomas Edison built the world's first commercial electricity station in Lower Manhattan. And Great Britain's first major hydro plant was developed just six years later near Loch Ness by British Aluminum Company, which recognized that using the enormous and constant force of water to turn turbines would drive down the tremendous energy cost of extracting aluminum—then considered a semi-precious metal—from its ore.

(Related: "Energy and Industry")

But it was not until World War II that Britain began to weigh a widespread system of hydropower plants linked together in an electricity network, thanks to the urging of Scottish Labour Party politician Tom Johnston, Scotland's secretary of state in Churchill's wartime coalition government.

At that time in the United States, a hydropower construction frenzy was under way to secure energy for aluminum to build military planes and bombs; President Franklin Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Authority had 12 hydroelectric projects under construction at one time in 1942.

Across the sea, Johnston, born in Kirkintilloch, near Glasgow, spoke out on the potential of the Highlands mountains and lakes of his homeland to provide both power and jobs. Parliament was persuaded, and voted to establish the North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board in 1943.

Published March 21, 2011

Machinery That Endures

Photograph by Toby Smith, Getty Images Reportage

The grand Tummel power station that houses this huge hydroelectric turbine speaks to the investment made over the years in this system, some portions of which have been in operation since the 1930s. The teak doors at the end of the building are the largest in Britain.

Much of the engineering equipment that makes hydroelectric power work is housed in such buildings or completely hidden underground. The manager of the hydro operations in Scottish and Southern Energy’s southern region, Roger Twigg, who is now nearing retirement after 40 years in the business, marvels at the longevity of the plants. "What other industry is producing the same product, with the same machines and same specifications that were put there in 1933?" he asks.

The Tummel Valley has a cascade system; water from the main reservoir, which is 21 miles (32 kilometers) long and 1,400 feet ( 426 meters) above sea level, travels downward into a valley with nine power stations. The same water may have run through turbines to generate power five times before it reaches the end of the system. "That’s how much value we’re putting on the water," says Twigg. "We’re using it as much as we can."

Published March 21, 2011

Engineering and Excavating

Photograph by Toby Smith, Getty Images Reportage

An engineer studies original diagrams at Lochay Power Station, near Perthshire. The station is fed through a pipeline and tunnel system that is more than 6 miles (9 kilometers) long.

Excavating such underground passageways for water was the most dangerous of the jobs required to build the system. Between the 1940s and the early 1960s, a workforce that averaged 4,500 workers and at its peak had more than 12,000 was required to build the infrastructure for the Scottish Highlands hydro system. During World War II, the workforce including German and Italian prisoners of war.

After the war, the crews of "Tunnel Tigers" included Germans, Poles, and Czechs drawn to the high wages and hefty bonuses. The wages were 10 times what could be earned by a Highlands estate worker at that time. But workers had to live in temporary camps near construction sites. And although there are no definitive statistics, on-the-job casualties were frequent, with 22 deaths recorded in one 1,000-worker camp in just one year.

Published March 21, 2011

Where Time Stands Still

Photograph by Toby Smith, Getty Images Reportage

Deep inside Sloy Dam, a structure called "the pendulum" measures any movement of the dam due to geological or pressure change. A high-tensile wire stretching from the top of the dam to its base etches a path in wax paper that is periodically inspected by engineers. More modern dams use lasers and ultrasound to monitor change, but the harsh conditions in this part of Scotland—cold and wet—favor old-school methods.

"The engineers that work on the hydro stations today, and the work they do would be recognized by the people who build them 60 years," says Julian Reeves, a spokesman for Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE). Although the valves and the switches are now controlled from the company’s central offices in Perth, "all of the maintenance and all of the technology is actually identical to the original," he says.

A major refurbishment of the stations, to add computerized controls, was able to squeeze out only a 5 percent improvement in the system’s efficiency. "That’s how well-designed they were," he says.

Published March 21, 2011

A Valley's Gentle Flow

Photograph by Toby Smith, Getty Images Reportage

In a remote corner of northeast Scotland known as Glen Strathfarrar, rare Caledonian pines line the valley and waters that feed into Loch Monar.

Altogether the capacity of SSE's hydro operations in the Scottish Highlands is about 1,100 megawatts, making it quite a small system. In contrast, one single dam in the United States—Grand Coulee on the Columbia River in Washington State, which opened in 1942 and is still the largest U.S. power station—has six times the capacity of all 80 of SSE's dams. And Scotland's hydro boosters look with envy at their near neighbors in Scandinavia: Norway’s rugged landscape enables it to derive 99 percent of its electricity from rushing water.

"The mountains here aren't quite high enough and the valleys are not quite big enough to be ideal for hydro," says Reeves. "But when the stations were built, it was the way of getting electricity to these remote areas."

Published March 21, 2011

The Power of Renewable

Photograph by Toby Smith, Getty Images Reportage

An engineer transports heavy lifting gear to a small turbine connected to a lock designed to enable fish to bypass the turbines at Lochay Power Station.

Opposition from local landowners was fierce when the hydro program was getting underway. Not only did they fear damage to tourism and sport fishing, but they worried that the availability of cheap power would attract industry and destroy the region’s agrarian way of life.

Lord Airlie, the first chairman of the hydro board, tried to fend off the opponents: "Industry on a heavy scale will never come to the Highlands, because it is common sense that it is easier to bring current to industry than industry to the current," he is quoted as saying. But the criticism targeted at him personally grew so great that he resigned in 1946.

In order to ensure his Scottish hydro dream would be realized, Tom Johnston left politics and took over as board chairman.

Although it was years before the modern environmental movement, he and other hydro supporters worked to win over detractors by pointing to hydro as clean power (a story memorialized at the Scottish and Southern Energy Visitor Centre in Pitlochry, Perthshire).

"They would say if you look at some of the properties that rely on oil and peat and paraffin for lighting, then think again if you think you should oppose the development of this new energy," says Reeves.

Published March 21, 2011

An Upstream Passage for Salmon

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A visitor views a traditional fish ladder, an interlocking stream of shallow cascades, that enables salmon to swim upstream past Dunalastair Dam for spawning.

As early as 1943, in establishing the program to bring hydro power to Scotland, Parliament required that developments avoid injury to fisheries and stocks of fish. (At that time, many hydro plants being built, including the Grand Coulee in the United States, had no protection for fish at all; it is blamed for decimation of several types of salmon.)

(Related: "Dog-Eating Catfish, Other River Giants Threatened by Mekong Dam Plan")

As a result, SSE's hydro system today has 36 fish passes throughout its six hydro system groupings to enable salmon and other species to navigate past the obstructions that changed the shape of the Highlands' rivers.

Fish screens, which require a great deal of labor to maintain, prevent any small fish from entering the turbines. It is estimated that each year between April and October an average of 5,400 salmon fight their way upstream from Atlantic feeding grounds to spawn in the upper reaches of the River Tummel. At the last dam on the system, Pitlochry, the ladder is 1,000 feet (310 meters) long and has 34 pools, including three larger areas that enable the fish to rest as they travel upstream. The rise between each of the pools is about 20 inches (50 centimeters). Some 500,000 tourists come to the Pitlochry visitors' center each year, where they can view salmon passing through a glass-enclosed ladder.

"Sport fishing is so important here, " says Twigg. "We would have never been allowed to build unless fish were able to make a free passage up the dam."

Published March 21, 2011

Footfall on a Changing Landscape

Photograph by Toby Smith, Getty Images Reportage

Fresh Scottish wildcat tracks puncture the snow on the shores of Loch Errochty. The elusive species' numbers are estimated to be as low as 400, as it is threatened not only by development and hunting, but more recently by interbreeding with domestic cats.

The remote hydroelectric lochs, often in conservation or scientific study areas, provide some of the last refuges for the species outside of captivity.

The engineers are keenly aware of the changes to the landscape from which the Scottish hydro system draws its water, says Reeves. The snowfields of the north were sometimes called "nature's batteries," a means of storing electricity until the spring thaw would slowly feed power into the hydro stations. "But what we've found recently with milder winters is we're getting less snow and more rain," says Reeves. "And while you can store rain in the lochs, there's a limit, and therefore a limit in the way the power stations are used than they have been in the past. They've seen a real evidence of change in the past 50 years."

(Related: "Nuclear Reactors, Dams at Risk Due to Global Warming")

Published March 21, 2011

Flooding and Preservation

Photograph by Toby Smith, Getty Images Reportage

In the far northwest of Scotland at Glen Strathfarrar, remote Loch Monar is held in this valley by an unusual double curvature concrete arch dam—making the facility unique in Britain. Deer and wild goat roam on the surrounding land, which is privately owned and managed.

As at many locations, the hydro board had to overcome opposition to build the dam that flooded this valley.

"It did change the shape of Scotland; you can't get away from that," says Reeves. "But it was done in a way that blended in with the environment."

Similar conflicts arise wherever hydropower plants are planned around the world, as corralling water for power can destroy marshland, other sensitive habitat, and even villages. For the largest hydroelectric project in the world, Three Gorges Dam, China relocated more than 1 million residents.

(Related: "China's Three Gorges Dam, by the Numbers" and "Pictures: Huge Jets Shoot From Dam During China Floods")

The upheaval for residents, by contrast, was minimal in the rural and rugged Scottish Highlands, with 25 percent of Great Britain's land but only 3 percent of its population.

At Loch Monar and the associated power stations, just as at all of the hydro plants in the Scottish Highlands, government regulations require that SSE maintain certain levels of water flow so that rivers do not run low. This compensation water allows fish to move, breed, and feed, and maintains a flow of water throughout the landscape. It comes at an energy cost. "That means sometimes we are not able to generate," says Reeves.

He says when rainfall is extraordinarily heavy, the hydro system also will allow water to spill over the dam to minimize the impact of local flooding, as long as it doesn't create a problem further downstream. "We have to be a neutral player," he says. "But if there is a way to safely operate to prevent flooding at the expense of generating power, we will do that," he says.

(Related: "Lessons from the Field: Patuca River, Honduras")

(Related: "Resurgence of Large Dams Threatens Tribal People, Report Says")

Published March 21, 2011

A View to the Future

Photograph by Toby Smith, Getty Images Reportage

The water catchment and power station at the cliff base in Loch Leathan replaced an expensive diesel generation system on the Isle of Skye it was built in 1949. Skye, in the northwest, embodied the idea of the remote areas Britain hoped to reach with its hydro program; it was not connected to the mainland until a bridge opened in 1995.

Although hydropower still makes up the largest share of Great Britain's renewable energy portfolio, Reeves of SSE says that will soon change. "Over time, what we're seeing is a great number of onshore and offshore wind farms, and the total output of those will outstrip hydropower," he says. "Being an island nation, we have a very good wind resource, particularly in some of the coastal areas, whereas Great Britain and Scotland are just marginal for hydro."

SSE, which already has a number of wind power operations, is in the process of developing more, as the United Kingdom—which now gets less than 4 percent of its total power from renewables—has a goal of reaching 20 percent by 2020. But the company's plans sometimes face a reception that would be familiar to Scotland's hydropower pioneers of the 1940s. In early March, SSE abandoned plans for an offshore wind farm near Kintyre because of strenuous opposition from residents who feared it would damage tourism, disrupt recreational sailing, and destroy the seascape that inspired William McTaggart, Scotland's great 19th-century artist.

Even as wind power proliferates in Great Britain, SSE's Southern hydro manager Twigg says that he believes the hydroelectric system of the Scottish Highlands continues to play a crucial role. Unlike the intermittent power of the wind, the power from water can be controlled, stored, and called on when it is needed. "It plays a very important part in balancing the system," he says.

"You always get people who knock us," Twigg says, "but it's free, it's on the rainfall and natural, and it doesn't generate any greenhouse gases. In my opinion it was the best use of Scotland's glens and rivers, to harness the energy to supply cheap power to the people of Scotland."

This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.

Published March 21, 2011