British rivers could power 850,000 homes

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent Published: 9:00PM GMT 06 March 2010

A loan breeze turbine spins amongst empty plumes from cooling towers Photo: GETTY

The Environment Agency will exhibit that the H2O wheels have the intensity to beget sufficient physical phenomenon to appetite 850,000 homes some-more than 3 per cent of the UK"s residential physical phenomenon demand.

A investigate commissioned by the Government physique has resolved that there is immeasurable untapped intensity opposite the England and Wales for generating appetite from rivers.

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Waterways in Wales, the top reaches of the Thames, the Humber, the Aire, Severn and the Mersey have been identified as carrying the infancy potential.

If all the turbines are built, it would cost around �4 billion. The income would be paid by the in isolation operators of the particular schemes, who would embrace subsidies from appetite customers.

The inform has identified at slightest 5,000 sites around England and Wales where small to middle scale schemes could be built easily. A serve 21,000 sites could be grown if befitting stairs were taken to safeguard the tide ecology was protected.

However, the proposals have met clever critique from inhabitant fishing organisations and panorama campaigners.

They explain hydropower turbines could turn eyesores in a little of the infancy pleasing tools of the nation and can have harmful impacts on migrating fish such as fish and salmon, that need float upstream to breed.

Tony Grayling, head of meridian shift and tolerable growth at the Environment Agency, insisted that any schemes being built would have to heed to despotic environmental regulations, together with the designation of channels to concede fish to quit up and down stream.

He said: "Hydropower is a well determined and arguable approach of generating power.

"We hold it can fool around an critical purpose in assembly the targets set by the supervision on shortening CO emissions but we have got to safeguard that they do not stroke on alternative tools of the sourroundings such as fish populations and inundate risk.

"We are additionally now seeking at ways of streamlining in the approach we umpire hydropower.

"Currently hydropower schemes typically need up to 4 licenses from the Environment Agency at the moment, that is utterly formidable from a developers point of view."

The intensity for hydropower opposite the UK will be suggested in a inform patrician Opportunity and Environmental Sensitivity Mapping in England and Wales.

It will brand multiform prohibited spots that were the intensity for generating hydropower is quite high, with the largest concentrations on the rivers Severn, Thames, Aire and Neath.

Not all of the 26,000 identified sites will indispensably be grown and so the tangible physical phenomenon generated is expected to be far less.

The infancy of the new schemes are expected to be retreat Archimedes screws, where H2O is funnelled down a screw done knife edge to stagger a turbine.

Landowners, internal communities and appetite firms could work together to set up turbines on the rivers, with primary set up costs an normal of �100,000 to �150,000.

If fish paths and screening has to be commissioned to strengthen fish afterwards costs will fast rise.

Such schemes would, however, be subsidised by the Government"s new feed-in price tag for renewable energy, that allows householders and landowners to sell one more physical phenomenon from micro-generators on their skill onto the National Grid.

Electricity producers would embrace up to twenty pence for each kilowatt hour of physical phenomenon they generated, definition a middle sized hydropower intrigue that generates sufficient appetite for 32 homes could embrace �25,000 a year.

Critics of renewable appetite subsidies point out that the cost of ancillary projects similar to these will upheld on to the householders by their appetite bills.

Consumers already compensate an one more �13.50 a year in appetite bills to await large scale renewables schemes such as breeze farms.

The Angling Trust reacted in a huff to the proposals for hydropower generation, claiming they could poise a risk to Britain"s already abating salmon and fish populations.

Dr Alan Butterworth, the trust"s technical executive and a former consultant on the impacts of hydropower on fisheries with the Environment Agency, said: "It is really transparent that English and Welsh rivers are simply as well small to have any disproportion to the country"s appetite needs.

"This sort of hydropower can do a large volume of repairs to the ecology of the rivers and retard the emigration of fish."

The Government has set targets to acquire at slightest thirty per cent of the country"s physical phenomenon from renewable sources by 2020.

Renewables now usually have up 5.5 per cent of electricity.

There are now 307 small scale hydropower schemes in the UK, together with most that make use of normal H2O wheels used by former mills.

On the River Monnow in Osbaston, Monmouth, Wales, one homeowner has built a turbine powered by dual Archimedes screws, producing 670,000 kilowatt hours per year sufficient appetite to supply 152 homes.

Dustin Benton, comparison process military officer from the Campaign to Protect Rural England, pronounced that schemes where efforts have been done to revoke the environmental stroke could be hugely beneficial.

But he added: "It will be critical to safeguard there is great and in effect formulation to minimise any visible stroke they will have on the countryside."