Micro Hydro Association

I have been involved for some time in discussions with departments and agencies on the way micro hydro schemes are regulated and on other matters affecting their development.  I have now drafted a paper which proposes ways to  lessen the burden both for potential scheme owners and developers, and for agencies and planning authorities.

It is alarming that the few suppliers with real experience are now abandoning micro hydro owing largely to the delays and complexities of the red tape - hundreds of valuable schemes risk delay or abandonment otherwise.

Please contribute your comments and ideas in response to this entry.

21 January 2013 Environment Agency consultation on flow standards

The EA has today published their supplementary consultation on flow standards for regulating hydropower abstraction.

It is vital for securing the hydropower industry's existence and ability to contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and for the ecology of watercourses, that the Agency adopts a rational approach to setting both risk based and proportionate guidance and permitting rules.  The EA proposes four options but does not limit responses to those.  I will be posting a draft response to the consultation on this website and distributing it to mha members by email, inviting comment before a final submission on behalf of the mha.  The consultation document is also available here.  Note that EA's Option 1 is basically emulating SEPA guidance for high head schemes already in place for Scotland.

The consultation is open for 10 weeks closing on 2 April 2013.

The full list is available from Ofgem here (large Excel spreadsheet):
Feed-in Tariff Installation Report 31st December 2012
- MS Excel - 38986Kb

I have extracted data for hydro installations in this spreadsheet (also in pdf format here)

Below are analyses of this data for micro hydro schemes (<=100kW) commissioned from 1 April 2010 to 31 December 2010.