Spotlight |
Assessing hydro resources
The British hydro industry has been described as an engaged sector that wishes to develop more. Calls are being made to ensure that hydropower, including tidal technologies, are able to play their full part in decarbonising the country’s electricity system
Above: Hydropower has helped to decarbonise the UK’s electricity systems for over 100 years but has yet to fully develop its full potential
HYDROPOWER HAS SERVED THE UK incredibly well for over a century as a renewable electricity resource, helping to decarbonise the country’s power system. It has cumulatively saved the need to generate 300TWh from other sources, leading to an estimated saving of 160 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions over that same period. However, the sector has yet to fully develop to the levels that have been previously suggested. According to the UK Hydropower Resource Assessment 2022, a new report produced by The Energy Informatics Group at the University of Birmingham and commissioned by the British Hydropower Association, UK hydro is “an engaged sector that wishes to develop more”. It believes it has an increasingly important role to play in security of supply as part of an overall net-zero generation portfolio. Furthermore, the sector has shown it is able to continue to innovate through the co-location of hydropower schemes with battery storage and the development of pico-scale hydropower systems. The report’s aim was to provide an evidenced assessment of the potential of additional hydropower
10 | February 2023 |
www.waterpowermagazine.com
generation thar could support the UK’s target of net-zero. It suggests that “a sound representative estimate” of 217.5MW of hydropower could be built by 2030 under a favourable policy environment, which if scaled up across the whole UK would be up to 1.4GW. However, a more conservative value is considered to be 1GW of additional capacity that would generate an estimated 1.5% of the UK’s net-zero annual electrical demand by 2050. According to the report, the main barriers to further
hydropower deployment in the present climate include a lack of ongoing financial certainty, as well as difficulty in obtaining environmental licences, grid connections and planning permission. These challenges can be addressed, and the sector reinvigorated by implementing the report’s following five recommendations: 1. The UK should target a 50% increase in its hydropower capacity.
2. The Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy should continue to engage with the British Hydropower Association on the relative merits of different funding mechanisms to incentivise 1GW of
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