19th April 2008

Last Wednesday Stroud Life printed a letter from Green party Town Councillor Dave Cockcroft writing in his capacity as Transition Stroud Energy Group Coordinator. We copy it below as it raises the same points Green District councillors have been making regarding the need for an increase in wind and hydro.

I'd like to support the letter writers (Stroud Life Weds 9th April) urging more use of small scale hydro power generation along our local streams and rivers. This is a neglected source of power and the Transition Stroud Energy Group has recently been researching its potential. We have unearthed documents produced in 1994 and 1997 by Jackie Carpenter of Energy 21 and Osman Goring of Water Power Engineering for GCC and SDC repectively. The first titled a "Study of Hydropower in the Stroud Valleys" and is a thorough and professional review of the available resource. The conclusion is that the potential electrical power available is 1.3MW or around 6GWh per year. The second report looks in more detail at individual mill sites and downscales estimates in the orginal report due to site specific difficulties.

Even taken the optimisitic figures in the original report the size of the hydro resource amounts to less than 2% of current electricity use in Stroud District. Electricity is only one third of our total energy use which includes liquid fuels for transport and natural gas for heating. An equivalent amount of energy to the total available from many small hydro schemes can be generated by a single large wind turbine and done so much more economically.

It may be that Stroud Valleys was once powered by water but that is no longer possible. Our energy needs have grown vastly in the past 100 years since the availability of cheap fossil fuel supplies.  Those supplies are now peaking and that, combined with the need for drastic emissions reductions required to avert the worst effects of climate change, means we need to be utilising as much renewable energy as possible including both hydro power and wind.

Anyone wanting more information on this should get in touch with Transition Stroud Energy Group. Watch out for more information and articles about Transition Stroud in this newspaper.

Regards - Dave Cockcroft
Transition Stroud Energy Group Coordinator

energy@transitionstroud.org