Farming energy – an opportunity we cannot afford to neglect

These are not good days to be promoting renewable energy because of climate change. An atypically cold winter, coupled with dodgy emails from a leading research centre and an increasingly sceptical public, has rather taken the wind out of the sails of those who argue that climate change remains a formidable challenge which we cannot and should not shirk.

But unpopular though it may be with some, I want to defend that rationale. Robert McKie wrote an excellent piece in the Observer a couple of weeks back in which he advised us to be sceptical, as all good citizens and scientists should, but not to deny the existence of climate change. 

The evidence he argues is overwhelming; the scale and causes are debatable; but we know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and we know that over the last 200 years we have released carbon dioxide sequestered naturally over millions and millions of years.  It just might just have an impact on the planet’s temperature!

Of course, we can approach climate change not just as a threat but as an opportunity- a new way of making land-based businesses more profitable. It is nearly 30 years since I wrote a book on farm diversification. If I were to write it again today, renewable energy would be right up there amongst the big opportunities to be explored.

We have just been looking at low head hydro-power opportunities in Aberdeenshire, from where I write. We estimate that there were something like 1,000 water power sites working in the area 150 years ago. Often the old lades/leats are still there; so are many mill buildings. Some are even still in use today.

New technologies create new opportunities – with low-head, the Archimedean screw offers real scope for minimal environmental impact and we estimate there are technically and financially feasible opportunities on as many as a quarter of these. And these can work from a few kilowatts of power upwards to a couple of hundred depending on the head and volume of water.

What is the principal barrier?  Put simply, it is the regulatory authorities.  The site can be right and the financial return promising.  But time and again those who are protecting the environment seem to be missing the point that the depletion of a few hundred metres of the main stream into a lade to an Archimedian screw is just about as environmentally friendly as you can get when producing renewable energy – and the returns from that energy stay largely in the rural economy. 

But it seems easier for environmental and planning authorities to accept large-scale and highly intrusive installations which bleed their profits immediately out of rural areas and are disconnected from land-based business.

I remain convinced that land-based renewables provide a huge and underexploited opportunity to support a low carbon rural economy and need to be supported further in the Rural Development Plans.  We can benefit our recession hit rural areas, we can benefit individual farmers and we can benefit the renewables sector and help green the economy. 

It is time for the regulatory authorities to wake up.

Professor Bill Slee is head of the Socio-Economics group at the Macaulay Research Institute, an international centre for research and consultancy exploring the environmental and social consequences of rural land uses.