‘Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink’, ‘It never rains but it pours’…. There are lots of sayings about water, perhaps because water is so precious to all of us.
So what happens when a private company builds a windfarm and the public water supplies from the area then deteriorate to the point that public reservoirs and a Water treatment plant has to be abandoned?
Who pays? Is it the polluter – which is what European Law says, or should it be the public through their taxes?
Well such is the situation at Whitelee.
In 2006, the first Whitelee windfarm began and water monitoring of surface, groundwater and raw water reservoir quality deteriorated with 28 turbines on public water catchment areas. Official concerns raised by Scottish Water were ‘inconclusive’ as to causation in 2008. So, ignoring the warning signs, a further windfarm was built, the Whitelee Extension, adding a further 32 turbines onto public water catchment. Reservoir raw water quality then continued to deteriorate, by now affecting the quality of treated public water.
Where will the millions of pounds of ‘rent’ money for hosting the 60 turbines on public water catchment go? Not directly into the public coffers but to the unregulated private subsidiary company of Scottish Water; Horizons Ltd.
Scottish Water is legally obliged to meet standards for potable water, which are defined by Scottish, UK and EU law. Following enforcement notice from the Drinking Water Quality Regulator, and to remedy the situation, SW spent millions of pounds on further water treatment and filters at Amlaird, altered the reservoir feed in streams to try and exclude the water coming from the windfarm Extension area and even ‘destratified’ (stirred up) the public reservoir water to try and deal with the problem.
Apparently, all this was unsuccessful with the treatment works being unable to consistently meet required standards for public water. So in 2011, during the height of the Whitelee Extension construction, SW decided that the only solution was to ‘main out’. This was not to ‘man up’, to admit that the price to pay for hosting 60 turbines on a statutory protected drinking water catchment might have been a mistake!
No, this was to replace the whole water supply to North Kilmarnock and the Irvine Valley area – more than 50,000 people (34,000 customers) by 2017. ( You might wonder what happens to those who drink the substandard water in the meantime… a question for another day!)
The map (attached) shows the proposed 20 km route of the 1 m wide pipeline, which will also require installation of intermittent storage reservoirs. This new pipe will bring water from Loch Katrine, from North of Glasgow, to Ayrshire. Ayrshire is not noted for any shortage of either water, or reservoirs, so common sense would question why this pipe was necessary at all!
With a fanfare, SW produced this press release (attached) last December, showing that the cost of this pipeline and the upgrading of other treatment works (Milngavie and perhaps Gorbals WTW) to cope with the additional volume of water to be treated is to be £120 million. (There is a little clearing of undergrowth added to disguise the actual cost of the pipeline in those figures of course!)
This is an outrage. Why should the taxpayer be funding the mistakes of Scottish Water and Scottish Power Renewables to the tune of about £120 million?
What about all the other windfarms, consented and operational , on protected public water catchment areas? Will the taxpayer also have to bail out the developers if public drinking water quality deteriorates?
I have written to the Scottish Water Commissioner on behalf of our local Community Council who have been concerned for some while about the impact of windfarms on both public and private water supplies in the area.
I will let you know the response, but meantime, you might also like to ask your local MSPs some searching questions about where your precious taxes are being spent and why the public should pay for the environmental damage caused by windfarm developers who are getting very rich by selling us very expensive electricity!
4 Comments
Jane Fox · December 5, 2017 at 11:59 am
Please can Dr Rachel Connor contact me. I have some information re illness, auto immune disease and cancers suspected of being caused at alarming rates by Scottish Water’s polluted drinking water supply in Angus, Scotland. I suspect there may be a larger picture that needs to be seen and that the underlying problems are similar to the problems you have exposed already.
Thank you