Power Sources in Scotland
By DAVID MURRAY N 1903, when the late Sir Edward MacCoil I started work with the then Clyde Valley Electri- cal Power Company, very reasonable boiler fuel could be bought, as he once told me, for' half-a- crown a ton. In those days, when the coal com- panies had to get rid of their small coal for what little it would fetch, refinements in boiler-room and turbine hall practice were hardly worth while. And the harnessing of water power on a large scale to profit was out of the question, even in the 'land of the mountain and the flood.'
Twenty years later, when he induced his firm to set about taking power out of the Falls of Clyde, near Lanark, the project was called MacColl's Folly. When he died before his time in 1951, being then Deputy Chairman and the working brains of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, the water turbines under the linns at Bonnington and Stonebres on the Clyde were producing among the cheapest power in the country. And much bigger hydro-electric schemes were in profit- able commission in Galloway, and in the High- lands.
What, in fact, has made all the difference to power production in Scotland, as elsewhere in Britain, has been the chronic scarcity and mount- ing price of coal, That has set the pattern of effort for both. the Hydro-Electric Board, as it t' generally called for short, and the South of Scot' land Electricity Board. The former, which is in charge north of a line drawn from above Dum- barton to the north-west corner of Fife, generates the bulk of its power from water. But it has a yell considerable stake in steam and diesel stations and is pushing ahead with the development- of peat' burning gas turbines. The latter, which operates south of the line, and for convenience sake, in a little corner of 'Scotia irridenta' which takes in Berwick and the Holy Isle, is preponderantly based on steam power. All the same, its string of hydro stations in Galloway makes that land of the ancient Gaels of the South much more completely water-power country than the general Highlands 'of the present-day Gaels of the north.
Among the bens and glens of the north, west of the narrow coastal belt, where coal' burning power stations serve to take the base load, more and more of the streams are being run to' gether and dammed up. But though the Hydro- Board is no longer quite so generous with its terms to the public, having been caught short with an arid summer which dried up its water and its kitty, it is still vigorously pushing ahead with pioneer developments. These include, on the strictly power side, work with an oil-burning gas turbine at Dundee and with a peat-fuelled gas turbine at Altnabreac in Caithness. With so much of the country that is not bare rock being under a blan- ket of moss, the 'Peat for Power' slogan has always been compelling in Scotland.
Oddly enough, however, the first really suc- cessful burning of peat for power, this time under boilers, may well take place in the bailiwick of the South of Scotland Board. Near the Barony pit in Ayrshire, that Board has just commissioned a power station specially designed to use washery slurry and duff. Based on peat-firing experiments already carried out at its Bonnybridge station, it has in mind to win extra fuel for the Barony boilers from the nearby Aird's Moss. The deep and expansive bog was the scene of a bloody clash .letween the Covenanters and the dragoons of Claverhouse and it might, incidentally, as well as fuel, yield a selection of eighteenth-century weapons, if not well-preserved bodies.
To be sure, the South of Scotland electricity people, who are now almost as free from direct London control as their fellows in the north, are out to make the most of their comparative liber- ties. In Portobello power station, near Edinburgh, which boasts the highest thermal efficiency in all Britain, they have, for example, been experiment- ing with the running of steam turbines on gas turbine lines. This promises a doubling of thermal efficiency and thus a more than substan- tial saving in fuel.
If this idea were to come to anything it would, of course, put commercial atomic power away back where it came from, in the science labora- tory, until at least such time as further rises in more conventional fuel costs make uranium com- petitive. For all that, the biggest thing in the power programme in Scotland is the development of nuclear power. Matching a station now being built by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority near Annan, Dumfriesshire, the South of Scotland Board is now well away with a com- mercial venture at Hunterston, on the Ayrshire coast. Set by the sea amid rugged grandeur, this new plant will have a capacity of around 300,000 kilowatts. It will thus be somewhat larger than the biggest coal-burning station presently active in Scotland, at Clyde's Mill, Cambuslang.
The big point is that, for a number of cogent reasons, atomic power would seem to fit Scotland like the hand the glove. To be going on with, the country offers plenty of sites well away from population centres, where the cleansing winds blow free, and the fresh cooling water is abundant.
But the ace card in the atomic game now in early train is the possibility of linking atomic and hydro power in aid of low capital and running costs. The basic principle is that nuclear power stations, which must, short of 'dumping' the steam, whirr away steadily during the dim watches of the night when demand is low, will devote this surplus power to pumping water into elevated storage dams. This water, belying the caustic comments by Lemuel Gulliver about a mill on a ridge which was served by water pumped up from the valley and which he saw on his travels, will then be run down through water turbines to cope with day- time demand at a few minutes' notice. It so hap- pens that while England commands few suitable sites for the combined operation, Scotland, by favour of nature, is very well provided. The first scheme of the kind, in which the two Boards will co-operate, is planned to go up by Ben Cruachan, in Argyll. And, who knows, future visitors to the Edinburgh Festival may see Duddington Loch being regularly raised to the top of Salisbury Crags in aid of fugitive current.
For the rest, the South of Scotland Electricity Board is busy with the first half of a new thermal power station at Kincardine-on-Forth, by the road bridge. Though strictly conventional, this will ultimately, at full size, develop 700,000 kilo-
watts out of low-grade fuel. And it will be notable for the systematic disposal of the resultant flue ash and dust to win land along the river bank.
Touching on ash, the Scottish power people have their eye on the big Turgi' gas plant, the first of its kind in Britain, which the Scottish Gas Board plans to lay out at Westfield, in Fife. Com- pletely gasifying the high ash, open-cast coal which is plentiful in the district, this will pipe out 30 million cubic feet of high-grade gas a day. Whether or no some part of this is burned under boilers or fed into gas engines it will add to Scottish power resources.
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