It's that time of year when once yearly maintenance jobs need to be done, and de-silting is one of them. This year I devised a new way of blasting through the penstock without having to take the turbine off its plinth:
A galvanised union, barrel nipple, 90 degree elbow, and a short length of threaded pipe, each in 2" size, were all that were needed. The union screws on to where the jet sleeve has a thread for the nozzle retaining cap.
With the head tank de-silted and the penstock as clean as a whistle, I'm ready now for the best possible level of generation in the coming 12 months.
Yesterday the abstraction police descended on me: Saturday morning, unannounced, in an unmarked vehicle and brandishing paper copies of my abstraction licence. The intent was clear: to catch a criminal in the act of transgressing the terms of his licence. Is it just me who gets irritated by such tactics ?
I was irritated from the start, and that was a shame because the Natural Resources Wales (NRW) policeman who came to make the inspection was a decent fella, with a wife and child, worried about the security of his job with NRW, and with an interesting career before joining NRW. But we got off on the wrong foot with each other, largely because the circumstances of the unheralded visit made me resent being treated as a neo-criminal. Not just that: there's a long standing sore dating from when I first applied for my abstraction licence which has yet to heal. I still feel hard done by and am left nursing a grievance that NRW as an organisation fail to properly engage with clients.
With the decent fella however, toward the end of his visit, bridges had been built.
This is the third inspection I've had and each time it's someone different. No continuity which might make for a fruitful discussion with someone who knows the site from a previous time. So he was seeing it afresh. Everything needed to be explained. Queried. Photographed.
There really ought to be another way, a better way, of doing this sort of compliance visit. Most of us who have small hydro sites are people who are environmental enthusiasts. We're not going to be trashing the water courses of Wales or draining them dry from over-abstraction. And in any case, the damage possible from such minnow schemes as mine hardly makes it justifiable to do a compliance visit every year.
NRW have more important things they should be addressing: they still haven't managed to sort out a reporting system for hydro abstractors to give their annual readings on-line. It's been banded about for over three years, launched and failed twice and still hasn't seen the light of day.
It's a question of priorities: their finances are tight so they need to deploy wisely what little they have. Not happening at the moment though !
