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 !
6.48 mm diameter nozzle delivering 0.91 l/s to the runner which is rotating at 1084 rpm and generating 225 watts into the grid at an overall efficiency of 47%.
2 comments:
Hello,
Your blog is a great resource. Thanks for all the effort documenting your installation and operation. It is proving really helpful in thinking about the construction of my own system.
Do you write about the process of getting the abstraction licence anywhere here? (Think I might be missing it as you've been so thorough)
Kind regards,
Tom
Hello Tom.
Thanks for making contact and for your generous words.
I haven't written specifically about getting a licence for abstraction. It was such a nightmare that I haven't wanted to re-visit the matter by writing about it ! Altogether, dealing with the powers-that-be on water abstraction is something that raises my blood pressure, - as you may have gathered from this post on which you have commented.
But I would be happy to talk you through the process I had to follow, which was the Welsh system. If you're in England or Scotland there are differences but not big ones.
Get in touch by direct email. You can find mine under the "view my complete Profile" under "About me". There are spaces in the address so web bots don't pick it up and you'll need to edit these out.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Bill
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