Potential Sites of Hydropower Opportunity

PLEASE NOTE: This record has been Retired. Potential Sites of Hydropower Opportunity will no longer be updated. Many factors have changed since this data was created in 2010 such as waterbody status and weir status. There has been no updates to the data since 2010 when it was created. The data was created when hydropower schemes were few, with the intention of highlighting potential sites for new schemes to stakeholders. A hydropower scheme is now located in many of these sites. This data is now inaccurate. To find out more about a potential site for hydropower, please contact the local Environment Agency office. 


INFORMATION WARNING
These datasets are not up to date and not being updated. There is not a high level of confidence in its current accuracy. These data are intended to provide a general national and regional overviews of the potential hydropower opportunities available, their locations, and their relative environmental sensitivity to exploitation.
At site-level, there will be some error inherent in the results as the map uses a national GIS dataset that is based on various sources.  One-third of the sites where older ‘Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) data was used for the height estimate include an error of up to one metre. The remaining two-thirds use ‘Light Detection and Ranging’ (LIDAR), which is accurate to 25cm. This means that the data for an individual site may be inaccurate, but at the national and regional level the error will be averaged out to an extent.
There is not a high level of confidence in the power generation calculation.  The power category takes account of this uncertainty.
These data are indicative only and are not intended to replace any part of an individual site assessment, which is necessary for a full scheme appraisal.
These data show the location of hydropower opportunities that appear to have a lower risk of environmental sensitivity and a higher potential for power generation associated with exploiting them in England and Wales. 

A filter has been applied to a total of 25,935 ‘barriers’ identifying a total of 4195 where environmental sensitivity appears to be low and potential power generation high. The term ‘barriers’ is used to describe sites with sufficient drop to provide a hydropower opportunity. They are mostly weirs, but could also be other man-made structures or natural features, such as waterfalls. 
The filters applied are both:
- Within one of 2708 heavily modified water bodies. These are water bodies which have been identified as being at significant risk of failing to achieve good ecological status under the Water Framework Directive, because of modifications to their hydromorphological characteristics, resulting from past engineering works, including impounding works.
- Medium to high power potential, which includes opportunities of greater than 10kW.
Be aware that this filtering is based only on these statistics and does not indicate that a hydropower opportunity is necessarily feasible at any given location. 
Given the scale of the project and the data used, the results are not intended to replace any part of an individual site assessment. Instead, the dataset gives national and regional level overviews of the potential opportunities available, their locations, and their relative environmental sensitivity to exploitation. The unfiltered dataset, 'Potential Sites of Hydropower Opportunity', is covered by AfA175. Attribution statement: © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2015. All rights reserved.

Tags: OpenData, energy resource, energy supply, energy technology
Organization: Environment Agency