Autumn is certainly upon us: the nights are drawing in, and the trees are turning. We had a fairly dry late summer, so didn’t generate much, but since then it has rained….and rained – luckily for us not as torrentially as in other places, but it certainly filled up the river, and things have been busy at the turbine as a result.

We had a very successful working party just before the weather turned – we cleared lots of overgrown vegetation, and started to try to shift a set of willows that had fallen over into the river and rooted just above the turbine intake; we felt these were causing an eddy which allowed silt and rubbish to be deposited at our intake, reducing the flow.. We only managed to move part of the set of trees – but heavy rain then half-uprooted them and left them dangling across the intake.

Just hauling failed to shift them – too heavy – but Mike Ford found an electric winch, which more or less did the job…even this could only drag the root mass partway up the bank, so we are gradually cutting pieces off as weather allows, and will eventually get it moved.

One of the features of Autumn is the beauty of the trees as the leaves change colour and fall; this is lovely, but all those leaves have to go somewhere, and many of them end up in the river, get waterlogged, and clog up our intake screen. Sometimes just stopping and starting the turbine will fix this, but often someone has to go down and clear the intake with a big rake. It keeps us fit.

Other news: Mike has organised a replacement high-pressure cylinder for our hydraulics, now installed. I’ll write some more about servicing and maintenance in a later blog….

Rory Newman, Chair of Esk Energy

Here we are in July, and I recently picked up a news article suggesting we’ve had one of the 6 wettest Springs since 1838; it certainly feels that way…but one real advantage of being involved with the turbine is that I can look out at the rain and think about all the lovely power we will generate. Ideal conditions for generation involve plenty of steady rain, which is just what we have been getting. As a result we have had probably our best Spring  and early Summer since we started.

I should add that too much rain can also cause us problems: if there’s too much water coming down, particularly if tides are high, river levels below the turbine rise too much and we can’t run…it’s gravity, not flow, that drives the screw round; if we lose the drop from above to below the dam, we lose power. Also very heavy rain/high river tends to bring down a lot of dead wood which clogs up the intake screen – I’ll talk more about this, perhaps in the Autumn.

And it hasn’t been all wet misery with the weather; we had a good working party in April, when a lot of site tidying and a number of outstanding jobs got done;  we then entertained a party of students for the University of Hull at the end of the month: they were bright and keen and asked lots of sensible questions; we hope they will go on to become green energy advocates and help to change the world.

Rory Newman, Chair of Esk Energy

Would you like to visit our community-owned 50kW Archimedes screw hydroelectric turbine on the River Esk at Ruswarp, near Whitby and find out how we generate renewable electricity?

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