Yesturday, West Coast Energee arrived to take down the turbine at the community recycling site. The machine is heading back to Ireland for refurbishment. It’s been operational for 18 months now and in this time the manufacturer has improved the design. Community Energy Scotland have arranged for a number of Westwind machines to return to the factory and all be brought up to the current specification. The trailer contains the machines from Galson, Back and Barvas. Our machine was also added to the collection.

This time, to speed up the process, the engineers used a mini-digger to help lowering the tower. Normally, JDs battered old LandRover gets tied to a ground anchor and they use the winch mounted on the bumper. Instead, a long cable was attached to the digger, and as it slowly advanced towards the tower, the turbine came down. We took advantage of having the digger on site to put some stone down in the soft bits of ground. The Landrover nearly got stuck in the peat the last time the tower came down. The access track gets very soft in the Winter.

We are now hoping for a calm few weeks whilst the machines are down. The Urgha site is now being more careful with its electricity. We now have to pay for everything we use. Let’s also see if anyone notices that the turbine and tower are down!

Our hydro scheme has been on hold for fast-approaching a year, whilst the UK government contemplates changes to the Feed-in-Tariff. The consultation is now over and we now hope for a June closure to the process. In the mean time, we thought out of courtesy that we should tell SSE that we won’t be exporting electricity onto their grid this year as planned because of the review. The response was along the lines of “that’s OK, we weren’t going to connect you until 2015 anyway.” This came as a bit of a shock. Lurking in the small print of our connection offer is the phrase “subject to any transmission connection works”. This little phrase now relates to a £300M sub-sea cable between Lewis and Ullapool. It’ll carry 450MW of renewable energy to export to the south. We just want 0.0002% of that capacity! We’re told that at the moment, the grid in Lewis and Harris is full. So that’s no more renewable energy from Lewis & Harris in the next three years! So much for those European targets on renewable energy.

• Anna Fraser Band
• Duncan MacKinnon
• Ness Melodian Band
• D.A. Matheson
• Kirsty Watt

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We are told that the Lewis and Harris electricity grid is full. There is no room for new generation. The interconnector will solve this issue – but not until 2015 at the earliest. There is still some risk that this 2015 date will slip. There’s a chicken and egg thing going on too. Large commercial developers don’t want to commit until the interconnector is definite. SSE don’t want to commit to installing the interconnector until enough commercial developers have signed up. This leaves community groups like ourselves stuck until the “big boys” sort it out.

Windflow Technologies, who we are working with on the project, have been in regular contact with SSE, trying to find an interim solution. Could we not just generate when its cold and there’s lots of demand? Surely, there must be some concession that can be made until the interconnector comes to allow generators on line, and start generating all that green energy both governments have commited to?