Early Adopters' Gallery
June 13, 2025
Neville RigbyLoch Ness
Loch Ness, the largest body of fresh water in the United Kingdom, is challenged on multiple fronts by large-scale development. The loch isn’t just a tourist attraction – the fantasy home to the mythical monster – but an entire eco-system with many creatures including Atlantic salmon, trout, eels, charr, invertebrates and land based mammals that are integral within its biodiversity around its 80 kilometres (50 miles) of shoreline. Importantly it provides a crucial migration route for Atlantic salmon smolts descending to the sea from its river tributary breeding grounds – juvenile salmon whose overall survival rate has plummeted from more than 10% in the late 20th century to at its present lowest ebb at only 3%.
Now the rich biodiversity of the loch, which plunges to a depth of 228 metres/750 feet in the Great Glen fault, faces a new environmental threat from profit-seeking pumped storage hydro (PSH) schemes that will inevitably be needed to feed the rapacious energy and water hungry demands of AI datacentres planned to proliferate across the Highlands, other parts of Scotland and beyond.
When combined, all the PSH schemes aiming to exploit Loch Ness could raise and lower the loch by as much as 125 cm every day turning it into an inland tidal system. To enable the schemes to work at all, it is further necessary to raise the existing weir where the Telford’s celebrated Caledonian Canal and the River Ness part company. The threat to life along the extensive shoreline is explained succinctly by local expert Dr Penelope Whitehorn on https://youtu.be/YQ4AaCfJy84.
Two schemes have already been approved despite opposition, and now the largest of these PSH schemes, costing £3bn, would store a massive 34 GW equivalent of water pumped up to the moors half a kilometre above the loch where lies the small but beautifully formed Loch nam Breac Dearga. This ancient loch nestles beneath Glen Urquhart’s most prominent hill – Meall fuar Mhonaidh – which is a popular climb just off the Great Glen Way. Too small to form a sufficient headpond for the scheme, the loch and its littoral eco-system would be submerged below a massive reservoir construction swamping precious peatland bogs beneath a reservoir with one kilometre-wide 57 metres high dam.
The small but beautifully formed loch itself and its environs also provide an established eco-system both for fish, insects which thrive in the surrounding blanket bog, and a variety of wildlife small and large including protected species such as eagles, Slavonian grebe, bats, and other typical flora and fauna. Memories are short, but little over half a century ago Loch Ness was also summer home to visiting osprey.
So if we really do care about turning the tide on biodiversity loss, we must safeguard Loch Ness as an entity, an eco-system whose habitats are facing destruction, and protect the ‘being’ that is Scotland’s most famous loch, the host to myriad other beings – I STAND BESIDE THEM ALL.