Stornoway Community Council has called for a 100MW upgrade to the interconnector between the Western Isles and Skye to be carried out during replacement of the failed cable linking the islands to the mainland.
The body has penned an open letter to Scottish Energy Minister Paul Wheelhouse asking him to lobby for the upgrade after community wind farms on the islands were told to switch off following the fault on the interconnector between Harris and Skye.
The letter also calls for capacity on the upgraded replacement cable to be ringfenced as “capacity for community generated power”.
Distribution operator SSEN was alerted to a fault on 16 October which caused a power cut on Lewis and Harris, with subsequent investigation showing damage to the cable will require a full replacement.
Replacement is expected to take up to 12 months with the islands running off SSEN’s backup diesel power station (pictured with the Beinn Ghrideag wind farm in the background) in the interim.
“Apart from all the risks of us now being dependant on our ‘back up’ energy supply, it is deeply ironic and somewhat disturbing that the Isle of Lewis, despite its incredibly rich wind resource, is pouring streams of filthy fuel into the atmosphere,” the community council wrote in its letter to the minister.
“Then there is also the matter of all the community wind farms that have been set up on the island. They face the sudden loss of all their income for many months, potentially a year, due to the nature of insurance and liability on matters such as this.
“That will have a catastrophic impact locally due to the amount of money they generate for good causes.”
“As just one example, the local Bethesda Care Home and Hospice receives a grant of £55,000 a year from one of the community wind farms to help support its running costs. Fundraising is always a struggle for Bethesda and we would be very concerned that they would be unable to close a funding gap of this magnitude, should it that appear.”
The community councillors said that while ongoing discussions went on about the case for a larger interconnector directly between Lewis and the mainland, the broken cable needed “to be restored as a matter of urgency, both for the security of the islands’ power supply and for the sake of the environment”.
They added: “We also feel strongly that this cable should be a community cable, upgraded to the largest power capacity that its current route and infrastructure can support”.
“Our information is that this could allow an increase of 100MW and it would be a prudent and sensible act of future-proofing to put in a bigger cable instead of a similar-sized cable since the work has to be done anyway.”
They said this could be a once in a generation opportunity to increase community-owned capacity for generation and enable new renewables projects on the islands.
In addition the letter suggests work on a power management system for the islands to enabling existing wind turbines combined with battery storage to replace the need for the backup diesel system.
SSE said an end-to-end subsea survey of the cable was carried out in August 2020 which did not identify any material concerns requiring attention. Further investigations are ongoing to determine the root cause of the fault, including to rule out any instance of third-party damage, it added.