Hansard

Water is important to us. That is a self-evident truth, not least because each and every one of us is made up of about 80 per cent water. Without water, there is no human being or human race.

The only chemical formula that many people will probably know is that of water. When H2O is mentioned, the light goes on, even for people who know nothing of chemistry; they know that it means water.

Water is absolutely central to us. Too much of it and a person will drown and die; too little, and a person will wither and die. If people have the right amount of water, they prosper. It is important however one looks at it.

Ken Macintosh referred to Fort Augustus and the first hydro power station that was built there. In 1896, the aluminium factory had what is described as—at least in Wikipedia, so it must be true—

“the first large-scale commercial hydro-electric”

generation.

Ken Macintosh also made reference to Sir James Henderson-Stewart and some of the remarks that he made in Parliament during the war years. I was quite astonished that he did not pick up on some of the important linkages between that man and other events. For example, the 1961 by-election that followed Sir James Henderson-Stewart’s death was the first parliamentary election in which I had a role. Perhaps more crucial to Ken Macintosh is that that by-election was the first parliamentary outing for John Smith—the subsequent UK Labour Party leader. He received 8,882 votes, which was some 26 per cent of the poll. He managed to move the Labour Party up to second place, so he did pretty decently. He did not sustain that in the 1964 election, moved on elsewhere and was eventually elected in 1970.

Water is a great reservoir—I think that that is the right word—of innovation. Its use led to engineering innovation in irrigation thousands of years ago. The Archimedes screw that we are familiar with today almost certainly should not be called the Archimedes screw because it probably predates him by 500 years. It is thought that it came from the time of the Assyrian king Sennacherib, around 700 BC. It was originally a device for lifting water, and was turned by hand, but it became one of the very first sources of generating hydro power by water being allowed to fall through it. It was particularly effective where there was waste material and the water was contaminated because the screw was free flowing—it did not get jammed up in unfavourable conditions.

That brings us to an essential point about water in relation to the debate—1m3 of water weighs 998 kilograms, which is about 1 tonne. Therefore, one can see the power of water that moves horizontally or vertically. An early example is the undershot method, in which the power of the water flowing under a waterwheel is extracted from flow and not from fall, whereas an overshot waterwheel is a combination of underflow and overflow, in which the power is also extracted from the weight of the falling water.

It is worth saying that there is a formula—I am sure that I have it somewhere in my notes. It basically states that 1m3 of water falling 1 foot every second produces something like 96MW. That gives an insight into the power that there is in water. I hope that that formula is right; I simply cannot find the note that I had written it on.

Water has resulted in innovation in lots of other ways. The first combustion engines were dependent on water, the first of which was constructed in the first century AD, when the Greek engineer Hero produced a machine called the aeolipile. The aeolipile was basically a drum that contained water. When the drum was heated, the water heated up, steam came out of vents and the drum spun on an axle. Incidentally, 2,000 years ago, Hero was also the inventor of the first coin-operated dispenser, which dispensed—yes, you have guessed it—water.

Electricity is one of the great benefits from our use of water in Scotland, but transmission of it is a significant problem. We have talked about some of the problems around the network, which we are far from solving. It takes a long time to create the right kind of infrastructure, and transmission was probably the most challenging aspect of the development of hydro power in Scotland. The question was not just how to generate the electricity but how to get it to consumers.

My wife was brought up in a council house on the shores of Loch Ness, at the opposite corner from where, 60 years earlier, the first electricity from hydro power had been generated, but she was in secondary school before electricity reached her. To this day, the brass paraffin lamp beside which she studied when she was a youngster sits in our living room, as a reminder that in her lifetime and mine—and in the lifetimes of one or two other members—the world was very different and electricity was not something that was delivered to all but a few homes.

There are other ways of transmitting power from water. In some places that is done by compressed air. I say to Mary Scanlon that that is a more mechanically efficient approach, because the power from water energy can be transferred to another location without using moving parts of any kind—hence there are no mechanical losses associated with such transmission.

It is worth saying that water is a strategic asset for countries. We need only consider Nasser’s building of the Aswan dam, for irrigation and for hydro power, and the current debate—I think that “debate” is the right word—between Sudan and Egypt, as Sudan seeks to dam the Nile.