Potential Hydropower Sites in England and Wales, 2010 Data

A 2010 geospatial dataset identifying 4,195 potential hydropower sites in England and Wales. The data was created by the Government Digital Service to highlight locations with low environmental sensitivity and medium-to-high power potential. It is based on a filtered set of 25,935 barriers, primarily weirs, within heavily modified water bodies.

Use Cases

• Analyze historical spatial distribution of hydropower potential based on the 4,195 filtered sites.
• Study the correlation between heavily modified water bodies and energy development sites mentioned in the description.
• Assess regional-level trends in hydropower opportunity density across England and Wales.

Strengths

• Contains 4,195 spatially referenced potential sites derived from an initial set of 25,935 barriers.
• Applies a defined filter for sites within 2,708 heavily modified water bodies and with power potential greater than 10kW.
• Specifies that two-thirds of sites use LIDAR data accurate to 25cm for height estimates.

Limitations

• The record is retired and has not been updated since its creation in 2010; data accuracy for current conditions is low.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality, column definitions, and file formats require manual inspection after download.
• One-third of sites have height errors up to one meter due to the use of older Synthetic Aperture RADAR data.

Provenance

Source

Government Digital Service

Collection Method

Filtered national GIS dataset based on environmental and power criteria.

Time Range

2010

Freshness

Last updated in 2010; no longer maintained.

Geography

England and Wales