Summer has come to an end, and Autumn is here, but the main theme – lack of rain – has been a fixture since late Spring until the last few days. The river has been too low for us to run all Summer; indeed at times the river has been the lowest I can remember – but we have finally had enough rain – just – to start running again, and more is forecast.

The warm dry weather has been good for butterflies, but I think other wildlife has struggled; certainly many trees are stressed, and this won’t be a year when tree rings show much growth. Lots of rain over the next few weeks wouldn’t just help the turbine, it would be a huge help to fish migration. Things are now much better, but we need a lot more.

We also need lots of rain to help with the disastrous moor fire which started on Langdale Moor weeks ago and is still burning; this has been another big blow to wildlife locally. Luckily most of the ground-nesting birds would have fledged before it started, but reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates will have suffered badly as well as the moorland vegetation; this will take years to repair – where the peat has been burned, potentially thousands of years. It really makes the case for renewable energy, as some of the conditions leading to the fire are almost certainly to do with global warming and consequent climate change. It concerns me that there are now calls for us to abandon any attempt to reach net zero….

Other Esk Energy news: we’ve just had our AGM: all the usual business got done, and we had an interesting discussion about possible surplus funds which I may come back to in the next blog. Having the AGM online does seem to encourage more attendance, which is great.

So please enjoy the Autumn sunshine, but let’s have some more rain as well.

The Whitby Esk Energy team are taking our working model of the turbine to the Wonders of the Esk event in Whitby on Saturday 28th June. Hope to see you at the Seafarers Mission sometime between 11am and 3pm.