ScottishPower Restores Loch Moan Peatland to Revive River Cree

ScottishPower has restored 22.5 hectares of degraded peatland at Loch Moan in southern Scotland, rewetting an old forestry site the size of around 32 football pitches so water flows back into the River Cree. The work was led by SP Energy Networks (SPEN, the company’s electricity distribution arm) alongside the Galloway Fisheries Trust and Forestry and Land Scotland.

It is a small piece of a much larger change in who pays to fix nature in Britain. The companies that run the power grid, long judged on cables and reliability alone, are now spending on bogs and rivers, pushed by tougher regulation and hard deadlines for measurable gains in biodiversity.

What ScottishPower Restored in Galloway

The project sits in the hills of Dumfries and Galloway, on ground planted with commercial conifers decades ago. Draining peat to grow trees dries the bog out, and a dried bog stops holding water and starts breaking down. Crews at Loch Moan blocked the old drainage channels, raised the water table and let the saturated ground take over again.

That matters for the river below. The Cree is famous locally for its salmon and sea trout, and it holds one of only three remaining Scottish populations of sparling, a rare fish also known as European smelt that depends on clean, well-oxygenated water. Steadier flows and less silt washing off the hill give those species a better chance.

Conservation staff reported a strong presence of sphagnum moss across the site, the spongy plant that builds peat in the first place and a reliable sign a bog is recovering. Black grouse, reptiles and amphibians are expected to gain ground too as the wetter habitat returns.

• 22.5 hectares of former forestry peat rewetted on the hill above the river
• 32 football pitches, the rough area of bog brought back into a working state
• 3 remaining Scottish populations of sparling, one of them in this river system
• 2028 and 2030, the two deadlines built into SP Energy Networks’ nature targets

Why a Drying Bog Becomes a Carbon Leak

Healthy peat is mostly water. It locks up plant material that never fully rots, and over thousands of years it becomes one of the densest carbon stores on land. The UK’s peatlands hold around 3 billion tonnes of carbon, roughly the amount stored in the forests of Britain, Germany and France combined.

The problem is condition. About 80% of UK peatlands are damaged by old drainage, burning, peat extraction and conversion to farming or forestry, according to the IUCN UK Peatland Programme. Once drained, peat dries, oxidises and turns from a carbon sink into a carbon source. Degraded UK peatlands are estimated to emit roughly 23 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) a year. In Scotland, where peat covers close to two million hectares, degraded bogs account for about 15% of national emissions.

Rewetting reverses that slide, though slowly. The recovery runs over decades, not seasons, and restoring bare peat can save in the region of 19 tonnes of CO2e per hectare each year once the ground stabilises. The mechanics on the ground are simple enough.

• Raise the water table so the peat stays waterlogged and stops breaking down
• Block the grips, the drainage cuts dug for forestry, to slow water off the hill
• Cut erosion at the peat edges, keeping silt out of the river gravel below
• Let sphagnum spread again, the plant that rebuilds peat and traps carbon

Why Grid Companies Are Paying for Bogs

A peat bog is an unusual thing for a power company to fund. SPEN moves electricity across central and southern Scotland and parts of England and Wales; its core job is keeping the lights on. Yet restoration projects like this are becoming a standard line in network spending, and the reasons are part regulation, part strategy.

The shift reflects a wider rethink of what a utility owes the land it crosses. Pylons, substations and cable routes touch huge areas of countryside, and the rules now ask operators to leave that ground in better shape than they found it.

The Regulator’s Nudge

Britain’s energy regulator sets the spending plans that distribution network operators (DNOs, the firms that run local power grids) must follow. Under the current price control, RIIO-ED2 (Revenue = Incentives + Innovation + Outputs, the framework running to 2028), every DNO had to publish an environmental action plan and report each year on its impact, including biodiversity.

That turns nature from a voluntary gesture into a tracked output. Ofgem’s RIIO-ED2 environmental reporting rules mean a project at a place like Loch Moan now counts toward commitments the company is measured against, not just a press release.

From Network Spend to Shared Value

SPEN’s own framework, its published Action Plan for Nature, sets targets that the Galloway work feeds directly: no net loss of biodiversity by 2028, becoming nature positive in its direct impacts by 2030, plus 20 community biodiversity partnerships by 2026 and habitat work on 25 hectares of network land by 2028.

This is not the operator’s only bog. Earlier it committed about 490,000 pounds to restore roughly 114 hectares on the Slamannan Plateau near Falkirk with Buglife Scotland, a programme running to 2027. Add the partnerships with fisheries trusts and forestry bodies, and a pattern appears: the grid company acting as a funder and convener of restoration rather than a one-off donor.

How One Catchment Fits the National Backlog

This is where the upside meets its limit. The Galloway project is real, well delivered and good for the Cree, but it is tiny against the scale of the problem it speaks to. Scotland has committed to restore 250,000 hectares of peatland by 2030, backed by 250 million pounds, with an interim goal of 110,000 hectares by 2026. Around 90,000 hectares have been restored since 1990, and 14,860 of those came in a single recent year.

Set against a backlog measured in the hundreds of thousands of hectares, a single restored hillside barely registers on the national ledger. The value of corporate projects like this is less the raw acreage and more the funding, contractors and delivery muscle they add on top of public programmes such as Scotland’s Peatland ACTION restoration record. The science of fixing a bog is settled; the bottleneck is money and skilled crews, and that is exactly what a network operator can supply.

Iberdrola’s 2030 Biodiversity Goal

ScottishPower’s parent, the Spanish energy group Iberdrola, has set its own headline ambition: a net positive impact on biodiversity by 2030 across the places where it operates. That is a steeper bar than simply doing no harm, because it requires the company to add more nature than its plants, lines and substations remove.

To get there, the group leans on what it calls nature-based solutions, restoring habitats rather than only offsetting damage with cash. Its wider plan, set out in Iberdrola’s 2030 biodiversity programme, includes a target of conserving or planting 20 million trees this decade and a Carbon2Nature arm built to deliver this kind of work at scale.

The harder part is counting it. Iberdrola has built an accounting framework meant to put a number on the gains and losses to ecosystems from building, running and decommissioning its sites. That matters because a net positive claim only holds if the measurement is credible, and a rewetted bog with a recovering water table is the sort of project that produces verifiable, long-lived results rather than a paper credit.

What Rewetting Means Downstream on the Cree

For people who live and fish along the river, the gains are practical. Wetter ground higher up releases water more slowly, which steadies flows in dry spells and softens the peaks after heavy rain. Less peat erosion means cleaner gravel beds, and clean gravel is where salmon and trout spawn.

It also helps the species that act as warning lights for the whole system. Sparling and freshwater mussels need consistently clean, oxygen-rich water, so their survival is a fair read on how the catchment is doing. Restoration upstream is, in effect, water-quality insurance for everything below it.

The approach echoes river and habitat work being tried elsewhere, from native-seed riverfront restoration projects to efforts to protect natural floodplains and water flow. The common thread is treating the land that feeds a river as part of the river’s health, not a separate problem.

If the sphagnum keeps spreading and the water table holds, the Cree should see steadier flows and cleaner spawning gravel within a few years, and the carbon stays in the ground. If the restored hillside is left unmonitored and the drains creep back open, the same peat starts leaking again, and the gain quietly unwinds.