Entrepreneur sells £1bn Scottish hydro plan to energy giant

Mark Wilson, chief executive of Intelligent Land Investments, last year sold the huge consented pumped storage hydropower project, then called Red John after a local lochan and now known as Loch na Cathrach, to Statkraft, which is owned by the Norwegian state.

It changed hands for an undisclosed sum, but an idea of the scale is given in the potential £1 billion cost of building the project.

While his bank balance may have soared overnight, the journey to get there took longer. Mr Wilson grew up on a farm in Northern Ireland and then in Newmains before studying accountancy and building his career in Scotland.

He started out renovating and renting property in Glasgow, building a portfolio of 42 houses and flats, before setting up Hamilton-based Intelligent Land Investments in 2004, and a syndicate of 183 who each invested £12,000 on an eco-homes planning development business.

The 2008 economic downturn slowed building and prompted the firm to take a new direction.

Mark Wilson, with Balliemeanoch in the background (Image: ILI Group) He said: “We were able to park our sites up because there was no market and that is when we looked around and saw that the best market for us in Scotland was onshore wind.

“So we took a similar business model, where we would go out, look for sites, instead of being suitable for housing they would be suitable for wind, and would sign it up with the farmer, go get the planning, get a grid connection, which was different from housing, and basically get all the pieces of the jigsaw.

“We would put that into a company, and when we had all the pieces of the jigsaw ready, we would then sell that to the market, to a developer or a fund.

“We did from 2009 to 2016 and really went for it.”

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The Hamilton firm used a model that involved 76-metre single turbines for farmers.

“We signed up 600 landowners, all farmers … from 2009 to 2016 and we got 140 sites into planning and 96 consents.”

He continued: “While we were on that journey, we were right on the frontline doing wind, in 2015 the UK Government announced that they were going to close all the coal plants down by 2022 and the Paris Agreement was signed to get us to net zero by 2050.

“So that was when we knew that energy storage was going to become absolutely vital, because if there is no wind and there is no sun and you have all the coal off and we eventually wean ourselves off gas, then you’re not going to have any power in the system.

“We looked at all the different technologies, we looked at green hydrogen, compressed air and salt mines, lithium battery at scale which we are also doing and we looked at pumped storage.

"Pumped storage stood out a mile. Ninety-five per cent of the world’s energy storage is pumped storage hydro.

“What makes it so ideal for Scotland, the UK as a whole, but certainly Scotland, is that we’ve got the topography, we’ve got the lochs, we’ve got the mountains.

“What was cool as a company was we moved from 500 kilowatt turbines to 415 megawatts, so that jump was a massive leap.”

Mark Walker, left, and chairman Michael Kelly, who speak to each other every day (Image: ILI Group) After a £5 million crowdfund through Abundance Investments, and bringing AECOM on board, the company has sold one project with the next, Balliemeanoch at Loch Awe, well under way.

“We would hope to see Statkraft start putting a spade in the ground at the end of next year, the start of 2026, and have that built by 2030, which would be amazing.

“We are doing a lot of lithium batteries as well, there’s now still only nine of us in this office, but we are doing 4.5 gigawatts of energy storage which I am proud to say is more than any company in the UK.”

Mentor

Mr Wilson has had as his mentor and chairman Michael Kelly, the former Lord Provost of Glasgow, also a businessman and one-time Celtic director, who said:

"Mark's efforts exceeded all my expectation of what would happen.

"He identified an opportunity and asked me to come on board mainly for my experience and to act as a mentor.

"I didn’t know anything about energy or pumped storage then, and I thought there was a moderate chance of success, of Mark doing moderately well.

"He has exceeded anybody’s expectations in the way he has put this together and sold Red John to Statkraft.

An incredible story of enterprise

"I’m an economist and I taught entrepreneurship at Strathclyde University, and Mark is just the true mark of an entrepreneur.

"It was always defined in the economic textbooks as an entrepreneur was somebody who would take risks.

"I’ve modified the definition of that having worked with Mark, because taking a risk would be walking into a casino and putting a chip on black. But once you put the chip in the risk is over.

"What I saw Mark doing was living with that risk for seven, eight, ten years.

"For me it is an incredible story of enterprise … and I taught Tom Hunter economics at Strathclyde."

Tomorrow: Concerns raised around energy storage and battery parks