Paul Dacre, the newspaper editor, has been highly critical of the renewable energy levy on household bills.
Paul Dacre, the Scottish land owner, is about to reap the benefits of that levy as a renewable energy producer.
According to The Herald, Daily Mail editor Dacre “stands to earn over £15m over the next 20 years” from a hydro scheme on his Highland estate.
Dacre’s family owns the 17,000-acre Langwell Estate, north of Ullapool in Wester Ross, where a 1.2 mega-watt hydro power plant is under construction and due for completion in the autumn.
The £4.25m scheme involves increasing the size of an existing dam on Loch a’Crois and a replacement footbridge along with buried pipelines.
Dacre is one of the directors of the business, DHG Hydro - billed as “one of the largest privately owned hydro-electric developers” in the UK - which applied for planning permission to build the scheme.
The Herald article claims that Dacre’s family share from the scheme should double the £2.45m they paid for the estate in 2009.
The Mail has a long record of opposing green taxes. Among many leading articles critical of the levies were these in July 2011, in October 2013 and, most recently, in April 2016.
At the time of writing, the Mail had not responded to a request for a comment from Paul Dacre.
