YES: Abingdon Hydro committee member Peter Wiblin.

Hydro-power is the greenest energy you are ever likely to find.

It has been around for thousands of years if you think of the hanging gardens of Babylon and watermills. It is not new.

It is just the way we harness the energy and store it which makes it new. Apart from that it has been around for years.

If you think about what the Romans did for us and travel all around Europe there are aqueducts everywhere.

It is the cleanest, greenest form of energy, which is important because we are destroying the planet.

We somehow have to produce cleaner green energy. It is only a fraction of what we need but every little helps and if everyone did their little bit we would be a lot further along.

Abingdon has one of the hydro projects down the Thames.

If we can get these schemes working we can get other schemes going too.

It is a learning curve because whatever we work out people up and down the country can learn from and do too so it all helps.

There is no evidence that it harms fish or wildlife.

And there are ways you can try and improve the river.

We are looking to try and improve spawning by the weir and we are creating a new fish pass which is a lot better than the one we have at the moment.

Another point is actually that the scheme can benefit the community. Whatever cash we get, people in the community will benefit from it through the community benefit scheme.

I don’t know exactly what projects that will go towards in Abingdon yet because you can’t run before you can walk but it could be improving the tow paths or creating better facilities up and down the river.

I just think it is the right thing to do to get this scheme up and running. There is a fascination with water.

People like to go down and walk by the weir, and there will be an added attraction too with the hydro project there.

Each hydro scheme on the Thames should save 800 tonnes of C02.

One tonne of C02 is the equivalent of one hot air balloon so 800 hot air balloons of C02 should be saved rather than burning fossil fuels.

We would love to make it work.

NO: Richard Knowles, of the Upper Thames Fisheries Consultative.

The ecology of the Thames has changed a lot in the past 100 years.

Historically the Thames in Oxfordshire had strong populations of the native Thames fishes – among them dace, chub and barbel, and most famously, the Thames trout.

All of these species spawn where the river is fast flowing and has a clean gravel bed. Since the 1940s the Thames has been repeatedly dredged to make navigation easier for bigger and bigger boats and those shallows have almost totally disappeared.

The only places where gravel shallows have survived have been below the many Thames weirs, where the rushing water keeps the river bed clean of mud and silt.

The Thames fish which spawn on gravel shallows have survived by spawning in and around those Thames weirs.

As many of the weirs have also been dredged, even these spawning areas have largely disappeared and some species like the barbel and the Thames trout have disappeared with them.

Hydro-power schemes aren’t inevitably incompatible with sustaining native fish species. Of course, some hydro-power schemes kill fish which are sucked into the turbines, but engineers are aware of this and the problem can be prevented.

What fewer people understand is that hydro-power schemes present a hidden threat to the fish of the Thames because they can change the flow of the river below the weirs. In the now controlled flows the gravel is no longer washed clean and the fish can’t spawn.

Does that mean we can’t have hydro-power projects? No, it doesn’t.

What it means is that, before any scheme is approved, there must be proper ecological studies to ensure that the scheme doesn’t damage the key flows and gravely areas that the fish need.

This hasn’t happened at Abingdon. It hasn’t happened anywhere on the Thames where hydro-power projects have been put forward, but it needs to happen.

We wouldn’t let development destroy the last remaining populations of nightingales or red squirrels and we shouldn’t let fish populations be destroyed in the same way.

We can stop this happening at Abingdon, but only if we make the effort to understand how we can have hydro-power without environmental damage and then act accordingly.

Unfortunately, the developers of the Abingdon scheme haven’t so far done this.