Dundee, Aberdeen, Perth, Inverness, Buckie, Lossiemouth, Branderburgh and Oban Corporations. Activity One of the first responsibilities was to produce a Development Scheme. This would detail the available water resources in their area of operation, which had the potential to later become 'constructional schemes'. MacColl pressed on at breakneck speed, and within three months they had a list of 102 sites with potential for development. These ranged in size from small, such as one utilising Loch nan Gillean (Plockton) and streams, with a capacity of four million units (kilowatt-hours per year) to huge schemes such as that at Glen Affric, with a capacity of 440 million units. The capacity of all the schemes combined was estimated to be 6,274 million units, which was considerably more than the 4,000 million units suggested by the Cooper Committee. MacColl wanted to ensure that no scheme could later be rejected because it had not been included in the Development Scheme. Guthrie Brown, one of the Panel of Technical Advisers, later wrote of his amazement at MacColl's detailed knowledge of so vast an area and its potential for water power. While Johnston was still fighting the political battle to save the Board from Lloyd George's reorganisations, MacColl wanted to begin building a scheme to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Board. He chose Loch Sloy as the first constructional scheme. The loch had been the proposed site of a 360 MegaWatt pumped storage scheme in 1935, which had been rejected by Parliament, and the new scheme was for a conventional hydro-electric station with a lower capacity of 130 MW. The plans included two smaller projects, at Loch Morar and Kyle of Lochalsh, which were probably included to demonstrate the Board's commitment to providing power to remote communities, even though on their own these two projects would not have been economically viable. Despite approval by the Amenity Committee, the Fishery Committee and the Electricity Commissioners, the Loch Sloy scheme was opposed by several county councils and some private individuals, raising the same issues that had prevented development of hydro-electric power in the Highlands for many years. An inquiry, chaired by John Cameron KC, was held in Edinburgh, which lasted for six days. The Board had done themselves no favours by moving the site of the dam after the original plans were published, but Cameron was sympathetic to their cause, and handled attempts to scuttle the plans skillfully. Some