A crazy tidal scheme re-emerges from the deep
Of the three massive political riddles now overshadowing Britain’s future, at least two, Brexit and public spending, are widely discussed. Much less in view is the third: our suicidally climate changeskewed energy policy. For a moment, with the arrival at Number 10 of Theresa May’s new joint chief of staff Nick Timothy, who once described the Climate Change Act as “a monstrous act of self-harm”, there seemed a brief flicker of realism.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) was scrapped. The ludicrous Hinkley Point nuclear project was put on hold. But then back it came again, and speeches by our energy ministers, Greg Clark and Nick Hurd, suggest that little has really changed.
Indeed, there has lately been the strange re-emergence of the one “green” energy project even crazier than Hinkley Point. Last year I was writing about the crackpot plan, like something out of Swift’s Academy of Lagado, to spend £1 billion on harnessing the tides of Swansea Bay to produce a ridiculously tiny amount of the most expensively subsidised electricity in the world, averaging just 57 megawatts (MW).
For the same £1 billion, the newish gas-fired power station at Pembroke down the coast can generate nearly 40 times as much power without a penny of subsidy.
The Swansea Bay project was backed by David Cameron and George Osborne. Planning permission was rushed through. Then last winter, Mr Cameron got cold feet. He put Swansea on hold, setting up an “independent” review into its viability.
But the man put in charge of that review was a former Decc minister, Charles Hendry, who had expressed enthusiasm for tidal power as far The plan to spend £1.3 billion on harnessing the tides of Swansea Bay would provide only a 40th of the power from a £1 billion gas-fired power station back as 2008. Now he has handed in his report, leaks suggest that he is looking favourably not just on a modified version of the Swansea plan but on five even larger schemes proposed by the same developer, Mark Shorrock, who likes to call himself “the Brunel of tidal energy”. These include an £8 billion tidal lagoon for Cardiff Bay, which would supposedly generate far more power than Swansea.
Welsh politicians and the BBC have gone into overdrive puffing these schemes, which it is said could make Wales “the hugely lucrative hub of a global tidal lagoon industry”. But the claims reported for them are wildly exaggerated. For £1.3 billion, the modified Swansea scheme, according to the BBC website, could generate “enough clean energy” to meet “11 per cent of electricity consumption in Wales”. But a quick check on the facts would have shown that its average output, now reduced to 48MW, would meet only 2.8 per cent of Welsh consumption.
Even wilder is the BBC’s claim that Cardiff Bay would provide enough “low-carbon energy to power every home in Wales”. As usual when reporting on any form of intermittent renewable energy, the BBC plays the familiar trick of relying just on their theoretical “capacity”, as if they are working flat-out all the time. The actual output of tidal turbines, which operate at full power for only a few hours a day, is less than a fifth of their “capacity”.
Meanwhile, across the sea in Cornwall, there is continuing anger over plans by Mr Shorrock to reopen a disused quarry on the Lizard peninsular, to provide the huge quantities of stone needed for the vast breakwaters to house his turbines.
This in itself would be a colossal project, involving a jetty from which 10,000-ton barges would operate 24 hours a day, shipping millions of tons of Cornish stone across to Wales.
But so far, no one has seen the environmental impact assessments required by law on what damage all this might do to protected sites in the surrounding area, including a major offshore marine conservation zone. Irate local residents have already won one High Court judicial review against Cornwall council over part of this scheme, and a second is due in the High Court in January.
Similar serious environmental concerns have been raised, not least by the head of the planning inspectorate, over the threat posed in Swansea Bay to feeding grounds for wading birds, spawning grounds for fish and the blocking of access for eels to local rivers.
All this is now awaiting the publication of Mr Hendry’s report, originally promised for earlier this month. But at the last minute, to the fury of Welsh MPs, it was then postponed to “the end of the year”. If his findings have been as predicted, even our “green” ministers may be understandably finding it tricky to concoct any plausible case for approving what he recommends.