Speaking at the Glasgow climate summit, First Minister Mark Drakeford was in optimistic mood.
One reason, he explained, was that Wales has the advantage and potential of being beside the sea; in fact surrounded by it on three sides, All that sea and air. So much potential for energy saving.
But is the optimism justified?
A look back over the years suggest it is not.
Time after time the opportunity to harness wave power to energise industry and businesses, to light and heat homes, has been turned down.
Wales’s one world class climate change achievement has been the Dinorwig North Wales hydro electric scheme. Completed in 1984 it is a brilliant, simple idea. Pump water up a mountain and let it rush down, creating instant electricity, and repeat the process ad infinitum.
Wales and Britain has ignored since 1849 an easy, affordable way of harnessing the power of the world’s second highest tidal range.
That is as when the importance of the treasure that could be wrested from the Bristol Channel was first recognised by the Gloucester City engineer, Thomas Fuljames. He suggested a barrage linking Wales with Monmouthshire to make Gloucester docks more accessible.
Nothing happened, as after the next, much more ambitious study many decades later, in 1933. That chose a similar line, the English Stones, with electricity - 2:365 million kilowatts per hour on 706 tides a year.
A new study was ordered by the government in 1943 resulting in a positive report two years later.
The benefits, it said, would include expansion of business and commerce, shipping, tourism, recreation, housing and infrastructure.
Its construction would provide a workforce of 35,000 with 10,000 plus permanent jobs.
The report concluded, ‘If renewable energy resources are to be utilised to increase diversification of electricity generation and reduce pollution, the Severn Barrage remains the largest single project that can make a significant contribution on a reasonable time scale’.
Later that year the case for the barrage was forcefully argued at a civic engineers conference on tidal energy.
It asserted that if every practicable estuary in England and Wales were harnessed to produce energy, 20 percent of the nation’s electricity demand would be met; the largest, the Severn Barrage would account for 7 percent.
Decades of silence followed
Then, in 1973, the Severn Barrage committee was formed in which I was involved
Its secretary was Peter Davey, chief executive of the South Glamorgan county council, my boss.
I helped arrange the committee meetings, including organising helicopter flights over the Bristol Channel to select the barrage route.
Its enthusiastic report in March 1981 proposed a further study be taken.
The prospect at last, looked rosy, boosted five years later by the influential Severn Tidal Power group report.
By then the cost had risen to five and a half billion pounds.
Asserting the project would be ‘of great value and a permanent asset to the country’ they wanted an immediate three year £18 million study and, on time, an impressively illustrated report was presented to the Secretary of State for Energy.
The ten mile long barrage on the preferred Lavernock to Brean Down route would built with huge concrete caissons involving embankments on both sides of the channel with a dual carriageway crossing.
The report confirmed it would meet one seventh of England and Wales' electricity needs, would save eight million tons of coal a year and last for at least 126 years. Since then, silence.
There has been limitless water under the bridge, up and down the channel, with the world now facing possible disaster.
Mr Johnson in Glasgow is pleading for action by Great Britain and the world.
Why is the Severn Barrage scheme still dead in the water?
No comments:
Post a Comment