March 10

The Severn barrage

Here we go again. The government is taking another look at the  Severn Barrage scheme, an idea they turned down ten years ago and that has been tossed about for almost two hundred years 

It was in 1849 that Thomas Fulijames, the Gloucester city engineer, designed a barrage to link Monmouthshire with England to boost Gloucester dock’s trade. It would use the energy of the Bristol Channel tide - second highest in the world - would take eight years and cost £4million. But it seemed too ambitious and was dropped.

Almost one hundred years later, in 1943 the government initiated a study to revive the idea. The result was positive; stating that if work started in 1947 power could be generated by 1955.

Then decades of silence until, in 1981, after three years, the study report enthusiastically argued that it should be started straight away.

They opted for a route from Lavernock Point, Penarth, to Brean Down; the cost, five and a half billion.

Three years later hopes rose when the Secretary of State for Energy was presented with another, impressively illustrated, report on the scheme

It visualised a ten-mile-long barrage on the same route but topped by a dual carriageway road. It would produce one-seventh of the electricity for England and Wales.

Its benefits would be wide ranging, including industry, commerce and transport, shipping, tourism, recreation housing and infrastructure.

It would take a labour force of 13,000 to build  and many thousands of permanent jobs.

Later that year the barrage scheme was forcefully argued at the Institute of Civil Engineers’ conferences At last, with the clamour for clean energy becoming deafening, the largest ever single renewable energy project looked likely to approved, but it again stalled.

A helicopter flying over the Bristol Channel in 1978 signalled the possibility that the barrage would at last be built.

As county public relations officer for South Glamorgan I had arranged the flight that carried members of the committee chaired by Sir Hermann Bondi to survey the projected barrage route.

In March 1981 the committee’s report could not have been more positive.The original plans had been based on harnessing only the incoming tide, but the report favoured also using the ebb tide. The committee urged the government to spend £45 million on final preparatory work that would take four years.

But again it came to nothing. The main reason resistant was the powerful opposition to the effect the huge scheme would have on the environment and the unique habitat of the wide area affected.

It looked final - until last week when Michael Gove MP sparked it into life, setting up a new commission.

With the unique energy problems now faced by the UK and the world this looks to be its best chance to see a rare but not unique project, first visualised in Britain in the 19th century but completed by successfully in Brittany by France in a far smaller project forty years ago.

I would not bet on it.