April 26

Water power

The news that the Welsh government plans to go ahead with schemes to use energy from the sea to provide electricity is welcome but far too limited.

If, and it is a big if, they are ever completed, they would produce a mere trickle, compared with the massive but proven Severn harrage scheme that has bee floated for decades.

Four possible projects around the Anglesey coast have been announced, the first of which has received a £35 million grant from what is probably the last EU regional government scheme.

That and the other schemes would cost billions of pounds.

The most ambitious project - pie in the sky ? - is the North Wales tidal lagoon stretching for 19 miles from Prestatyn to Llandudno.

Compare the Anglesey plans with the massive Severn Barrage scheme, first floated many decades ago, which the government is now once again considering.

The Anglesey Morlais project would instal turbines to produce energy from what is accurately described as one of the world’s largest tidal streams.

The Bristol Channel, site of the Severn Barrage scheme, has the second highest tide in the world.

Geraint Llewellyn Jones, a director of the Morlais project company, emphasises the huge potential of water power which he says, was much better than wind or solar power.

He is right. The Severn Barrage scheme, last costed in the late 1970s at £18 billion, now revised to £30 billion, was predicted to produce one seventh  of the electricity needed in Britain and would last for two hundred years.

The Anglesey projects if,  to use a perverse analogy, they ever get off the ground, would be just a drop in the ocean.