Alternative Power

In about 1972 I worked as a consultant to Frederick Snow and Partners. Incidentally it was on the new airport/terminal at Aldergrove to replace Nutts Corner.

What was interesting was that the consultants were promoting a scheme to barrage the Severn, which has the highest tidal movement of anywhere in the world. Remember too, that this was at the time of the opening of the first Severn crossing.

Their plan was to put a barrage from Wales to North Devon, where it narrows again just below Portishead. A spine would then go up the middle of the river in a north-east south-west direction. Sluice gates would create a high and a low lake, with electricity being generated by turbines in the spine.

The advantages of this high-low barrage and central spine as compared to other tidal power systems, such as at La Rance in France are extensive :-

1. Because the power is generated by water passing between the high and low lake, electricity can be generated when it is needed and not when the tide is flowing.

2. It can also be used as a pumped storage system to store electricity, because if power is not needed, the generators can become pumps and they can pump water from the low lake to the high lake. Pumped storage is a technique that can also be used with wind power to sort out fluctuations.

3. Frederick Snow and Partners are airport builders and also felt that a major offshore airport could be built on the spine. Remember that the estuary runs the right direction for runways in the UK.

4. Another proposal would be to put energy consumptive industries such as petrochemicals and chlorine production on the spine, to keep them well away from centres of population.

5. It would also create a third Severn crossing.

6. Flooding on the Severn would be completely controlled.

As originally planned it would have created ten percent of the UK’s energy needs. Cost would have been large, but now that the UK’s economy is very much larger than in 1972, I believe it would now be very much more affordable.

The biggest objections are environmental, as the lakes would change the habitat along the coastlines.

I think that as you are going to deal with energy next week, you should take a good look at this project.

Do I think it should be built?

I am ambivalent because of the cost and environmental objections. I am a fierce opponent of wind-power because of the eyesore factor, cost and the fact that it only works part of the time. I am also someone who has hunted hounds in the shadow of Sizewell and moaned not at the power-station, but at the farmer who had taken all of his hedges out nearby.

I speak though as an engineer, who wrote the Project Management System, Artemis, that is used to create and manage most of these large projects. And also as a stud farmer, who lives in a hundred hectares of beautiful countryside.

So we have some difficult choices.

I feel that if we are going to have reliable electricity we may have to choose between nuclear, which I know is safe, but is vociferously opposed by a strident minority and schemes such as the Severn Barrage, which will also be opposed by a more local and much smaller group of people.