EU Referendum


Booker: Welsh eels


19/04/2015



000a Booker-019 eels.jpg  

If you wanted a single example of how far all those who aspire to govern us after this election can lose any touch with reality, writes Booker a good place to begin might be page 56 of the Conservative manifesto. 

Here, in a section on "Energy", we are told how the Coalition Government has "unlocked £59 billion of investment" to produce "low carbon" electricity to meet our commitments under Ed Miliband's Climate Change Act.

All the projects listed are, of course, hugely subsidised, to produce power costing us all twice or three times as much as that from conventional power stations. But there at the end is a mention of "the Swansea tidal lagoon".

Booker admits that, until recently, he had no more idea what this was about than 99 percent of the population. But he was struck by the remarkable array of backers this scheme has attracted, from the Prudential insurance company and Ed Davey, our Lib Dem Energy and Climate Change Secretary, to George Osborne in his recent Budget speech, and the BBC, which has been giving it excitable puffs.

Tidal Lagoon Power (TLP), the company behind the scheme, is proposing to ship 3.2 million tons of stone from a disused Cornish quarry to south Wales, to enclose a vast area of Swansea Bay in a six-mile breakwater. At the sea end, 16 giant turbines will then use power from rising and falling tides to generate "zero-carbon" electricity for 14 hours a day.

TLP insists that its £1 billion scheme will only work if it is allowed to charge for its electricity at 330 percent of the normal wholesale price of £50 per megawatt hour (MWh). This would give it a subsidy of £118 per MWh, even more than that for offshore wind, making it easily the most expensive electricity in the world.

But even more interesting is how much electricity we would be getting for our money. It makes one wonder if all those politicians have actually done their sums. All TLP reveals on its website is that the Swansea Bay scheme will generate "495,000 MWh a year". To Ed Davey and Co, this may sound a lot. But divide it out and the average output would be just 57MW. Compared to that of even a modest conventional power station, this scarcely registers.

The £1 billion gas-fired power plant that opened two years ago along the Welsh coast near Pembroke can, without a penny of subsidy, generate 2,000MW or 35 times as much. Even allowing for the cost of the gas, the comparison is laughable.

And, of course, the pitiful output from Swansea, varying wildly while it is working, and producing nothing for 10 hours a day, would – to keep our lights on – need constant back-up from those fossil-fuel power stations that our politicians say they want to see closed down in pursuit of the "decarbonised" economy they prattle about without having the faintest idea what this means.

Not the least astonishing feature of the Swansea scheme is how quickly it has been rushed through, at the highest political level. We were told that, as a "National Infrastructure Project" it had been approved by the Planning Inspectorate. All that remained was for whoever heads the Department for Energy and Climate Change after 7 May to press the button for TLP to start work within weeks.

Last week, however, there was an unexpected twist. Contrary to any impressions previously given, the Department for Energy and Climate Change received a letter from Giles Scott, "Head of National Infrastructure Consents" at the Planning Inspectorate, asking 25 more searching questions, to be answered no later than April 28.

These are on every kind of issue, from whether the scheme complies with the EU's Habitats Directive and whether any alternative projects have been considered that would give more "environmental benefit", to whether the turbine project would prevent eels having access to local rivers.

Mr Scott tells the department and TLP only to reply to his letter if they can "provide responses to the specific questions being asked". Otherwise "nothing in this letter is to be taken to imply" what the final decision might be.

How ironic it would be if Welsh eels put the kybosh on the most nonsensical "green" pipe dream ever proposed in Britain.