As expected, the £1.3 billion Swansea Bay tidal lagoon project was finally rejected by the UK government a few days ago. The question, however, is not why the project was rejected, but how it got this far in the first place. As reviewer Charles Hendry saidafter the announcement; “a decision not to back the world’s first tidal power lagoon could have been made 18 months ago”. It could in fact have been made a lot earlier than that.
Energy Matters’ first review of the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon project was published over three years ago in May 2015, and was discussed further in later posts here and here. The results of the 2015 review confirmed that Swansea Bay was a non-starter, partly because of its high cost (£168/MWh strike price compared to £92.50 for Hinkley C), partly because the ebb-flow generation being considered would create four power spikes a day with no generation in between, which would pose insurmountable problems for the grid if enough tidal lagoons were constructed, and partly because of invalid claims made by the project’s developer Tidal Lagoon Power PLC (TLP) that combining output from different sites would result in baseload generation, which it would not.
So why was the project still being actively pursued? As David Cameron put it during his 2015 visit to Swansea:
From the moment I heard about the (Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon) project I have always been personally very keen on really examining it because it seems to me it has real transformational potential for Swansea — there’s obviously the energy side of it, the clean, green energy, but also the recreational transformation and economic transformation. I am excited by projects that can really transform.
And as Charles Hendry said in his January 2017 project review:
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