Britain's Answer to Clean Electricity - Tidal Power

What a great idea - harness the natural environment that's all around you. The biggest problem, as always, is the cost and the eco-fascists that oppose everything that isn't completely biodegradable. heh.

This is only in the planning stages, but I find it most amusing that the environmentalist demand hard evidence to prove it won't be harmful to the environment, but when they say it won't work and will be harmful, all they need is soft science, that is, opinion or belief that bad things will happen is enough. A consensus of opinion is truth.

This is world wide insanity!

This article from Britain is good as it shows the struggles that they are having, as we are here in America, to combat this nonsense of man-made global warming. How is it that so many people refuse to debate this problem? Why not debate man's involvement so we can find the real answer? The 'real' answer could save our country from those that wish to do us harm.

Why, indeed, should we debate when it's not about finding the truth, it's all about a belief that makes us feel useful and part of the solution without having to do anything ourselves. No thinking aloud, it's too confusing. The true believers don't even have to get their hands dirty with the details, all they have to do is sit in the front pew and clap there collective hands to beat of the song brought forth by the preacher.

Hallelujah - Al Core will save us all from ourselves and, just think, all we have to do is put in the plate every time it passed around. Can life really be this simple?

Hang on to your wallets here people and keep the faith in freedom of choice, we are fighting the good battle!

*Daniel Clery*

Harnessing nature's energy to produce up to 5% of the United Kingdom's electricity without any carbon emissions sounds too good to be true. It is, according to a report last week from 10 environmental groups opposing plans to build the world's largest tidal power scheme.

High water.

The River Rance barrage in France has been churning out electricity for more than 40 years. The proposed Severn barrage would be much bigger. Britain is under pressure to combat climate change with more renewable energy. According to the European Union's (E.U.'s) common energy policy, 15% of the U.K.'s total energy consumption should come from renewables by 2020. Wind turbines and other renewables now provide less than 5% of U.K. electricity. As a result, the government is reviving mothballed plans for a dam, or barrage, across the Severn estuary, which separates southwest England from south Wales.

But wildlife and environmental groups, including the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), the Worldwide Fund for Nature, and The National Trust, who argue that it will damage a unique ecosystem, now also assert that it will cost too much. "The report shows that this exorbitantly expensive and massively damaging proposal cannot be justified on economic grounds--there are simply too many cheaper options for clean energy generation," says RSPB Chief Graham Wynne.

Positioned across an estuary or inlet, a tidal barrage is essentially the same as a hydroelectric dam, but the rise and fall of the tides drives water through its turbines. The first such barrage began operating on France's River Rance in 1966. Because of high construction costs and fears of ecological damage, there have been only two, smaller imitators, in Canada and Russia.The River Severn has the second highest tidal range in the world--15 meters between high and low tide. The first of many plans for a tidal power scheme there dates from 1925, but none has left the drawing board.

The $29 billion scheme now being considered by the U.K. government is an order of magnitude larger than that on the Rance. The barrage would stretch 16 kilometers from Weston-super-Mare in Somerset to Cardiff in south Wales and would generate 17 terawatt-hours of energy per year, equivalent to the output of two 1-gigawatt power stations. A tidal barrage has lower operating costs than a nuclear station and would last up to three times longer, as long as 120 years.

The Severn barrage would have locks to accommodate ships and perhaps a road or rail link along its top. Proponents say that the water behind it would be safe for shipping and watersports and would reduce the threat of floods.

Then there are the drawbacks. Apart from cost, the barrage will irrevocably change the ecosystem of the enclosed estuary. The groups that sponsored last week's report say that it would threaten 35,000 hectares of protected wetlands, home to 68,000 birds in winter and more in summer. The barrage will also disrupt the migration of salmon, shads, lampreys, and sea trout to their spawning grounds. "The estuary is truly exceptional for its ecological value," says Wynne.

In 2007, the government-funded Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) issued a report supporting a Severn barrage, as long as it does not contravene E.U. environmental directives. The directives allow for schemes that alter habitats if there is overwhelming public benefit--such as combating climate change--and if compensatory habitats are provided, either by restoring damaged habitats or creating new habitats somewhere else. SDC also recommended that the project should be government-funded and owned to avoid higher commercial interest rates. In January, the U.K. government launched a 2-year feasibility study into the barrage.

Last week's report, drawn up by the consultancy group Frontier Economics, argues that there is no compelling reason for the government to bankroll a project that the private sector could do equally well. Doing so, it adds, may actually contravene U.K. treasury rules. Public money would be better spent on other types of renewable project, it concludes.

Researchers are divided over both the economic and the environmental arguments. "I'd rather see more distributed, smaller [schemes] built sooner," says ecologist Peter Randerson of Cardiff University in the U.K., who believes a barrage would take 20 years to build. Hydraulic engineer Richard Burrows of the University of Liverpool in the U.K. notes that E.U. targets have Britain getting 60% of its energy from renewables by 2050 and that small-scale schemes will never reach such a target. "You have to capture a larger part of the tidal power out there," he says.

The barrage's environmental impact is also debatable. "There will be environmental modification but not necessarily degradation," says Burrows. "You could argue that there will be a richer ecological state inside the impounded reservoir." Oceanographer Robert Kirby, who has studied the estuary for 40 years, predicts that the barrage will be good for the estuary, slowing the fast tides that stir up sediments and blocking sunlight from the water.

Randerson says that this is a "tantalizing argument" but that as yet there have been "no serious studies" of the idea. In any case, he expects the decision to be made on political rather than scientific grounds. "It's very attractive for politicians to have a big, megabucks, grandiose scheme to hang their credentials on," he says. "It's inevitable for all the wrong reasons."