A sea of support for tidal lagoon power?

UK electricity demand is rapidly increasing while the generating capacity of aging power infrastructure is in decline. The country is going to lose 21,000MW installed capacity over the next nine years, and this, Mark Shorrock warns, must be replaced somehow.

Shorrock is chief executive of Tidal Lagoon Power, the company tasked with developing and building the UK’s first tidal lagoon generating station. Swansea Bay tidal lagoon will act as a pilot project with an installed capacity of 320MW, and 14 hours of reliable generation every day.

At a conference in Berlin, Shorrock emphasises how reliable this is as a way of generating power. “You put this infrastructure in and it goes and goes and goes,” he says. “We’ve been very clear with the British government that when you want to have cheap power, when you want to get to a paradigm that renewables in the sea haven’t got to yet, you have to build bigger lagoons.”

But concerns have been voiced over the cost of the project, which has an estimated strike price of £168 per MWh hour. When Chancellor George Osborne announced in the March Budget that the government had opened talks on the provision of financial support for the project, consumer group Citizens Advice pointed out that the price “exceeds every technology for which strike prices have been published by Decc” and conveyed apprehension at the “appalling value for money” for consumers.

Shorrock, however, is quick to quell any qualms. He insists that as bigger lagoons are built, such as the one planned for Cardiff Bay, costs will come down.

“Because it has such a long life, we can end our subsidy period, whatever duration that is, and we can contract to give money to the government per MWh that we produce,” he says. “We’ve said to the government ‘we can give you £10 on Cardiff or one of the big lagoons’, and in real numbers, we would pay back more to the consumer or the government than we would receive in subsidy.”

He explains it’s a question of scale. If the Cardiff lagoon produces 6,500GW over its 120-year lifetime, and receives a government subsidy over 30 years, it can then spend 90 years “putting money back in the public purse”.

Reports in the Welsh media recently surfaced, suggesting that negotiations on the project have been hit by delays, and construction will not now start until March 2017, although Decc insists there is “no timeframe for how long the negotiation process could take”.

“We’re driving this process as if the [contracts for difference auction] has already happened,” says Shorrock. “We’re finishing the advance works phase next month. We then do the real detailed design. We’re in a process whereby we will engage with the banking community in January next year and drive towards financial close.”

He hopes tidal lagoon power is part of the energy mix worldwide, making up for the renewable baseload generation wind and solar are unable to provide.

The Crown Estate estimates that tidal lagoon power will contribute up to 25TWh of renewable electricity to the UK every year, equivalent to 8 per cent of the country’s electricity consumption.

But time and tide wait for no man and if negotiations aren’t quick to conclude, there’s a risk that the technology could be killed off before it’s had a chance to prove itself.