[BITList] Fwd: Lloyd's List: Send to Colleague

[Michael Feltham]

Another interesting article from Michael Grey

Begin forwarded message:

From: enquiries at lloydslist.com
Date: 1 September 2008 08:39:30 BDT
To: mj.feltham at madasafish.com
Subject: Lloyd's List: Send to Colleague


The below article was sent to you from Mike Feltham  
(mj.feltham at madasafish.com) with the following message: I thought you  
might be interested in the article below.

Is the green lobby power mad?
Monday 1 September 2008

THERE is an air of panic about energy policy in the UK at present. It  
is clear that there will not be enough electricity to go around once  
the power stations currently reaching the ends of their operational  
lives have been shut down. The prospects of dependence upon Russian  
oil and gas (and what might come with it) are causing alarm.

There is also the dawning realisation that even if the government  
pressed ahead with its disgraceful legislation to subvert planning  
processes, we do not have sufficient knowhow on nuclear engineering  
remaining in the UK, which has shamefully left this industry to  
flounder, compared with the reinforced expertise across the Channel.  
And if every coal-fired power station requires to be defended 24  
hours a day against the violent attention of nose-ringed  
environmental activists trying to bung up the chimneys, there are  
certain signs of alarm in this direction, too.

Panic begets panic measures, with the sense that environmental  
pressures are pushing energy planners inexorably towards so-called  
‘sustainable’ energy, notably those deeply unpopular forests of  
windfarms which are being hurled up with abandon on sea and land.

The public is being urged to look upon these brutish objects with  
approbation, with meaningful references to the Kyoto Protocol and  
other mad targets to which the government has committed us. They  
provide ‘clean’ electricity. So they must be good.

The fact that despite the free wind they represent the most expensive  
(and unreliable) form of electricity generation is rather hidden from  
us. Sacrifices must be made to save the planet, and if our soaring  
energy bills encourage us to turn down the central heating and wrap  
up warm, that is all part of the price we must pay.

On the subject of sacrifices, what about sacrificing the Port of  
Bristol on the altar of sustainable energy? Would that be a fair  
exchange? Because as part of this desperate government plan to reach  
impractical sustainable energy targets, there is a mad plan emerging  
which will block up the Bristol Channel with an enormous barrage  
stretching from Cardiff to Weston. If one is thinking of a perfect  
panic measure in the business of energy procurement, look no further  
than the brown, silt-rich waters of the lower Severn, with their  
powerful tides.

There is a sort of seasonality about plans for vast schemes for civil  
engineering. They reside in dusty archives (some rudely call them the  
‘lunatic’s files’) in ministries, and they emerge from time to time,  
but only at times of national crisis.

There are always superficially positive attractions about these  
enormous schemes. I would ask you now to imagine a fictitious  
conversation between the managing director of one of our major  
construction companies and a very, very senior government minister,  
in the quiet confines of the former’s club.

The industrialist speaks first: “Look here, minister, I’ll put my  
cards on the table. We’re both in a mess and I’m the first to admit it.

“You’ve made a complete pig’s ear of the economy, big civil  
engineering projects can’t get backing from the banks because they  
say they don’t have any money. House and office building have come to  
a grinding halt. I’m chucking 2,000 construction workers a week onto  
the dole, despite the fact I have three years’ worth of cement and 1m  
tonnes of steel rebars secured in the forward markets.

“Take this mad scheme for a barrage between Cardiff and the coast of  
Somerset, which I am told will, when fitted with hydro-electric  
turbines, generate some 0.7% — or 7.0% — or is it 17% — of the UK’s  
electricity. The quantity is unimportant, because it is green  
electricity, and that’s the stuff you chaps want.

“You get behind this scheme, we build the barrage. I can get shot of  
all this cement and steel and simultaneously employ several thousand  
workers, from highly skilled engineers who would otherwise be  
emigrating en masse to Dubai, down to mud-shovellers from South Wales  
who might just, if they have a bit of work, think twice about voting  
Plaid Cymru and ensuring that Wales as well as Scotland is New Labour- 
free after the next election.

“That way we all win, we both get to keep our jobs, and who knows, by  
the time the thing is built, peerages might have become popular  
again, and directorships in my company will certainly be useful for  
padding out even the most generous of ministerial pensions.”

The minister, who, like Napoleon’s marshalls after failing to take  
Moscow, has become inured to the inevitability of defeat and the  
permanence of retreat, is attracted to this bold plan of action,  
although he is sufficiently streetwise to consider some of the more  
immediate problems.

“It’s an attractive concept,” he confesses, “but we have to think of  
the environmental compensation that will be necessary under the EU  
Habitats Directive. We’ll have to turn the Somerset Levels into salt  
marsh, for a start.

“We’ll have a fight on our hands with the bird lobby, and the surfers  
will be rioting in the streets about us buggering up the Severn Bore.  
And if this is going to be an Anglo-Welsh project, we’ll need two  
languages in every working document and sign, while all the boatmen  
will have to be bilingual. Oh — and, by the way, isn’t the Port of  
Bristol going to end up on the wrong side of the barrage, after it  
has been built?”

Nothing even remotely resembling this conversation, I’m sure, has  
possibly taken place, although the plan for the barrage has advanced  
from the ‘highly unlikely’ to the ‘constructively being assessed’  
category. There has been no debate, no publication of proposals, but  
there are already people adding up the number of green gigajoules  
which could be attributed to this enormous erection.

Indeed, the Port of Bristol has become sufficiently concerned about  
the consequences should this barrage be built to have undertaken its  
own detailed studies. And, it transpires, there are virtually no  
consequences that are not negative to this port, which is one of the  
most efficient in the country and a model for marine operations,  
cargo handling, training and labour relations.

The port became even more worried when its assumption that there  
would be large ship locks in this vast obstruction was not backed up  
by any assurances that these would indeed be built. The port, the  
largest bulk cargo port in the South of England, the biggest handler  
of motor vehicles in the UK, the second biggest power coal import  
facility, and importing 27% of the UK’s imported aviation and 30% of  
the UK’s animal feed capacity, would be cut off in its prime.

And even if there was a ship lock included in the barrage, the port’s  
studies forecast trouble in store, with “highly damaging”  
implications for shipping caused by delays and costs associated with  
the lock transits, and the reduction of the water depth inside the  
barrier.

It is also worth thinking about the ‘blight’ which such long-term,  
undebated and unpublished plans will cause. Bristol has been a port  
which has invested heavily in its present prosperity, and this  
continuing process includes both regionally and nationally important  
projects. These include a £500m ($915m) container terminal and  
several large biomass-fuelled power stations which depend heavily  
upon the ability to dock big ships. Both schemes, it might be  
thought, fulfil important objectives in addressing, respectively,  
South of England congestion and energy shortfalls. Does the  
government’s left hand know what its right hand is doing?

And while such a barrage might be a notional £15bn lump of red meat  
to a hungry civil engineering and construction sector, the marine  
aspects of throwing such an obstacle across this complex estuary need  
very close consideration.

Bristol Port knows more about the hydrography and the movement of  
sediments and sands in the Bristol Channel than anyone else, but  
points out that data is still sparse. Nobody, it suggests, has really  
sat down and analysed the “post-barrage geomorphological change” —  
what on earth will happen to the channel with this huge obstacle set  
down across the main tidal flow. For its part, Bristol believes that  
the presence of the great barrage will reduce the underkeel clearance  
of ships by up to 1.3m on spring tides, which would make the port  
economically unsound for the big ships to which it markets itself.

You cannot look at these consequences in isolation. If such cargoes  
have to divert, there will be other consequences to traffic flows all  
around the country. Who has considered these impacts, bearing in mind  
that the business of Bristol is not entirely due to the excellence of  
its management, but also because it is close and well-connected to a  
large portion of the UK’s population?

One is reminded (albeit on a smaller scale) of the furious  
interference with the forces of a river that took place in China with  
the Three Gorges dam, seen as essential for power generation,  
although the word ‘green’ was not raised in this context. But the  
turbines have barely hummed into action and already the huge lakes at  
the back of the dams are filling up with silt, scoured out of the  
hinterland.

In the upper reaches of the Bristol Channel there will be a major  
maintenance dredging operation to be undertaken on a permanent basis.  
Somebody had better cost this into the equation.

Bristol itself knows a bit about the abrasive qualities of the Severn  
silt, which has caused it all sorts of problems in its own pumping  
system.

It suggests that high wear of the barrage’s generating turbines will  
be a probable difficulty, causing downtime.

If this is the case, there will be deeply furrowed brows at that  
important desk which controls the surges of power all over the UK as  
East Enders and Coronation Street end each day.

And at the end of the day, as ministers evaluate the attractive  
‘green’ features of hydropower, one hopes that the real price of this  
electricity is considered. There is no one, at present , who has a  
clue about how much this barrage will ultimately cost.

It has been notionally put at £15bn, but nobody in their right mind  
would suggest that it will be completed for this stupendous sum. It  
has been suggested that £25bn might be more realistic. And even at  
the lower cost, the barrage would be three times more expensive than  
nuclear power stations for the same capacity. Interestingly, offshore  
wind is the next most expensive.

The fact is, we just don’t know enough, and the chances are that  
those who are making decisions in what were once smoke filled rooms,  
don’t know enough either, but will be surely driven on by Kyoto and  
Copenhagen and wrong-headed environmental zeal along with the need to  
rack up brownie points with other ‘activists’ drivelling on about  
climate change.

Twenty years on, and we have killed off the Port of Bristol. The  
Bristol Channel is bunged up with abrasive silt which wears away the  
barrage’s turbine blades every six months. Windfarms ring the land,  
but still don’t deliver. The lights are going out.

There are a couple of nuclear stations, thank God, just coming on  
stream, care of the French. Meanwhile the real answer, in the first  
underwater power station, which employs the vast and predictable  
tides which surge around this island, is finally commissioned. Dream on.

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