Finally, the UK government has rejected the £1.3 billion Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon Project.
Phew!
This is a tremendous victory for common sense, for the environment, and for the hapless energy users who would have been subsidising this massive white elephant for many decades to come.
Christopher Booker explained precisely why the project was such a bad idea in a series of articles for the Daily Mail.
The first one, in 2015, began:
Just when it seemed that our national energy policy — alongside defence of the realm, an absolute priority, to keep the lights on — couldn’t be managed in a madder or more alarming way, along comes the most bizarre project of all.
This is a £1 billion scheme to build a colossal U-shaped stone breakwater, six miles long, enclosing the whole of Swansea Bay in South Wales, containing 16 giant submerged turbines, whose blades would be seven metres across.
The idea is that these would be driven by the water pouring through them from both directions by the 30ft daily rise and fall of the Bristol Channel’s tides, the second highest in the world.
This mammoth scheme, recently given a glowing plug on the BBC’s Countryfile, is said to have everything going for it.
It is backed by an array of financial investors, led by the giant Prudential insurance company. Also behind it are our most influential ‘green’ lobby groups, such as Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.The ‘tidal lagoon’ project, which would be like nothing else built anywhere before, is favoured by politicians of all parties, led by Lib Dem Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey, who can barely contain his excitement, saying that tidal power offers Britain ‘fantastic economic opportunities’.
The plan was given positive mention in George Osborne’s recent Budget speech, and has now been included in the Conservative manifesto.
On the internet, there is a picture of David Cameron meeting the chief executive of Tidal Lagoon Power (TLP), the company behind the scheme. So, the project certainly has friends in high places.
Note that by the time Booker was out of the traps with the first in-depth article on the subject, the project was already pretty much a done deal.
Read the rest at Breitbart.
