What’s happening with Swansea Bay tidal lagoon?

Am I the only person who’s bemused about what’s happening to the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon? It looks like precisely nothing, though it would be just my luck for a deal to be announced five minutes after I post this article. If that happens, then don’t bother reading the rest!

As far back as July the FT reported that the project’s investors were warning that the delay in making a decision was putting the project at risk. According to Wales Online, a bunch of Swansea councillors met with Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Greg Clark on 30 October to urge him to speed things up, but two weeks later there have still been no announcements about what is happening. I wondered whether an announcement might have been made at the recent International Tidal Energy Summit earlier this week, but there’s still no news.

I don’t understand why the government couldn’t have given it a definitive unambiguous yes or no several years ago. But I have a theory, and here it is.

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Swansea Bay tidal lagoon, what is its real cost?

The Swansea Bay tidal lagoon debate tends to focus on its cost. The figure usually quoted is £168/MWh for the feed-in tariff or ‘strike price’ needed to enable it to go ahead. If you were wondering where this number came from, how it was derived, and whether it is still correct, then you’ve come to the right place.

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An attempted reconstruction of Tidal Lagoon Power’s ‘New Power Cost League Table’

Tidal Lagoon Plc (TLP) has recently published a document called ‘The New Power Cost League Table’ that compares the cost-effectiveness of different electricity generating technologies according to a new measure they have devised that they call ‘lifetime consumer cost per MWh’. Figure 1 shows the league table.

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