 Re: Severn barrage
Hi, just skimmed through it and I can see:
- a large and important part of our coastline will be lost forever
- very large tracts of South Wales get turned into quarry pits to supply the raw materials
- big redesign of the grid to take huge fluctuations of output into account
- The estimates of its output in terms of USEFUL power are pretty nonsensical, because electricity generation is controlled by the tides, not demand. So it may be generating at odd hours of the day/night with its peak output in warm weather and minimums in the winter. Because of this, it looks as if they need to build a whole lot of backup stations to take over the load.
If we must have backup stations to take the load every day when the barrage doesn't generate and they stand idle while it does, we don't need the barrage at all.
The figures have been fudged. Cost esimates at 6p-kW (2001 prices!), but selling to the National grid at 2.7p-kW, which includes .7p for "secure supply", even though it can't be turned on/off on demand. Looks as if the rest of the cost is going to be made up by us footing the bill for a big "flood barrier". At its peak output maybe 50% could be wasted because there's no way to match to peak demand.
So really: it's environmentally disastrous, it doesn't supply electricity when needed, it's very expensive per kW and it's not scalable (you can't build Severn B next to it when you want more output). Apart from that, fine.  |