Wales Plans World's First Tidal Lagoon

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland) - Consultations have begun for the creation of the world's first tidal lagoon to be located off the coast of Wales which could supply almost 10% of the region's electricity.

The €752 million project ($986 million), being developed by Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay (TLSB), will mean building a 9.5 kilometer (km) long, U-shaped, seawall running from the entrance to the River Tawe adjacent to Swansea Dock (Swansea Port) out to sea before curving back to re-join land adjacent to Swansea University. The tidal lagoon will have a rated capacity of 240-megawatts (MW), generating around 400 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity annually, enough to power 121,000 homes.

The seawall will incorporate a turbine housing, located at the deepest point of the wall. The turbine housing will contain between 16 and 22 permanently submerged, low-head, hydro turbines and around 10 sluice gates. Power will be generated using the sluice gates to impound a "head" of water -- a difference in water level between the inside and outside of the lagoon. When released, the flow of water is channelled through the turbines. The hydro turbines can operate with flows of tide water in both directions meaning the lagoon will generate electricity four times per day (on each of two ebb and flood tides) totalling, on average, 14 hours of generation every day. The electricity will be exported from the lagoon via underground cable to the nearest National Grid substation, which is located in Baglan.

"Our vision is to deliver 10,000 MW of power from the tidal range in the U.K. and thus change the energy mix to home-grown, low carbon energy that creates local jobs, cheap power and local long term amenities for the communities who host the lagoons," explained Ton Fijen, Technical Director for Tidal Lagoon Power. "We know that there is an available 10,000 MW of potential sites in the U.K. alone that are suitable for tidal lagoon development. The Swansea project will hopefully be the first in a network of lagoons around the U.K. coastline, driving a critical change in our energy mix with low cost, low carbon electricity sources that are sustainable long-term."

TLSB estimated that the operational life of the tidal lagoon could be up to 120 years and offset around 216,000 tons of CO2 each year. The project will take two years to build. Costain Group (LSE:COST) (Maidenhead, United Kingdom), Atkins (Sheffield, England) and Dutch marine engineering firm, Van Oord (Rotterdam) have signed agreements to design and build the lagoon.

An application for planning permission will be lodged with the Planning Inspectorate later this autumn.

There are currently three large scale uni-directional tidal range plants in operation: Annapolis in the Bay of Fundy, Canada (30 MW), La Rance in Brittany, France (240 MW) and Sihwa in Korea (254 MW).

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