out and about - 2018
16 June 2018 .............. Swansea Bay
Later on in the day, and the weather has improved, and I cycled right along the super track from Mumbles round to the Marine Quarter and the barrage.
Looking back towards Mumbles Pier -
Round in the other direction and an excellent view right round Swansea Bay to the south and east - I wonder what the view will be like if the Swansea lagoon ever gets built -
Interesting to see that Carwyn Jones has announced that he would now be prepared to offer £200 million of Welsh tax payers money to the lagoon company - back in January he offered £100 million, and that was bad enough.
Now he has announced that he is retiring from his position, he has doubled his offer.
It really is a bit of a strange form of democracy that an outgoing political leader can spend as much of the Welsh tax payers money as he likes, knowing that by the time things go pear shaped, he will be gone, and be unaccountable.
We also regularily get articles on the Welsh news websites which suggest various reasons that the lagoon should go ahead - they do seem to be scraping the barrel a bit.
Is there some kind of culture in Wales just now, in which people and organisations need to be seen to be supporting the Swansea lagoon, whether or not they know anything about it, or whatever their personal opinion of it is ?
The articles usually suggest that the lagoon would provide low carbon electricity to thousands of homes - well for 12 hours a day that may well be true, but it isn`t true for the other 12 hours.
And that isn`t a continuous 12 hour period, it is 4 distinct sessions of something like 3 hours each, and either one or two of them will be in the middle of the night - the punters out there would get seriously pissed off if they had to wait for 3 hours before they can put the kettle on, or watch TV.
So what generation capacity does the National Grid have that can be switched on and off every three hours to replace the electricity that the lagoon isn`t generating because it is waiting for the tide levels to change ?
And if the plans of the lagoon company go ahead, then there will be more lagoons in the Severn Estuary all having near enough the same tidal timings - that`s going to all add up to a lot of power generation that the National Grid is going to have to switch on and off every three hours.
Are we going to see a repeat of the farcical situation that happened or still happens with wind power generators that the operators are going to be paid huge sums of money to NOT generate electricity because the National Grid can`t take it ?
Then there is the idea that the lagoon will stop coastal erosion - but in reality the amount of coastline enclosed by the proposed Swansea lagoon is quite small, and as far as I am aware, coastal erosion isn`t really an issue on that bit of the coastline anyway.
Quite a lot of comment has been made about the sporting facility that the lagoon will bring - I am not really convinced about this - a fact that I haven`t ever seen mentioned is that the lagoon will be tidal, just like the open sea is, with the tides inside the lagoon time shifted by an hour or two compared to the tides outside the lagoon.
I am fairly sure about this, because if the water level in the lagoon isn`t going up and down, it isn`t generating any electricity.
I haven`t ever seen any information about the depth of water in the lagoon through the day, and the depth timing would be different every day.
I haven`t ever seen any information about what would happen if there are swimmers in the water, or a small boat capsizes, and the crew are in the water, and the water is flowing out through the turbines - it would be even worse if there is an offshore wind at the time.
Another argument that is sometimes raised is that the lagoon would be encouraging the culture in Wales - the proposed visitor centre would be used to display Welsh artwork.
Now I am happy to admit that I have don`t have much interest in art, and know nothing about it - but I do know that museums and art galleries spend a lot of time and effort in creating environments that are sympathetic to the preservation of artworks - yet people suggest that a visitor centre 3 miles out to sea, with all the big range of temperatures, and the constant damp and salt filled environment, is somehow going to be a good place to display artwork.
Not only that, but for quite a lot of the time, the weather and sea conditions would make it fundamentally unsafe for people to be out on the sea wall, so access to the visitor centre would be restricted quite a lot of the time.
And of course the same applies to the argument that the seawall will provide a route for walking and cycling.
I am still unconvinced that there would ever be public access to the seawall - there are a lot of costs involved in building a visitor centre and allowing public access along the seawall - does the lagoon company have investors with a sufficient degree of philanthropy that they are prepared to see a significant drop in the return on their investments, just so that the public can have access to the sea wall ?
Swansea is already a super place for cycling, with miles of off-road tracks - round the bay from Mumbles to I think the Bay Campus, the Clyne Valley route up to Gowerton, from the Marine Quarter away up past Llansamlet to Ponterdawe.
The possibility of getting another 6 miles of cycling track which is going to be closed because of the sea conditions for much of the time isn`t really a good justification for spending £1.3 billion - you could build a cycle track from Swansea to Anglesey for a lot less than that.
Quite apart from all the above, I still have never seen any reference to the effect on the generation capacity of the lagoon caused by the tidal range constantly changing due to Springs and Neaps - the tidal range during Neaps can be down to something like half the tidal range during Springs, so there is an inevitable drop in the amount of electricity that can be produced.
Now I believe that I am right in saying that if you design a turbine/generator for a particular water flow rate, the conversion efficiency drops considerably at lower flow rates.
So during Neaps, when the tidal range is smaller, not only is the potential generation capability reduced because of the reduced water flow, the conversion efficiency may also drop, so these two factors may combine to substantially reduce the amount of electricity finally produced - however the impact of a drop in conversion efficiency depends to a certain extent on how the generators are configured.
Will there be times during Neaps that the lagoon will generate no electricity at all because there isn`t enough of a water flow ?
As a taxpayer in Wales, I really don`t understand why the Welsh government - and now pension schemes in Wales - continue to be so in favour of the Swansea Bay lagoon - if the boffins in Westminister with a lot of technical expertise at their disposal have sufficient reservations about the viability of the project, why is the Welsh government so convinced that it knows better.
Maybe it is all just posturing, I really don`t know, but if it is for real then it would be an expensive way for the Welsh government to stick two fingers up at the Westminster government, with a high cost to the taxpayer.
It seems to be a bit like the old saying of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
It is quite clear that tidal currents do offer a potential for electricity generation, but it appears to me that tidal lagoons are an incredibly expensive, inefficient, and environmentally destructive way to do it.
It seems to me that with two universities that may be able to provide high levels of intellectual and research capability, with an ideal variety of coastal types and sea bed types, Swansea could make a much better name for itself by investigating further the technologies around submerged and surface tidal current generators and wave generators - something which I think is already happening, but could be expanded.
And both tidal current generation and wave generation are very much global things - wherever there is a current a submerged or surface current generator may be a feasible option, even in rivers.
Wherever there is sea there will be waves - and that includes inland seas like the Mediterranean and the Great Lakes in North America.
More than for lagoon generation, which requires a relatively rare combination of a high tidal range and a suitable sea bed, and so is quite limited in global terms.
Something of considerable significance to all this is the Swansea Bay City Deal, and yet it doesn`t really seem to get much publicity - as part of the Swansea Bay City Deal, there is going to a Pembroke Dock Marine project just exactly for this kind of tidal and wave generation development - this seems to be a far more sensible way for the Swansea Bay region to be involved in the development of marine energy extraction.
Is it just a coincidence that the £1.3 billion Swansea Bay City Deal initially agreed on 20th March 2017 exactly matches the anticipated £1.3 billion cost of the lagoon ?
The £1.3 billion available under the Swansea Bay City Deal is real money sitting there for the various developments listed within the deal.
The £1.3 billion which may or may not be spent on the lagoon is entirely under the control of a private company or private companies, and Swansea may or may not see some portion of it - Swansea would certainly not see a large chunk of the £1.3 billion, it would go elsewhere.
This may well be wrong, but as far as I can gather from what limited information is out there, the Pembroke Dock Marine project is already underway, Carmarthenshire has recently fully embraced the Swansea Bay City Deal, and Swansea has just signed off on the Joint Committee Agreement as well.
It would be nice if some of the news outlets and corporate press offices could be a little more proactive in telling us about the existence and the benefits of the Swansea Bay City Deal - the Swansea Bay City Deal is here, it is live, and is putting far more money into the region than the lagoon ever would.
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