Greening the Grid

Mark Whitby
03 July 2015

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With the Swansea Lagoon Tidal Power project clear to start, renewable power really is gaining the upper hand over nuclear as a deliverable low carbon power source, says Mark Whitby

News that the Swansea Tidal Lagoon project has won planning consent and is up and running under the leadership of Andrew McNaughton, is great for the UK’s challenged electricity power supply sector and balance of sources

But to gauge the real impact it needs to be seen in the context of falling demand for electricity that is now seen across the UK together with the way that other conventional renewables are reshaping our energy industry. 

"Solar and wind - particularly offshore wind -  will, we hope, continue to prosper and in the 1300 days that it will take to complete Andrew McNaughton’s tidal lagoon station in Swansea, they will have added at least another 15TWhrs."

Government statistics show that in 2014 our electrical consumption fell by 4.2% while the amount of electricity the UK’s generated also decreased 6.7% to the lowest for 18 years. 

The 2.5% difference is now being made up by increasing imports from our European neighbours in countries with higher reserve margins such as France and the Netherlands. 

The statistics show a vastly changing picture. Government figures highlight that coals’ contribution to our grid dropped by 23.0% and nuclear by 9.7%. 

Conversely, of the 337TWhrs of supply, 35.5TWhrs are being generated from wind and solar sources – a figure that has risen by 5.0TWhrs since 2013. 

Also we see that bio energy power generation was up 24% on 2013 to 20.6TWhrs. 

In fact, added together these once minority renewable resources actually delivered just 1.9TWhrs short of the output from our nuclear stations. 

What’s interesting is to speculate where this may be leading. Solar and wind - particularly offshore wind -  will, we hope, continue to prosper and in the 1300 days that it will take to complete Andrew McNaughton’s tidal lagoon station in Swansea, they will have added at least another 15TWhrs. And biomass will have added possibly another 10TWhrs.  

In addition we will see demand continue to fall, although most probably not quite as dramatically. Yet even assuming a 5% drop it will see UK demand fall from 303 to 287TWhrs. 

Add in McNaughton’s lagoon contribution of 0.5TWhrs and the other projects that Tidal Lagoon Power have planned and the picture looks even rosier for the UK renewables’ contribution.

On the other hand new nuclear is at best 4000 days away. 

The future is already here, it’s just there is still not much of it around.

Mark Whitby is chairman of WME Consultants