“It is time for us to reckon seriously with how we can exploit our natural geography to secure a clean, green, & domestic energy supply for generations to come.”
Mick Whitley MP
Mick Whitley MP
The UK, more than any other country in the world, is uniquely positioned to harness the power of its tides. Ten percent of the world’s tidal resources, and half of all of Europe’s, are found in Britain.
Already well developed plans for tidal range projects across the west coast promise to mobilise and deliver 10 GW of net zero energy, with the potential for 10 GW of additional capacity – enough to meet approximately twelve percent of the UK’s electricity needs over the coming decades, when, as a result of our efforts to decarbonise, transport, heating, and industry, demand for electricity is set to more than double.
While I want to approach this debate constructively, I am afraid to say that the government’s ambition in supporting the development of new tidal range projects has been sorely lacking.
Tidal range technology was excluded entirely from the 2023 Energy Bill and the one reference made to tidal power in the 2022 Energy Security Strategy, a commitment to “aggressively explore” the possibilities of tidal power, has not been delivered on.
While we are seeing encouraging steps in the right direction – including moving towards the inclusion of tidal in the National Policy Statements for energy and with the publication of guidance on tidal range on December 18th last year – there is still so much more that needs to be done.
In his correspondence with me dated October 26th, the Minister of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – the Honourable Member for Beverley and Holderness – stated that “the government remains open to considering well-developed proposals for harnessing tidal range energy” but that “any such proposal would need to demonstrate strong evidence of value for money in the context of other low carbon technologies”.
The issue of value for money has long been cited as the main obstacle for unlocking the potential of the UK’s vast tidal resources.
Indeed, when in 2018, the then-Secretary of State for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy declined to provide the proposed tidal lagoon project on Swansea Bay the price stabilisation mechanism that was needed to guarantee investor certainty it was on the grounds that the levelized cost of energy was higher than low-carbon alternatives, including new nuclear.
This was met with some incredulity by many figures in industry, coming as it did only eighteen months after Charles Hendry’s independent review found that tidal lagoons could “play a cost effective role in the UK’s energy mix” and constituted an “important and exciting new industry for the United Kingdom”.
In retrospect, and particularly in light of the conclusions of the study undertaken at the University of Birmingham in 2022 which found that the Swansea Tidal Lagoon would have actually returned profits to the Low Carbon Contracts Company, the government’s decision not to provide support for the Swansea Bay project seems to have been seriously misjudged.
It has deprived us of a credible pathfinder project of the kind advocated for by Charles Hendry’s review.
But I have not called this debate simply to revisit debates from a time before either the Minister or myself had entered Parliament.
Today is not about looking backwards. It’s about facing the future – and asking what we can do to guarantee our energy security in a time of growing geopolitical uncertainty and climate breakdown, and the role that tidal range generation has to play in that process.
And so in that vein, I would ask the Minister and his colleagues to recognise that the fundamental question of value for money needs revisiting.
Principally, that means adopting a whole-systems approach when assessing cost effectiveness.
The levelized cost of energy can be a useful tool, but it can also be a blunt instrument when it comes to gauging the comparative cost of renewable and low-carbon energy sources that fails to take into consideration the additional costs of solar and wind generation caused by grid transmission constraints, rebalancing, and storage.
It also fails to account for the fact that, uniquely for a renewable, tidal energy is a timetabled, predictable resource, giving it an important role to play when seasonal factors interrupt supply from solar and wind. In my previous engagements on this issue, I have made the case that when a whole-systems analysis is made, the costs of tidal power are comparable to offshore wind and new nuclear.
I am sure that the Minister will take great interest in the research currently being carried out by Jacobs for the British Hydropower Association, and soon to be published, confirming that analysis.
I do not want the Minister to believe that I am under any illusions about the upfront costs of tidal range generation. They are undoubtedly significant.
But these are also ultra-long lifecycle assets, which will continue to provide clean, green power for over a century.
As a case in point, 2024 marks the fifty-eighth anniversary of the world’s first ever tidal power station becoming operational on the Rance river in Brittany. Today, it is less than halfway through its estimated lifespan of one hundred and twenty years and continuing to supply green and affordable energy.
As the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee said in 2021 when he urged the Business Secretary to seize on the potential of our tides, once these upfront costs are paid off “the energy generated from range projects would be very low in cost and would be delivered over a longer time horizon than, for instance, energy generated from wind installations, which require repeated renewal”.
I should also note that last year, the government passed legislation to ensure financial support for new nuclear power, aimed at achieving what Ministers have described as a “nuclear renaissance”.
As with tidal range projects, the capital costs of a nuclear power plant are considerable, but the government has nevertheless recognised them as necessary to securing a vital domestic supply of low-carbon energy.
We will, of course, need to consider the optimum financing arrangements for new tidal range projects.
In fact, establishing a sustainable financing mechanism was one of the key objectives of the amendment that I tabled to the Energy Bill in September last year, which would have established a Tidal Range Assessment Grant to fund an independent, evidence-led study into tidal range generation.
Because while the Contracts for Difference scheme may be adapted to support the development of smaller tidal range projects, it is clearly not suitable for supporting the development of larger, gigawatt scale projects.
As I said when I last raised the issue of tidal range generation in the House, the government now needs to be working with industry to look seriously at the merits of employing a Regulated Asset Base model for funding tidal range, just as it did last year with new nuclear.
There exists considerable enthusiasm in industry to develop our tidal range capacities.
But investor confidence remains low largely because of a widespread – and I am afraid, for the time being, legitimate – concern that developers will not have the support of the government.
Ministers have said that they want to continue a dialogue with the hydropower industry, but if we’re going to rescue the ten gigawatts of tidal range capacity currently stranded in development, then developers need assurances that they will have a proactive partner in government.
The British Hydropower Association have established just some of the steps that the government could take to build up investor confidence and create a favourable policy context for tidal range.
This includes establishing a government-industry partnership, similar to the one established for offshore wind in 2012 which has had such success, the inclusion of tidal range as an explicit technology within the UK energy strategy and the National Policy Statements, and building on the work that was undertaken through the Tidal Lagoon Challenge.
We also need to see Ministers developing a roadmap for tidal range, as the EAC recommended in 2021 when it called on the government to set out a “stated ambition for the sector set out in gigawatts of generating capacity”, alongside an industry strategy for the sector, ensuring the supply chain is on shored within the UK, supporting British businesses.
I have spoken so far about tidal range generation only in general terms. But now I want to consider the specific proposals being put forward by Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram and his colleagues at the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority surrounding the Mersey Tidal Power project.
I understand that the Minister of State for Energy Security and Net Zero met with the team behind the Mersey Tidal Power Project as recently as last autumn and so I hope that the substance of the proposals are familiar to the Minister representing the government today.
This project represents an unparalleled opportunity for our region, with the potential to provide a green, predictable domestic energy supply to as many as a million homes in Merseyside and to create thousands of new jobs including in my constituency of Birkenhead, while supporting hundreds of UK companies across the supply chain.
If successfully delivered, the Mersey Tidal Power Project would undoubtedly be transformative for our region. But its impact would also be felt nationwide, helping to bring us closer to achieving our legally binding targets to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The particular geography of the Mersey, as a relatively short estuary with shallow waters, also makes the area the ideal location for a commercial pilot project of the kind that industry figures believe is so essential to accelerating progress in this sector.
By assigning the Mersey Tidal Power Project the status of a pilot project, the government could begin to resolve issues surrounding regulation, planning restrictions, and environmental impact before turning its attention to larger, gigawatt-scale schemes like the Morecambe Tidal Barrage, of which I know the Honourable Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale is an enthusiastic champion.
Here again, though, we need to see government working as an active collaborator with the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority as well as industry.
The Metro Mayor has in particular been keen to stress the importance of central government making available the kind of funding and support that was provided to hydrogen and Carbon Capture and Storage technologies, as well as of central and local governments developing a common approach towards the Crown Estate and Duchy of Lancaster so that the necessary sea-bed leases can be secured without prohibitive, high-entry costs.
Confronted by war in Ukraine, crisis in the Middle East, and the existential threat of climate breakdown, the question of how we secure our energy independence has never been more important. It is time for us to reckon seriously with how we can exploit our natural geography to secure a clean, green, and domestic energy supply for generations to come. It’s time for us to harness the power of our tides.
- This is a slightly edited version of a speech Mick Whitley MP made in the House of Commons. You can follow Mick on X here.
