The Energy Legacy

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When asked by Government, Journalists and others the question “and who is going to pay for it”? we all know that the future Governments of the UK will not be able to provide the huge cost (the Severn Barrage Causeway £18bn), it is a huge risk – hence stalemate)!

We believe the answer lays with the user, the house owners and businesses being the intelligent people who use power, and from 2030 to drive their electric cars. Using real innovation find attached a UK wide solution (just one of many).

Comments welcome….

How many readers of this illustrious and innovative magazine dream of generating their own electricity? The landowner bringing in their bespoke contractors to build a wind turbine surrounded by a small field of PV solar panels lighting all his buildings, heating the house and wait – for – it, charging that 4×4.

The geography teacher that ceases to spend his spare time with the local steam train society and sets about researching and building a DIY solar roof array with low volt invertor etc. (along, of course, with a car charger).

The Widow standing in the supermarket queue for her £25 weekly scratch cards wondering why she never wins and gets nothing
for her money, rather than the dream home to replace her damp flat with its ever-rising heating bills.

We can all be an imitation of these practical innovators who will build, modify, invent and improve energy production… while few may want to, most find they cannot … until now!

As a minor (and not very successful) inventor, I have brought to the UK – Drive-In Walk-Up Cash Point ATM Housings, Tracked Disability Wheelchairs, Pre-cast Traffic Calming Systems, Marina Cleena (canals and rivers) and many more. But, on March 1 st 2006, I placed two planning applications for the Severn Lake Causeway (the old Severn Barrage) with Vale of Glamorgan Council and Somerset Council which were passed onwards to the Department of Energy on 1 Victoria Street, London.

Within the twelve-and-a-half miles of Causeway wall, there were proposed 220 turbines each some 7.5 metres in diameter, that
would be able to produce, on ebb-and-flow, 20% of the UK’s energy requirement, while at the same time creating a 174,000-hectare leisure lake with the imaginable lakeside ribbon development and the added benefit of safeguarding the upper reaches of the Severn from flooding at Gloucester, Bristol, and Somerset. Clean renewable energy for one- hundred-years and more. It could be the biggest infrastructure project ever seen in Europe.

The technology required is proven and the infrastructure companies have been ready and able to start this project for many years. The project has been studied to bits, and forests have been hewn to print about it! The first plans for a Barrage by Thomas Fulljames, 1849, were known as the Severn Shootes and even Hitler had it all worked out in 1939… “tidal power to provide Cardiff, Bristol and Weston with electricity from the Severn with the Welsh coal out of Cardiff ready to fire up ships to invade America”!

So, you may ask, why has it not been built, and as you would guess, it is always the money. The closest it got to ‘go’ was to provide Lord Hain and Lord Debden, a pension, but unfortunately Ed Miliband (one of the sixteen Energy Ministers I have had to deal with since 2006), along with his team, cancelled the project at a major energy announcement in Bristol. We now know that they had spent everyone’s money, and the Labour Government were broke (we read it on that note)! There was, at that time, a golden opportunity for Ed Miliband to be the hero of today simply by approving the development and moving forward to build. So much for wasted opportunity, and hindsight!

The media also are too polarised and non-plussed to help, and the best they have done is to report on the developments but, unfortunately, at the same time, have created their usual bidding war on the story in that the likely cost (£16bn) rose in one particular week alone, to £35bn. Project money-fear gave many construction company chairmen the vapours’, whilst also giving fuel to the objectors and the nuclear lobby. As a side, I predict E.D.F. Nuclear will never come on-line UK.

This all brings me, finally, to our would-be electricity generators. How to save the planet, create your own electricity power and leave a true legacy to your children and grandchildren. Show them that you did more than think about it, but actually did something. You cared and you acted … and here is how.

A simple capitalist solution. Think canals 18th century, railways 19th century, mass industrialisation 20th century … and now the opportunity to produce people-power electrical generation 21st century.

BUY AN ENERGY BOND (or two, or more).
Your Energy Bond would be Government controlled and guaranteed. The purchase of your Energy Bond would have an in-built contract that in exchange for your investment would see your power station built, and would provide electricity at a fixed rate credit cost for your energy needs, secured by a not-for-profit build and supply energy company, licensed by Her Majesty’s Government, ‘but with your money’.

The figures are for the Accountants and the due diligence teams, but to give you an idea, if everyone in the UK bought one Energy Bond at £250 each, the Severn Lake Causeway, at a stroke, could be built and would provide 20% of the UK’s energy needs of clean, secure, renewable electricity, (and after ten weeks, the widow would have her Bond)!

It is obvious that 60m people buying a £250 Energy Bond is not feasible, but the market will normalise this investment and the Energy Regulator would see to it that the project is completed before the Energy Bond could be exchanged in that market. This is not a four-year battle, it is a lifetime war on staying warm through the generations following behind us.

What a legacy for every Energy Bond holder. Their kids would say … ‘our folks bought a power station, or two … and cared’.

Gareth G. Woodham
Founder of the Severn Lake Co
www.severnbarrange.com

Gareth has self-financed his lobbying for this project since 2006 with the dream to sail on the Severn Lake in his lifetime.

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