Plans for the £1.3bn Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon have been dealt a blow by the Court of Appeal, which has ruled that work on the project did not commence within five years of receiving planning approval and therefore the development consent order (DCO) is no longer valid.
image: for illustration – image: By Numero007 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
New Civil Engineer writes:
The project, put together by developer Tidal Lagoon (Swansea Bay), was to build the world’s first tidal lagoon power plant. This would span Swansea Bay to form a lagoon between the River Tawe and the River Neath. The structure would have had 16 turbines producing a up to 320MW per day.
Tidal Lagoon submitted its plans to government in February 2014 and the project received its DCO in June 2015. Ground investigation and survey works were undertaken by the developer in November 2016, but these were not considered as ‘material operations’ so did not count as the project having commenced.
