Qualla: Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay

Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Bristol Channel pushes water up Swansea Bay with one of the largest tidal ranges on Earth. Twice a day, the sea climbs and falls by as much as ten metres, exposing acres of sand and then swallowing them again. In the early 2010s, a company called Tidal Lagoon (Swansea Bay) plc looked at that vertical movement and saw something nobody had ever built: a horseshoe-shaped seawall, 9.5 kilometres long, with sixteen turbines set into a gap. Open the gates as the tide rises, close them, let the trapped water spin the turbines on the way out. Then do it again, every six hours, for 120 years. The world's first tidal lagoon power plant.

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Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay: The Sums Behind the Wall

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The proposal was bold to the point of audacity. A 9.5-kilometre breakwater would impound 11.5 square kilometres of seabed. Sixteen bidirectional turbines would produce up to 320 megawatts at peak, enough to power around 155,000 homes for fourteen hours a day. The seawalls would b...

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Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay: The 25th of June

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Then came the spreadsheet. Tidal power's load factor - the share of the time it actually generates compared to its nameplate capacity - works out to about 19 percent. Offshore wind sits closer to 50. The price per megawatt-hour the project needed to be viable was high, and fallin...

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Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay: What the Numbers Did Not Say

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Charles Hendry, a former energy minister whose independent review had backed the technology in 2017, accused ministers of cherry-picking. "Swansea would just be the start," he wrote on the day the decision came down. "Selective quotes from my Review do not enable us to have a pro...

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Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay: The Tide Will Not Stop

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

And yet the sea does not stop rising. In February 2019, The Guardian reported that a revived Swansea proposal was attracting interest without needing government money. Property developers, Cardiff Airport, the Berkeley Group: corporate buyers willing to sign power purchase agreem...

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Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay: Reading the Bay From the Air

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From a few thousand feet above Swansea, the bay reads like a topographic experiment. To the south, the long curve of Mumbles Head sweeps out into the Channel. To the north, the city of Swansea climbs the slope from the docks. Between them, the proposed lagoon footprint occupies r...

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