Severn Tidal Power Feasibility Study

A consortium, led by Parsons Brinckerhoff, was appointed in April 2008 by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), to manage the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) and related engineering elements of the Severn Tidal Power Feasibility Study announced by the then Secretary of State John Hutton in January 2008. Following the establishment of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) in October 2008, our client is now the Severn Tidal Power Unit within DECC.

One of our first actions was to develop a Call for Evidence comprising two separate but related elements:

• Call for Proposals, an invitation to submit proposals for new and/or updated tidal power proposals in the Severn Estuary. The Call for Proposals extended from 12 May to 13 June 2008.
• Call for Information on the environmental and other impacts for tidal range power generation in the Severn Estuary. This invited interested parties to submit information, which either exists or is under development, which could potentially contribute to the evidence base for the initial appraisal of schemes and the SEA. The Call for Information extended from 12 May to 11 July 2008.

We then undertook an assessment of potential options and prepared a scoping study for the SEA to finalise Phase 1 of the Study. DECC published the outputs from Phase 1 of the Study in January 2009 and confirmed its response to the public consultation in July 2009.  The consultation documents including PB's technical reports can be viewed on DECC's consultation web site. Also included within this web site is the documentation for the Severn Embryonic Technologies Scheme (SETS) which was announced by Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change at the public consultation launch on 26 January 2009. The £500,000 fund issued a Call for Proposals on 2 April 2009 with a closing date of 1 May 2009. Following review of applications, three submissions were accepted for funding. PB has been responsible as technical advisor to DECC on the SETS programme.

The Phase 2 studies for the Severn were confirmed by Government in July 2009 following the Phase 1 public consultation and PB’s team has now submitted the final reports on the options and the SEA to Government. These will be published as part of the second public consultation which will take place later this year (2010).