Sir, The plans for a barrage across the River Severn (“Could tide be favourable for power plan?”, May 7) are a revival of the longstanding proposal to harness the dynamic tidal power of the Severn Estuary. And a very welcome contribution to our renewable energy generation they would make.

However, we couldn’t see from the illustration where the locking in and out of shipping to the ports of Bristol, Cardiff, Newport and Gloucester would be positioned. The carbon savings gained by such a scheme could easily be lost if the infrastructure to move freight by water in and out of the Bristol Channel and its deep-water ports is rendered inaccessible to shipping. Water freight is the most carbon-efficient mode of transport: available to the UK logistics industry. It reduces and avoids congestion and offers fuel efficiencies that can help to reduce the cost of consumer goods.

Francis Power
Executive Director, Sea and Water
London SW1

Sir, The proposal shown in your paper today is timid. We have an energy crisis, an energy storage crisis, a landfill crisis and an airport crisis in this country and I believe that if we use the resource of the River Severn properly, we can help to solve all of them. A proper solution would also mitigate the problems of flooding in the Severn Valley.

I have knowledge of the proposals put forward by Frederick Snow in the 1960s. He felt that a central spine with a high and a low lake would be the best solution. Turbines would run between the lakes and could provide power when required, but they would also be capable of pumping water back to store energy. In these days of wind turbines relying on winds that don’t always blow, this would be a sensible way of storing the energy from wind power and releasing it as required.

Snow proposed putting energy-based industries such as chlorine and hydrogen production on the spine — but his major proposal was to site a very large airport on it. Could it with proper engineering be built on landfill? After all, it does face in the direction of the prevailing winds and it would be several kilometres from any centre of population, so noise pollution would be reduced to a minimum. As Brunel designed the Great Western to be virtually straight for high-speed running, trains à la TGV could do the journey to London in well under an hour. We either dither or we formulate a bold vision of which Brunel would have been proud.

James Miller
Newmarket, Suffolk

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