Last updated at 10:27, Saturday, 30 January 2010

IR Martin Holdgate has been familiar with the Eden Valley of Cumbria since the 1930s when he was a boy.

His father, who was a Blackpool school headmaster, regularly took the family to the Eden Valley for their summer holidays, even through wartime years.

Now little Martin Holdgate is the venerable Sir Martin, who lives near Kirkby Stephen and has a glittering public service career behind him, particularly in the areas of environment and conservation.

Rather than rest on his laurels, he is chairman of the Renewables Panel of Cumbria Vision, the strategic body set up to spot opportunities to improve the future prosperity of the county and its Energy Coast.

He has just produced a fascinating report that sets out in great detail Cumbria’s wide potential for renewable energy generation – from chicken, cow and pig droppings to a 12 miles long energy bridge over Morecambe Bay.

The Scope for Renewable Energy in Cumbria, which is thought to be the first of its type for a UK county, took him around five months to compile and is a scoping document providing a potential baseline from which Cumbria’s various economic movers and shakers and climate change combatants can work in future.

He hopes it will lead to the setting up of Cumbria Energy Office or Partnership to coordinate the development of renewable project.

Sir Martin said: “I started the idea quite early having taken over the chairmanship of the Renewables Panel of Cumbria Vision, to crystalize the panel’s thinking about what we were supposed to be doing.”

The panel includes representatives from local authorities, government bodies and business.

“It seemed to me to get them all thinking about common ground, looking at scoping the different forms of renewable energy in Cumbria, would be helpful.

“I think an Energy Office or Partnership for the county would be a very useful part of the way forward but whether it will happen will depend on money and on whether in the present tight economic situation the Northwest Regional Development Association would find the funds for such an office.”

The report examines the various technologies – offshore and onshore wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, solar and photovoltaic, landfill/sewage, wood (biomass), tidal and wave – and attaches potential job creation if they are taken up in the quest to make Cumbria a significant UK energy supplier.

Jobs are notional and extrapolated from industry standards per installed megawatt of energy, But the report concluded that across the piece development of the target technologies could create between 4,000 and 7,500 jobs by 2050.

Nuclear is the subject of another Cumbria Vision study and was left out. There are, in any case, arguments about whether it is renewable or not, said Sir Martin, partly depending on whether you have your own supplies of uranium to dig out, and on whether you accept creating new fuel from reprocessing spent fuel as a renewable.

But nuclear fusion if it is ever achieved it would certainly be renewable energy, he said, just like the sun, converting hydrogen into helium.

The sun itself is just a ‘big nuclear reactor’ in the vacuum of space 93 million miles from earth,said Sir Martin.

It “wobbles a bit” but has been a sustained source of power for four billion years and “will be good for another three or four billion”, he said.

Sir Martin, born 1931, is a former chairman of the government’s Renewable Energy Advisory Group and was Chief Scientist and Deputy Secretary, Environment Protection, at the Department of the Environment for 12 years.

He says of the Energy Coast initiative: “I think it is a sensible concept quite frankly. We have a major opportunity for energy based industries”

He says of renewables in the county: “I think it is going to be a steady progressive process. Quite apart from climate change, one reason is energy security.

“We have been through a period of decades where we have been self sufficient in gas and an exporter of oil. That is going to end as the North Sea reserves dwindle. There’s a necessity for things that make us independent of imported oil and gas regardless of climate change.”

Sir Martin believes only a tenth of the wind energy from Cumbria will be onshore because of scenic issues, and thinks most of that will be along the Western coastal region down which the grid will also have to be upgraded.

The greatest renewable output will be coming from offshore turbines and also potentially from tidal stream turbines in the Solway Firth, Morecambe Bay and the Duddon estuary, though unlike the first two, no group is proposing a Duddon scheme.

Sir Martin says a full 30 kilometre barrage across the Solway would be second only to the massive proposed Severn Barrage able to produce an astounding 5½-8 gigawatts of power (or 5,500 megawatts) compared to 8.6 gigawatts at the Severn.

A Duddon barrage would produce 500 megawatts and a Morecambe Bay solid barrage, if one were built, would generate maybe 3 gigawatts (3,000 megawatts). But all three would pose serious environmental challenges.

However, a smaller Solway gateway scheme from Annan to Bowness on Solway is a serious proposition that could generate 300 megawatts of power without attracting controversy, said Sir Martin.

“A bridge across Morecambe Bay is attractive because it would be an enlarged transport corridor that would link Barrow and the M6, I imagine a lot of people would be very pleased with that link.

“The idea of the bridge is not only a communication link ,whether they put a road over it or a railway or both, it would have tidal stream turbines in the main channels.

“They estimate it would cost £700m to build and would generate about 200 megawatts.

“It would not have the same ecological impact as a barrier on the internationally important wildlife because it would not be a solid barrier.”

Water would continue to flow under the bridge and energy would just be tapped from the main channels and there could even be wind turbines on top of the bridge. It could even carry the cable for the big electricity grid upgrade needed in Cumbria, he said.

Sir Martin said of the Morecambe Bay bridge plan: “I am not against the idea. I think it is worth exploring further.”

l See the full report at www.cumbriavision.co.uk

First published at 12:55, Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Published by http://www.nwemail.co.uk