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  3. The UK government’s decision to shutter plans to build the world’s first tidal lagoon off Swansea Bay is a hard blow for Wales.

The UK government’s decision to shutter plans to build the world’s first tidal lagoon off Swansea Bay is a hard blow for Wales.

admin2022-04-20  48
问题     The UK government’s decision to shutter plans to build the world’s first tidal lagoon off Swansea Bay is a hard blow for Wales. The tidal lagoon project, had it gone ahead, was expected to create 2,200 jobs, plus more in the supply chain. These are the kinds of jobs that Wales, so damaged by steel and coal closures, needs. But the business secretary, Greg Clark, has decided the country can’t have them because they would be too expensive.
    Welsh politicians have reacted with understandable fury to Mr Clark’s announcement, which comes almost exactly 12 months after the government abandoned plans to electrify the railway from Cardiff to Swansea, and just a day after Member of Parliament (MPs) voted to press ahead with another expensive infrastructure project: a third runway at Heathrow.
    There are some rational reasons to approve of this week’s decision, while regretting its consequences. No one, including the Tidal Lagoon Power company, denied that the electricity produced off the Welsh coast would have cost more than the cheapest renewables. The most recent government auctions saw offshore wind schemes win contracts at record lows of￡,57. 50 per megawatt hour, meaning they are within a few pounds of being subsidy-free.
    But cost is not the only consideration. Otherwise, the government would never have gone ahead with the hugely expensive, risky and uncertain Hinkley Point C nuclear power station. Nor would it have cut subsidies for solar power and onshore wind, as it did in 2015. Those decisions—particularly the promise to curb onshore wind, as the Conservatives did in their 2015 manifesto, despite poll after poll showing that a majority of the public prefers wind and solar to nuclear—were ideological.
    In a City speech this March, Mr Clark praised business for putting "evidence before ideology". It is welcome that the secretary of state says this is his own approach. Too many of his Conservative colleagues remain too strongly attached to fossil fuels, including the prospect of a whole new shale gas industry. As the price of renewables continues to fall, they will surely lose the argument. With Mr Clark in charge, the hope is that onshore wind and solar subsidies may soon return—though too late for UK companies that could have developed and profited from the technology had we not given up on it long before the renewables boom.
    Yet the government is planning more nuclear power stations, including one in Wales.
    Different rules seem to apply for different technologies. It looks like a Tory government in Westminster snubbed Welsh Labour’s pet project. Backers of the tidal project felt shut out by ministers. Wave energy lobbyists perhaps don’t have the firepower in Whitehall that others can muster. Mr Clark might have relied on the evidence to make a tough call not to back a new, green technology. But it’s hard to shake off the impression that the decision was one rooted in the partisan politics of self-interest.
Paragraph 3 mentions offshore wind schemes to________.
选项 A、highlight tidal power’s high cost
B、illustrate renewables’ big potential
C、show what subsidy-free power mean
D、stress wind energy’s cost-effectiveness
答案A
解析 本题是推断题。根据题干定位至第三段。该段首句指出，政府决议有一些合理的解释；接着提到该项目比最便宜的可再生资源耗费更大；最后引出耗电创新低的离岸风项目，不怎么需要政府补贴。可知，作者提及离岸风规划的目的是“突出潮汐能的成本高”。故答案选A。 B项“说明可再生能源的巨大潜力”和D项“强调风能的经济效益”都局限于事例本身，没有深入分析作者写此段落的篇章功能，故均排除，C项“表明零补贴能源意味着什么”是根据段末出现的meaning和subsidy-free设置干扰，并非提及离岸风规划的目的，故排除。
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