Joseph Toland

At the start of this year, Charles Hendry published his final report in an independent review of the role of tidal lagoons in the UK’s future energy mix. The Hendry Review is now under consideration by the government and 74-year-old Joseph Toland, a local Horrabridge resident, has recently been in discussions with a senior minister about the part that his invention may be able to play in supplying the UK with green energy. You might expect Joseph to have a string of letters after his name and a background in design engineering. Instead he left school at 16 and joined the RAF as an apprentice aircraft engineer, followed 17 years later by a career as an insurance salesman.

Joseph’s invention - the Jetstream Lagoon -  has a long elliptically curved wall with zero-energy pumps attached at 20-metre intervals. The shape encourages an increase of up to 25% in tidal flow close to the wall and the kinetic energy produced, operates the pumps. The pumps are then used to transfer extra water into the lagoon to increase the effect of the tide as the water flows out of the lagoon through the turbines on the outgoing tide and vice versa on the incoming tide. Consequently, this generates enough additional power to provide a 24-hour supply rather than a supply restricted to high and low tide times. Still more power can be generated from the sun by attaching solar panels to floating pontoons within the lagoon.

So how did Joseph’s background prepare him for a career as an inventor? – Quite simply, his life experiences, a keen sense of observation and an enquiring mind have furnished him with everything required. He grew up in Horrabridge and even from an early age he was fascinated by the mechanism of the former hydro-electric turbine near the bridge on the River Walkham, as well as the water wheel at Phoenix Mill. After joining Tavistock Air Training Corps in his teens, he was keen to progress into the RAF, where he trained for three years as an apprentice engineer. Stationed in Borneo as a helicopter crewman engineer in 1964/65, he enjoyed the experience of flying with ex-Battle of Britain pilots, but also had to adapt to living in the jungle and quickly learned to think on his feet to keep the planes running. During his time with the RAF he established a reputation for being the ‘go-to person’ for solving aircraft problems and his vast knowledge of different aircraft eventually led to the creation of a new role at RAF St Athan, where he was responsible for supporting the Training School instructors by maintaining 32 aircraft of different types, and supplying all the related test equipment, circuit layouts and air diagrams. He left the RAF after 17 years and continued to work in Wales for the next 20 years as a national and international insurance broker, making use of his RAF connections to help clients as far afield as Saudi Arabia and Australia. Joseph’s proximity to the Severn Estuary while living at Llantwit Major, sparked a deep-seated interest in the tidal range and flow which gives rise to the amazing phenomenon of the Severn Bore.

In 1995, he took the decision to move back to Horrabridge to care for his mother. With thinking time on his hands, he now started to make use of all the experience and knowledge he had gained over the previous 50 years. The result was a steady flow of what he terms as ‘mad ideas’, which varied from a machine to de-bead truck tyres as part of a recycling programme, designing plant machinery, converting railway branch lines into roadways – and finally the Jetstream Lagoon.

Joseph originally came up with the idea for the Jetstream Lagoon in 2008, in response to a competition to create an energy capturing structure. He based his design on the aerodynamics associated with the aeroplane shape and since then he has been working in conjunction with Pipex px and Water Powered Technologies to develop the product. He has also been nominated for the Zayed Future Energy Prize, which celebrates solutions that meet the challenges of climate change, energy security and the environment. The tidal power of the Severn Estuary has huge energy potential and if Joseph Toland’s technology can be developed to provide sustainable green energy by harnessing a totally natural resource, we may all be thanking him for many years to come.

Rosemary Best