Terms of use for this website

Who we are

1. This website is published by Severn Estuarine Marine Energy Research Ltd., trading as Severn Tidal Hydro-Engineering, a company registered in England and Wales with its registered office at 18 Mount Stuart Square, Cardiff Bay, Cardiff CF10 5DP. In these terms it is called the Company.
2. By reading past this sheet's heading you have not entered into a contract with the Company. These terms describe the basis on which the Company makes the site available, and the limits of what it accepts responsibility for. If you do not wish to use the site on that basis, the remedy is to close the page.

What the site is for

1. The site describes the Company's practice and publishes technical papers and a feasibility calculator for tidal-range energy schemes. It is information about engineering. It is not engineering advice to you, and nothing on it creates a professional relationship between you and the Company or its principal.
2. A chartered engineer's duty of care arises from an engagement, with a known client, a known site and a known question. None of those exists when you read a web page. If you need a figure you can rely on, write to us and we will tell you what it would take to produce one.

The calculator and the figures

1. The impoundment energy calculator applies the ideal potential energy relation, half rho g A H squared, with the efficiency, utilisation and direction factors shown beside it. It is a first-pass screening tool of the kind an engineer uses before deciding whether a site deserves a study. It is not a yield assessment, and it omits turbine hill charts, sluice capacity, nodal variation, basin bathymetry, grid constraints and everything else that makes a real scheme different from an ideal one.
2. Figures from the calculator, the harmonic constituent table, the generation schedule and the research notes may be quoted with attribution to the Company and this site, but may not be presented as the Company's assessment of any particular scheme, site or investment.
3. The constituent amplitudes and phases are the Company's own reductions of its own gauge records. They are offered as indicative values and are not a substitute for the published tidal predictions of the UK Hydrographic Office or for a site-specific analysis.

Ownership of the content

1. The text, drawings, diagrams, data tables, code and layout of the site are the property of the Company or are used under licence, and are protected by copyright and database right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1997.
2. You may read the site, print a page for your own reference, quote reasonably from it with attribution for criticism, review or study, and link to any page. You may not republish a technical paper in full, strip the calculator's code into another site, or scrape the constituent table into a product without the Company's written agreement.
3. The names Severn Tidal Hydro-Engineering and Severn Estuarine Marine Energy Research are the Company's trading names and may not be used to suggest an association with the Company that does not exist.

What you may not do

1. Attempt to gain access to any part of the hosting environment that is not deliberately made public, including the raw bathymetric mesh directory that is excluded from indexing.
2. Load the site with automated requests at a rate that would be unreasonable for a human reader.
3. Present any figure from the site to a lender, an investor, a planning authority or a regulator as a figure produced by the Company for that purpose.

Our responsibility to you

1. The Company takes care to keep the site accurate and up to date, and corrects errors when told of them. It does not promise that the site is free of error, that it will be available at any particular time, or that the calculator will produce a figure suitable for any purpose of yours.
2. To the extent the law of England and Wales allows it, the Company is not liable to you for any loss arising from your use of the site or your reliance on anything in it, including loss of profit, loss of a contract or the cost of an abortive study. Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that the law does not permit a company to exclude.
3. Where the Company cannot exclude liability, it is limited to the amount you have paid the Company for use of the site, which is nothing.

Governing law

1. These terms, and any dispute about the site, are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the United Kingdom you keep any right to bring a claim in your home jurisdiction.
2. If any clause of these terms is found to be unenforceable, the rest continue to apply.
3. The Company may revise these terms by publishing a new version on this page with a new effective date. The version in force is the one published when you use the site.