Hinkley
The cost to consumers of building the Hinkley Point nuclear power station could reach nearly £30 billion because of falling wholesale electricity prices, the spending watchdog has warned. Payments needed to guarantee the plant’s developer, EDF, a price for the electricity produced have more than quadrupled to £29.7 billion from £6.1 billion when the deal was agreed in 2013, the National Audit Office said. The “top-up” payments are met by consumers through a levy on bills. Theresa May has appointed a prominent critic of Hinkley, Nick Timothy, as a senior No 10 adviser. Mr Timothy has in the past stated that he was “baffled” by the project and criticised the role of Chinese investors, whom he has described as a potential security risk. A senior EDF manager told Le Parisien newspaper that EDF’s promise to set aside €24.7 billion to fund Hinkley Point was “vastly insufficient”, suggesting it could be twice that. Critics say that EDF, which has debts of €37 billion, cannot afford its part of the £18 billion that Hinkley Point was supposed to cost to build. That bill is being shared between EDF and CGN. They say that if the true price of construction was higher, the scheme would cripple the company.
Times 14th July 2016 read more »
Peter Atherton, a prominent independent energy analyst, said the NAO forecast highlighted the high stakes for both sides of the Hinkley deal, with the UK taking a gamble on electricity prices in return for EDF bearing the construction risks. “It started as a commercial project but it has become a political project,” he said.
FT 13th July 2016 read more »
The NAO also used its report to warn that the financial case for new nuclear was becoming less compelling as the costs of wind and solar power fell. “The cost competitiveness of nuclear power is weakening as wind and solar become more established,” it said. “The decision to proceed with support for nuclear power therefore relies more on strategic than financial grounds.” It said these strategic grounds included the need to “complement the intermittent nature of wind and solar” and the fact that generating an equivalent amount of power from wind and solar “would mean covering large areas of sea or land, which could cause public opposition and technical challenges”.
Telegraph 13th July 2016 read more »
A government spending watchdog has launched a devastating critique of Hinkley Point C, warning that the nuclear project could cost energy consumers £30bn in “top-up payments” due to falling wholesale power prices. The damaging review comes less than a week after an Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) assessment published by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) put the potential cost of Hinkley at £37bn. John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK, said Theresa May should kill off Hinkley as soon as possible. Meanwhile a French parliamentary report concluded that despite the risks of the project, Hinkley was a manageable risk and cost to EDF. The French company has promised to take a final investment decision in September.
Guardian 13th July 2016 read more »
The estimated bill for subsidies for Hinkley Point C under the contracts for difference scheme has soared to £29.7 billion, the National Audit Office (NAO) has said. The figure is nearly five times as much as the original estimate of £6 billion, which was calculated in October 2013 when the government agreed the contract. The value of the top-up payments increased “due to reductions in projected wholesale prices”, the NAO said in a report. The CfD scheme sees generators paid the difference between the wholesale price at which they sell their electricity and an agreed ‘strike price’.
Utility Week 13th July 2016 read more »
French state-controlled utility EDF can bear the financial risks linked its Hinkley Point nuclear project in Britain despite the various constraints it faces, a French parliamentary report said on Wednesday. EDF’s 18 billion pounds ($26.5 billion) project and its implications for the company has divided opinion in France at a time when its finances are severely stretched. The report by parliament’s finance committee said it was of the opinion that despite constraints EDF was facing, the risks linked to the project were reasonable, and plans including a 4 billion-euro share issue and sale of a stake in its grid operator unit, will enable it bear the risks. “Without minimising the importance of financial investment nor the industrial risks linked to the project…we noted that experience gained from ongoing projects will be beneficial in the realisation of the Hinkley Point project,” the report said.
Reuters 13th July 2016 read more »
Dame Vivienne Westwood DBE has announced that she will become a patron of the Stop Hinkley Campaign as a result of EDF Energy’s plans to build two large new nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point in Somerset.
Blue & Green Tomorrow 13th July 2016 read more »
THE potential lifetime cost of Hinkley C could be as high as £37 billion according to an assessment published by the UK government. The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said the figure was provisional and would not affect bill payers. French energy giant EDF said the £37bn figure should be disregarded. “Hinkley Point C will generate reliable low-carbon electricity in the future, so a cost estimate based on last year’s depressed wholesale price is not relevant,” an EDF spokesman said.
This is the West Country 12th July 2016 read more »
Small Modular Reactors
Oregon-based small modular reactor (SMR) developer NuScale Power will today strengthen its base in the UK by becoming a supporting partner of the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (Nuclear AMRC) in Sheffield. The two bodies said the move, which follows several years of informal collaboration, will further enable the two organisations to support each other’s ambitions to bring SMR technology to the UK civil nuclear industry.The announcement comes the same day as Nuclear AMRC hosted NuScale Power’s first UK Supplier Day at its facility at the University of Sheffield.
Business Green 13th July 2016 read more »
GDA
UK regulators expect to complete the Generic Design Assessment (GDA) process for the Westinghouse AP1000 and Hitachi-GE’s UK Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (UK ABWR) in March and December of 2017, respectively. In its quarterly GDA report for February to April 2016 issued yesterday, the Office for Nuclear Regulation also said it has “developed ‘entry criteria’ to provide transparency on the factors that underpin our decision on readiness to commence GDA” for China General Nuclear’s HPR1000 design.
World Nuclear News 13th July 2016 read more »
Capacity Market
The vote to leave the European Union will increase the costs incurred during the next capacity auction by £364 million, Cornwall Energy has predicted. Without the uncertainty created by Brexit the auction would other cost “in the region of £2.1 billion”, rather than the £2.4 billion now predicted. “Throughout the period of the Brexit negotiations, we can reasonably anticipate a risk premium being priced into all forward capacity market auctions, the cost of which will ultimately flow through to consumers’ bills,” it said in a report.
Utility Week 13th July 2016 read more »
Energy Policy
Theresa May’s government must increase its commitment to greening the country’s energy supply, despite the “distraction and disruption” caused by the referendum, the top energy official of the United Nations has urged. Rachel Kyte, chief executive of the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative, and special representative of the UN secretary-general, said generating more energy from cleaner sources would boost jobs and the economy at a time of uncertainty, and help poorer people the most. “This is about bringing better services, better quality services and jobs to the communities in this country that desperately need it,” she told the Guardian. “The evidence was [under previous energy policies] that this can happen and we should go back and make sure that whoever ends up running the government doesn’t abandon that.”
Guardian 13th July 2016 read more »
World Nuclear Status
Construction starts for new nuclear reactors fell to zero globally in the first half of 2016 as the atomic industry struggles against falling costs for renewables and a slowdown in Chinese building, a report on the industry showed on Wednesday. The last time there were no new reactors started over a full year was in 1995, according to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2016. The number of reactors under construction is in decline for a third year, with 58 being built by the end of June, down from 67 reactors at the end of 2013, the report said.
Reuters 13th July 2016 read more »
The year 2016, marking the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe and the 5th year since the Fukushima disaster started unfolding, strangely might go down in history as the period when the notion of risk of nuclear power plants turned into the perception of nuclear power plants at risk. Indeed, an increasing number of reactors is threatened by premature closure due to the unfavorable economic environment. Increasing operating and backfitting costs of aging power plants, decreasing bulk market prices and aggressive competitors. In addition to the usual, global overview of status and trends in reactor building and operating, as well as the traditional comparison between deployment trend in the nuclear power and renewable energy sectors, the 2016 edition of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) provides an assessment of the trends of the economic health of some of the major players in the industry. Special chapters are devoted to the aftermath of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters.
World Nuclear Industry Status Report 13th July 2016 read more »
Radwaste
The process to site a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) is planned to launch in 2017 and will be driven by working in partnership with willing communities. The technical work to assess the geological suitability of a site and build a credible long-term safety case is the main determinant of the length of time that it will take. Government has not set a fixed delivery timetable but the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has a current assumption that the GDF will be available to receive the first waste in the 2040s.
Radiation Free Lakeland 13th July 2016 read more »
Note stacking; proximity to the Irish Sea; rust; pooling water. It is in the rainiest part of England. This nuclear waste dump is officially expected to collapse due to coastal erosion. There is nothing low-level about the waste found within it, either. The operators are a consortium of California based URS (AECOM), Swedish Studsvik, and French State owned AREVA. British Serco is an affiliate. The owner is the British government (NDA).
Mining Awareness 13th July 2016 read more »
Weapons Convoy
Campaigners fear families are being put at risk by nuclear weapons being driven across Britain’s motorways. Warheads from weapons system Trident are shipped the length of the UK on the M6, from their base in Scotland to be refurbished in Berkshire.
Mirror 14th July 2016 read more »
Birmingham Mail 14th July 2016 read more »
More than 800,000 people would be killed if a nuclear blast hit Birmingham. Imaging the bomb went off at ground level at the Bullring shopping centre the effects would be devastating. The city centre would be turned into a 300m wide and 200m deep crater, according to interactive data site Nukemap. An enormous fireball would engulf everything within 700m leaving Digbeth, the Jewellery Quarter and Nechells a blackened fire-damaged wreck. The upmarket neighbourhoods of Sutton Coldfield and Solihull would avoid the worst of it.
Birmingham Mail 14th July 2016 read more »
Germany
The rows of towering wind turbines and legions of glistening solar panels spread across Germany’s landscape are striking emblems of the country’s shift to non-nuclear, low-carbon power. But although Germany is the world’s poster child for renewable energy, its grids cannot yet cope with the erratic nature of wind and solar power. In June, German meteorologists, engineers and utility firms began to test whether big data and machine learning can make these power sources more grid-friendly. “To operate the grid more efficiently and keep fossil reserves at a minimum, operators need to have a better idea of how much wind and solar power to expect at any given time,” says Malte Siefert, a physicist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology in Kassel, Germany, and a leader on the project, called EWeLiNE.
Nature 13th July 2016 read more »
Bulgaria
The prime minister of Bulgaria has indicated that he is considering reviving a plan to allow Russia to build a nuclear power station, despite the acrimony surrounding his decision in 2012 to cancel it.
Global Construction Review 13th July 2016 read more »
Local Energy
Mark Watts is the executive director of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. Prior to this, he was the director of Arup’s energy consulting team. Between 2000 and 2008, he worked as the Mayor of London’s climate change and sustainable transport adviser, which included developing London’s Climate Change Action Plan.
Carbon Brief 13th July 2016 read more »
Renewables – kite power
An Essex-based developer of airborne wind energy systems is re-locating to Dumfries-shire after gaining planning approval for its kite-driven generators by the Scots local authority. Kite Power Solutions now plans to start test flights at the former RAF base at West Freugh, starting next year with a 500kW system, followed by a 3-MW system in 2019. Its technology sees two kites tethered to spool drums and as they fly they turn the drums to produce electricity.
Scottish Energy News 14th July 2016 read more »
Energy Storage
An expert new report published today aims to decode complex market opportunities for UK energy storage and explain what is needed to drive cost-effective investment. The report from Everoze – a commercial energy consultancy – makes a series of far-reaching recommendations to level the playing field for rapidly developing energy storage technologies – some of which are locked out of current market arrangements. And it tackles head-on the primary risk holding back the roll-out of energy storage: securing a bankable revenue stream. The report adds: “The three major issues of low bankability, lost potential and revenue interface risk are common across the whole UK. A Scottish Renewables spokesman added: “A whole series of changes are needed if we are to ensure that the cheapest and most efficient technologies provide the services that a modern clean electricity system requires. “While batteries today are 94% cheaper than they were in 1990, and a range of pumped storage projects are ‘shovel-ready’ or in the planning process, the current market arrangements are at risk of favouring more expensive sources of flexibility for our network.”
Scottish Energy News 14th July 2016 read more »
Dozens of companies are set to submit bids this week for one of the world’s biggest energy storage projects, supplying back-up power for the National Grid. More than 60 companies have expressed interest in the colossal energy storage scheme to provide 200 megawatts of back-up electricity, mainly using industrial-scale battery arrays. That is roughly equivalent to the power produced by more than a million iPhone-sized lithium-ion batteries, according to AES, an American company that is among the bidders. Japanese, British and European groups are also involved. The contract from National Grid, for which preliminary bids are due tomorrow, is one of the biggest energy storage contracts of its kind in the world. It is viewed as an urgent priority after the shutdown of a string of coal-fired power stations and Britain’s growing reliance on volatile wind and solar power. Renewables supplied 25 per cent of electricity last year.
Times 14th July 2016 read more »
