Hinkley
The Stop Hinkley Campaign today welcomed news that the National Audit Office (NAO) has begun an investigation into UK Government plans to subsidise the proposed new Hinkley Point C nuclear power station. (1) The NAO is the financial watchdog which scrutinises public spending on behalf of parliament. Stop Hinkley Spokesperson Allan Jeffery said: “This is an extraordinarily bad deal, locking consumers into high prices until almost 2060. Worse still it will use up most of the money available to subsidise non-fossil fuel energy leaving almost nothing available for renewables at a time when their costs are plummeting”.
Stop Hinkley 17th Oct 2014 read more »
THE Stop Hinkley Campaign expressed ‘extreme disappointment’ at the news that plans for a new £16bn nuclear power plant in Somerset, came a step closure to fruition after the European Commission gave approval. Stop Hinkley’s Allan Jeffrey said: “This deal is clearly illegal under European law; it will saddle UK consumers with the bill for paying huge subsidies for decades, and yet there are more cost-effective and safer ways of providing low carbon electricity or not using the energy in the first place.
Bridgwater Mercury 19th Oct 2014 read more »
Hunterston
NORTH Ayrshire and Arran MP Katy Clark has formally objected to EDF’s application to transport radioactive waste from other sites to Hunterston to be stored. “I strongly believe that the safest way to store radioactive waste is to do so closest to the source it has been generated.“On that basis I hold concerns about SEPA’s current policy of allowing low level radioactive waste to be moved between sites never mind granting EDF permission to move more dangerous levels between sites to be stored.”Ms Clark added: “The lack of detail from EDF on their proposal is quite frightening.“That’s why I am asking for a meeting with EDF to discuss with them why they submitted this application and discuss what impact it could potentially have on the local area.”
Ardrossan Herald 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Heysham/Hartlepool
EDF Energy’s Hartlepool and Heysham nuclear power plants will not return to full service when they resume operations later this winter, with full capacity only expected by 2016, a spokesman for the company said.
Utility Week 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Electricity Supply
Strong wind speeds over the weekend contributed significantly to the UK’s electricity supply as nuclear reactors remained offline and a large gas plant was suddenly hit by a fire. Wind power set a new record on Sunday by providing 24% of the UK’s electricity supply for the entire day. The previous record stood at 22% of total generation in August this year. Wind’s consistently strong performance saw it outperform nuclear power from Friday evening throughout the whole weekend and into Monday morning. This also led to a number of coal plants being taken offline as they were surplus to requirements.
Renewable UK 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Business Green 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Fire at Oxfordshire power station is a reminder of the energy security risks of centralised fossil fuel power and that all energy sources suffer from intermittency. Renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, is frequently criticised for being “unreliable”. But the major fire at RWE’s Didcot gas-fired power station on Sunday evening shows that traditional energy generation is also intermittent. Moreover, accidents at coal, gas and nuclear plants frequently involve much larger amounts of electricity dropping off the grid and at much shorter notice. Power station drop-outs can occur suddenly and for unexpected reasons, like a plague of jellyfish or seaweed, both of which have knocked out nuclear power stations recently. In contrast, wind can be accurately forecast a day or two ahead and the sun rises and sets like clockwork. The risk posed by big plants falling off the grid will rise further if EDF build their 3.2GW nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset. Such is its size – a “behemoth” according to Owen Paterson – that National Grid is having to ramp up its back-up measures to cope. In a stunning example of perverse logic, the £160m-a-year cost of this bigger safety net is being spread across all energy suppliers, including renewables, because “increasing costs on larger users could delay the commissioning of large nuclear plants”. The second lesson to draw from the Didcot fire is that the intermittency of some renewables is simply not a problem. On Sunday, the same day the Didcot station crashed offline, wind power provided its greatest ever share of UK electricity: 24%. And the lights stayed on.
Guardian 20th Oct 2014 read more »
What happens when a major gas power station catches on fire? Well, it certainly looks spectacular. But it appears the short term impact on the UK’s power generation is pretty minimal. Energy company RWE npower had to unexpectedly shut down one of the Dicot B power station’s 700 megawatt units last night after a fire broke out in one of the cooling towers. Didcot’s shutdown is the latest in a series of unexpected outages which National Grid has had to cope with in recent months. This has led to a spate of headlines questioning whether National Grid will have enough power stations available to cope with high demand over the winter months. We take a look at how National Grid copes with such unexpected events, and why it remains confident the UK will have enough power this winter.
Carbon Brief 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Half of an Oxfordshire power station that supplies a million homes with electricity will remain “non-operational” indefinitely after a huge fire, its owners said. At its height, 25 fire engines and about 100 firefighters tackled the blaze at Didcot B power station. The blaze began in a cooling tower at about 20:00 BST on Sunday and spread to three others because of strong winds.
BBC 20th Oct 2014 read more »
British electricity supplies are now so stretched there is a one in three chance they will have to be limited this winter, the UK’s leading energy analyst has warned. National Grid is now just “one unexpected event” away from being forced to restrict energy use after a fire at Didcot power station near Oxford put a unit supplying half a million households out of action, according to Peter Atherton, an analyst at Liberum Capital. Most of the power plants that have seen technical problems in recent weeks set to remain out of action until at least Christmas – and the clocks due to go back on Sunday – the threat of shortages will increase in the coming weeks.
Independent 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Fire and faults at five power stations have left Britain’s homes with a one in three chance of electricity “brownouts” this winter, leading to dimmed lightbulbs, slow clocks and other disruption, according to a leading energy analyst. Ferrybridge power station in West Yorkshire remains closed after a fire in July and half of Ironbridge power station in Shropshire was closed permanently by a blaze in February. EDF said last week that it hoped to switch its four nuclear reactors at Heysham 1 and Hartlepool back on over the next two months, but they would run at only 75 to 80 per cent of their normal output for up to two years.
Times 21st Oct 2014 read more »
FT 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Guardian 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Telegraph 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Didcot power station’s partial closure wouldn’t usually cause such concern, but EU rules and unprofitable conditions for gas-fired power plants have together pushed Britain to the brink of an energy crisis. New replacement gas plants have not yet been built, in part because Britain’s drive for more intermittent wind farms means energy companies can no longer be sure how often they will actually be required to generate – and so how much profit they will be able to make. Just one, Carrington, is currently under construction and scheduled to open in 2016 – too late to help in the coming winters. Ministers are planning a new subsidy scheme to encourage new gas plants, but those built under this scheme will not be up and running until 2018 at the earliest. Plans for new nuclear are even further off, with the proposed new Hinkley C power plant in Somerset not expected to start generating until 2023 at the earliest. The combined effect has been to significantly reduce Britain’s spare capacity margin – the ‘buffer’ between peak supply and demand – down well over 15pc in winter 2011-12.
Telegraph 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Our power stations are ageing fast and replacements are urgently needed. Yet for years, our politicians have failed to act. The fire at Didcot B power station is not going to bring the National Grid to its knees. But in combination with other fires at Ironbridge and Ferrybridge power stations, and problems with the Heysham and Hartlepool nuclear reactors, it will chip away at our surplus generating capacity, to the point where blackouts will become, if not likely, then far more likely than they should be.
Telegraph 21st Oct 2014 read more »
Brian Wilson: Where will the buck stop if British households are plunged into power-cut gloom, or industry finds itself subjected to 21st-century rationing this winter? Will it be with Ofgem, the faceless regulators? Or National Grid, the front-line technocrats? Or any of the other myriad participants in the electricity industry? Frankly, if the lights did go out, none of these would be seen by an angry public as anything other than supporting acts. Fingers would point in only one direction – towards Her Majesty’s Government, and all the blame-shifting capacity in Whitehall would not divert their anger.Things were exacerbated by the Labour government’s refusal, from which I dissented, to allow new nuclear plants to be built. Instead, a fiction was created that imported gas and heavily subsidised renewables would fill the gap left by declining nuclear and polluting coal, which was scheduled to disappear from the scene by 2015. It was nonsense in both economic and environmental terms. At the most recent count, 30 per cent of our electricity was generated from gas, 28 from coal, 22 from nuclear and 17 from renewables. That still passes the test of a balanced energy policy on which Britain has sensibly relied for so long. But it is the prolonged failure to invest enough in new generation capacity that has caused the present problems.
Telegraph 21st Oct 2014 read more »
Energy Regulation
A key criticism of the Draft SPS is that it does not clarify how the Government wishes to prioritise its goals, or how the trade-offs between them should be made. Ultimately this is because the SPS has not confronted the fundamental tension between ‘independent’ regulation and the longer term, strategic framework needs of rapidly transforming to a decarbonised energy system. We are not sure that it is possible, or even beneficial, any longer to have an ‘independent’ regulator in its current form. We support decision-making based on knowledge, legitimacy, transparency and involvement of stakeholders. It is a time of huge technological change within energy systems. We also need to decarbonise our energy systems rapidly, and this implies a flexible but strategic framework to get there. It therefore seems to us that a CEO, powerful economic regulator, as with the current Ofgem model, is not compatible with enabling the necessary shift in our energy systems.
IGov 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Energy Policy
Dieter Helm: Owen Paterson, the former environment secretary, is right about at least one thing: UK climate change policy is not going well. Forty per cent of British electricity now comes from coal, the dirtiest kind of generation. At the same time, vast sums are being spent on cutting carbon emissions. The architects of this policy are energy secretary Ed Davey and his two predecessors, Chris Huhne and Ed Miliband. Between them they have dismantled the market-driven system that was created after the privatisation of Britain’s electricity supply and replaced it with something that looks more like the old Central Electricity Generating Board. The government now decides how much electricity the country needs, and how it should be generated. It is underwriting the investment needed to build the new plants and fixing the price at which they will sell power. You might have expected Mr Paterson, as an economic liberal, to point out the power of the market to bring about an efficient allocation of resources. Not a bit of it. For him the problem is not that the government has tried to pick winners but that it has chosen badly. The right technologies, Mr Paterson says, are shale gas, small nuclear power stations, plants that generate heat as well as electricity, and measures for limiting peak demand. Putting a price on the right to emit carbon woul d quickly have encouraged the industry to switch from coal to gas, with half the emissions. It would have signalled longer-term incentives to develop still cleaner technology. In time, solar generation might become far cheaper. Battery storage might make intermittent renewable sources viable as a primary energy source, and make petrol obsolete in transportation. IT solutions might mean we can make do with far less capacity. The critical word is “might”. We do not know. Markets create incentives to test out the options in the fire of the market. Public funds are better spent on basic research than on building capacity using current technology that is not up to the job.
FT 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Areva
Shares in French state-controlled nuclear group Areva, which is overseeing the decommissioning and clean-up of Sellafield, slid 0.4 per cent today after its chief executive announced he has stepped down. Luc Oursel cited health reasons, adding that “despite my very strong commitment to Areva, I have had no choice but to hand over my responsibilities at the head of the company and have chosen to take a leave of absence in order to pursue treatment”. Shares in the business, which is the world’s largest nuclear company, have fallen more than 40 per cent this year, after a series of financial struggles. In 2011 it took a €2.40bn (£1.89bn) hit on an investment in an African uranium mine, while costs at its Olkiluoto 3 EPR reactor in Finland, which was followed by the Fukushima disaster in Japan, which caused governments to rethink their nuclear strategies. At the beginning of August the company announced a €694m euro loss, causing shares to fall 20 per cent, its biggest ever one-day fall. Last month, credit ratings agency S&P put it on negative watch, putting its BBB status at risk.
City AM 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Submarines
The Chapelcross nuclear site near Annan and west Cumbria’s Sellafield plant are contenders for the task of dismantling up to 27 Royal Navy nuclear submarines.
NW Evening Mail 17th Oct 2014 read more »
US – Fracking vs renewables
Renewable energy, not shale gas, has played the biggest role in reducing US emissions, according to new analysis from Greenpeace’s Energydesk site. Many energy and political commentators have argued that a surge in US shale gas production has help replace dirty coal-fired power stations, helping the world’s former largest emissions cut emissions 16 per cent since 2007. But using figures from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), Greenpeace’s Energydesk team has calculated that only around 30 per cent of that emissions reduction came from switching from coal to less carbon intensive gas. The news comes after a study in Nature last week found that while a global shale gas boom has the potential to cut worldwide emissions two per cent by 2050, it could lead to an increase of as much as 11 per cent. Energydesk’s analysis shows that renewables have been responsible for 40 per cent of the drop in US emissions, with the remaining 30 per cent arising from improved efficiency. Generation from wind power plants alone accounted for 32 per cent of the drop – a slightly larger contribution than that made by gas.
Business Green 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Wind power, not shale gas, is the biggest single cause of the falls in US emissions from coal use, according a new analysis of US data by Energydesk. The fall in US coal consumption since 2007 is to a larger extent down to improved energy efficiency and an increase in renewable generation than to use of shale gas, Greenpeace analyst Lauri Myllvirta has found.
Energydesk 20th Oct 2014 read more »
US – PLEX
The prospects for building more nuclear reactors may be sharply limited, but the owners of seven old ones, in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina, are preparing to ask for permission to run them until they are 80 years old. Nuclear proponents say that extending plants’ lifetimes is more economical — and a better way to hold down carbon dioxide emissions — than building plants, although it will require extensive monitoring of steel, concrete, cable insulation, and other components. But the idea is striking even to some members of the nuclear establishment. At a meeting of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in May, George Apostolakis, a risk expert who was then one of the five commissioners, pointed out that if operation were allowed until age 80, some reactors would be using designs substantially older than that.
New York Times 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Japan
Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s goal of purifying all highly radioactive water stored at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant by the end of the fiscal year has proven to be increasingly difficult, despite additional steps implemented by the utility.
Asahi Shimbun 17th Oct 2014 read more »
What life is really like in Japan following the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
News.com.au 21st Oct 2014 read more »
Before the Fukushima nuclear crisis forced them from their homes, residents of Futaba had praised the Daiichi power plant as a “godsend” that brought jobs and money to the Japanese coastal town. Now, more than three years after the disaster, they remain stuck in cramped emergency housing facing the reality they will likely never go home, with Futaba set to become a storage site for contaminated soil, a new documentary film shows.
Reuters 21st Oct 2014 read more »
Iran
Iran is pushing what it portrays as a new compromise proposal in nuclear talks, but Western negotiators say it offers no viable concessions, underscoring how far apart the two sides are as they enter crunch time before a Nov. 24 deadline.
Reuters 21st Oct 2014 read more »
European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton will continue leading nuclear negotiations with Iran until a deal is reached, even if a November deadline is missed, she said yesterday. Ashton’s five-year term as EU foreign policy chief ends at the end of this month, and she had said she would stay on as nuclear negotiator until November 24, the deadline for reaching a long-term settlement.
Herald 21st Oct 2014 read more »
Nuclear Weapons
The British government has just published amendments updating a treaty that goes to the heart of the UK’s special relationship with the US. They relate to the Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA) first signed in 1958, which, according to the government, enables the UK and the US “nuclear warhead communities to collaborate on all aspects of nuclear deterrence including nuclear warhead design and manufacture”. One amendment refers to potential threats from “state or non-state actors”. But the amendments are for the most part arcane and their significance cannot be understood in the absence of information which is kept secret.
Guardian 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Renewables solar
Investors are seeking funding from the UK government for an ambitious plan to import solar energy generated in North Africa. Under the scheme, up to 2.5 million UK homes could be powered by Tunisian sunshine by 2018. The company involved says they have already spent 10 million euros developing the site. A number of overseas energy producers are competing to bring green energy to the UK from 2017. The TuNur project aims to bring two gigawatts of solar power to the UK from Tunisia if the company wins a contract for difference (CFD) from the British government.
BBC 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Up to 2.5 million British homes could be powered by Tunisian sunshine by 2018 under an £8bn plan to build a giant solar farm in the Sahara desert and ship the electricity to Europe through a 450km (280 miles) submarine cable.
Independent 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Taxpayers’ handouts to massive ‘ugly’ solar farms which scar the countryside are to be axed by Environment Secretary Liz Truss. She will tell farmers tomorrow to stop pocketing public funds by carpeting large parts of the landscape with the black panels – and go back to growing fruit, vegetables and crops instead. The move, to take effect from January, is the latest part of David Cameron’s attempt to move away from green politics.
Daily Mail 19th Oct 2014 read more »
The government has delivered a fresh blow to the UK’s burgeoning solar farm industry, announcing plans to end farming subsidies to landowners who install photovoltaic arrays from the start of next year. In her first major policy intervention in the green economy, Environment Secretary Liz Truss yesterday announced that farmers would lose payments under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for parts of land that host solar panels from January 2015.
Business Green 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Renewables – tidal
Plans to develop one of the world’s largest tidal energy lagoon projects in Swansea Bay took a step forward today, as Prudential announced that it has become “cornerstone investor” for the proposed development. Precise financial details for the deal were not disclosed, but Prudential said the support for the planned £1bn marine energy development formed part of the company’s commitment to contribute up to £25bn of UK infrastructure investment over the next four year alongside five other leading insurance companies. BusinessGreen understands the investment from Prudential could reach up to £100m, representing around 10 per cent of the capital.
Business Green 20th Oct 2014 read more »
Renewables
In a cover story and article 14 years ago about the emergent disruption of utilities, The Economist’s Vijay Vaitheeswaran coined the umbrella term “micropower” to mean sources of electricity that are relatively small, modular, mass-producible, quick-to-deploy, and hence rapidly scalable—the opposite of cathedral-like power plants that cost billions of dollars and take about a decade to license and build. His term combined two kinds of micropower: renewables other than big hydroelectric dams, and cogeneration of electricity together with useful heat in factories or buildings (also known as combined-heat-and-power, or CHP). Besides being cost-competitive and rapidly scalable, why does micropower matter? First, as explained below, its operation releases little or no carbon. Second, micropower enables individuals, communities, building owners, and factory operators to generate electricity, displacing dependence on centralized, inefficient, dirty generators. This democratizes energy choices, promotes competition, speeds learning and innovation, and can further accelerate deployment—because “vernacular” technologies accessible to many diverse market actors, even if individually small, tend to deploy faster in sum than a few big units requiring specialized institutions, complex approvals, intricate logistics, and hence long lead times. Ny the end of 2013, the rapid output growth of both modern renewables and cogeneration (Fig. 1) had eclipsed shrinking nuclear power by 3.34-fold in capacity and 2.35-fold in output. Modern renewables alone, those other than big hydro dams, reached 1.95 times nuclear power’s capacity in 2013 and should exceed its annual electricity output by 2015. This role reversal (Fig. 2) is accelerating, due mainly to economics and to modular renewables’ extraordinarily dynamic scaling mechanism. For micropower as for cellphones and personal computers, the race goes to the quick—but photovoltaic power worldwide is scaling up even faster than cellphones. Advocates who assume renewables can’t do much without a breakthrough in bulk storage of electricity are in for a rude awakening. Banking giant UBS calls the big, slow, lumpy, expensive coal and nuclear plants “the dinosaur of the future energy system: Too big, too inflexible, not even relevant for backup power in the long run.” Such obsolete technologies are less at risk from regulatory mandates than from market defeat by a swarm of agile competitors that their promoters don’t even recognize. What a sad epitaph—Devoured by Invisible Ants.
Renew Economy 21st Oct 2014 read more »
Energy Efficiency
A new report from the US Breakthrough Institute (BTI) provides evidence that historical improvements in the energy efficiency of lighting, steel and electricity production have led to greater energy consumption that would have been the case in the absence of those improvements. In other words, the ‘rebound effects’ have exceeded 100% (‘backfire’). The authors expect this experience to be replicated in industrialising economies, with the result that improved energy efficiency will contribute much less to reducing energy use and carbon emissions than is commonly assumed.
Sussex Energy Group 21st Oct 2014 read more »
Climate
Europe’s leaders are about to consign the Earth to the risk of dangerous climate change, a UN expert says. Prof Jim Skea, a vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says the EU’s plan to cut CO2 emissions 40% by 2030 is too weak. He says it will commit future governments to “extraordinary and unprecedented” emissions cuts. The Commission rejected the claim, saying the 40% target puts Europe on track for long-term climate goals.
BBC 20th Oct 2014 read more »
