Hinkley
I write this blog fully expecting the Austrian legal challenge to the Commission decision facilitating the Hinkley Point C nuclear power project to have finally been confirmed. But as it turns out the Austrians have lots of time and you might not actually here of a development with regard to their lawsuit right up until the 22 nd of July. It seems to have been forever since Vienna first served notice of their intent to object to the subsidisation of the project, but nobody, apart from the Austrians themselves (and maybe an energy-political aware postman) seems to know how much time they have left to play their hand.
Penn Energy 3rd July 2015 read more »
Bradwell
Tourism worth £1.8million and 50,000 visitors a year is predicted for the Dengie. Group manager of Leisure, Countryside and Tourism for Maldon District Council, Ben Brown, addressed councillors about the Dengie Gateway Project at Burnham Town Council on Wednesday.The project, with money from the Coastal Community Fund, is designed to mitigate the loss of jobs caused by the closure of Bradwell Power Station.
Harwich & Manningtree Standard 3rd July 2015 read more »
Wylfa
Plans to carry out major road improvements in anticipation of a new £8bn nuclear plant, are moving forward. Horizon Nuclear Power, who are behind plans for a new plant at Wylfa, near Cemaes, has submitted a series of planning applications to carry out ground investigation works along the A5025. The road, situated to the north west of Anglesey, links the Wylfa Newydd site to the A55 expressway.
Daily Post 5th July 2015 read more »
Radioactive Contamination
SCOTTISH scientists have made a breakthrough in the hunt for radioactive particles that lurk in the environment, raising hopes that toxic public beaches could be cleaned up and made safe quicker than previously thought. Academics at Stirling University have developed an “intelligent” algorithm that vastly improves the ability of gamma ray sensors to detect “hot” particles – microscopic pieces of radioactive material – that pose a public health risk as they can become lodged in living tissue and deliver a concentrated dose of radiation. Tests carried out on Dalgety Bay in Fife, which is heavily polluted with radioactive particles from the dumping of 800 wartime planes with radiated dials and other hazardous equipment into the sea, found that hot particles, the most heavily irradiated fragments, could be detected up to 10cm deeper in the ground than conve ntional methods. This is because the algorithm allows sensors to more effectively distinguish hot particles against naturally-occurring background radiation.
Sunday Times 5th July 2015 read more »
Levy Control Framework
The cost of subsidising new wind farms is spiralling out of control, government sources have privately warned. Officials admitted that so-called “green” energy schemes will require a staggering £9 billion a year in subsidies – paid for by customers – by 2020. This is £1.5 billion more than the maximum limit the coalition had originally planned. The mounting costs will mean every household in the country is forced to pay an estimated £170 a year by the end of the decade to support the renewable electricity schemes that were promoted by the coalition. Tory ministers are said to be “angry” at the scale of the over-running costs. They are blaming the Liberal Democrats who ran the Department for Energy and Climate Change for the past five years for the spectacular failure to control renewable energy programmes. The huge excess spending is thought to be a result of higher-than-expected numbers of rooftop solar panels being fitted on houses, falling wholesale energy prices, and offshore wind farms proving more productive than anticipated. The Chancellor believes the figures demonstrate the need to rein in the cost of policies to tackle climate change. As a first step, he will use this week’s summer Budget to announce that he is abandoning targets set under the coalition to increase the level of environmental taxes in a move he hopes will save customers and businesses billions of pounds. Official figures showed that environmental levies added £68 to the average household bill last year. By 2020 this had been expected to rise to £141. But the latest DECC figures suggest the true figure will be closer to £170 as costs continue to mount. The Chancellor will review the system to see whether further steps can be taken to cut the cost of climate change schemes such as the subsidies, sources said.
Telegraph 4th July 2015 read more »
Energy Supplies
More vexing than getting consumers to switch suppliers, however, is ensuring the industry produces enough gas and power to meet Britain’s needs. This takes us back to energy policy and fracking. The background is the rapid shrinkage of Britain’s ageing fleet of coal-fired power stations. Long the backbone of the nation’s energy system, they are being rendered uneconomic by pollution taxes. Last year coal met a third of Britain’s total electricity needs. Yet abandoning it is essential to the gov ernment’s plan to hit binding targets on slashing carbon dioxide emissions. The latest plant to announce its shutdown was SSE’s Ferrybridge station in Yorkshire in May – the third this year. Britain’s last coal-fired station is forecast to shut well before 2030. There will be a huge gap to fill. A combination of muddled policy and nimbyism has dramatically limited the options available to fill the void. Last month Amber Rudd announced an end to subsidies for new onshore wind farms. The new energy secretary’s move was a sop to the Conservatives’ wind-farm-hating base. It also strangled what is by far the cheapest form of low-carbon energy. Rudd proudly declared that the early end to taxpayer support would kill up to 250 planned wind farms with a capacity of 7GW – about seven Ferrybridges. The Department of Energy and Climate Change has also drastically cut back on subsidies for solar power. That leaves gas-fired power stations, offshore wind and nuclear power to fill the hole left by the disappearance of coal. All face serious challenges. Two years ago the government laid out its vision for one of the biggest components: atomic power. The UK nuclear strategy, unveiled by Ed Davey and Vince Cable, the former energy and business secretaries, envisaged 16GW of new nuclear plants by 2030. What was ambitious then, now looks comically optimistic. EDF’s Hinkley Point project in Somerset, which would be the first new nuclear plant in Britain in two decades, has fallen eight years behind schedule. Its budget has ballooned to an astonishing £24bn, and the company is locked in contentious talks with two Chinese partners almost two years after they first agreed a financing alliance.
Sunday Times 5th July 2015 read more »
Energy Costs
The Competition and Markets Authority’s “remedies statement”, due for publication on Tuesday, won’t be pulling its punches. One option would be to move back towards the system of overt profit regulation still used in Northern Ireland, where the incumbent electricity supplier, Power NI, is allowed a maximum margin of 2.2pc. Centrica’s margin last year was a much more robust 4.1pc after tax, and this was poor by the standards of recent years.
Telegraph 4th July 2015 read more »
THE competition watchdog is expected to rule out a break-up of the “big six” power companies this week – and instead bash regulator Ofgem for holding back competition in the energy market. The Competition and Markets Authority will on Tuesday present the provisional recommendations from a year-long review. Its investigation was launched after rising energy bills caused a political furore that was stoked further by Ed Miliband’s promise to freeze prices. Miliband said that if elected he would look at breaking up the big six companies that dominate the industry – EDF Energy, SSE, British Gas, Scottish Power, Eon and RWE Npower. Ed Davey, the energy secretary, suggested Centrica, owner of market leader British Gas, could be split. The watchdog is expected to say, however, that “vertical integration” – where companies own power stations and retail operati ons – does not lead to higher prices. Rather, its focus is likely to be on encouraging customers to switch suppliers. The competition authority found in a preliminary report in February that virtually all households – 95% – missed out on big savings by not switching. On Tuesday it will unveil a raft of proposals aimed at encouraging customers to make a choice.
Sunday Times 5th July 2015 read more »
Friends of the Earth
The environmental movement needs to escape the “white, middle-class ghetto” and engage more fully with the UK’s ethnic and working class populations, according to Friends of the Earth’s newly appointed chief executive. In an exclusive interview with The Independent on Sunday on the second day of his new job, Craig Bennett took a swipe at the environmental establishment as he outlined his plans to reshape the debate. “The environment cannot be stuck in a white middle-class ghetto. It can’t even be stuck in the environment ghetto. We’ve got to make it relevant to people’s lives,” Mr Bennett said. “I feel passionately that, to up our game, the environmental movement needs to make sure it is not just a white middle-class movement. We need to make a really big effort to look at how we can reach out to different communities and create opportunities for them to campaign on the issues that matter to them,” Mr Bennett said. The traditional green community will always be “absolutely critical” to environmental campaigning, he says, but the failure to engage a much wider audience is a waste of “huge potential”. “There will be no solutions to climate change that are done to people. The solutions to climate change have to be done by people – and by diverse groups of people – if they’re going to endure and … bring about the changes needed.”
Independent 5th July 2015 read more »
France
A large fire occurred at the Paluel nuclear power plant in Normandy, France, Le Figaro reported Friday citing the plant management. According to the newspaper, the fire started at 10:30 p.m. (GMT 20:30) Thursday night at the production unit number two. It took more than six hours before a team of 71 firefighters was able to fully extinguish it.
Sputnik News 3rd July 2015 read more »
Japan
Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority has finished part of its pre-use inspection of the No. 1 reactor at Kyushu Electric Power Co.’s Sendai nuclear plant, NRA officials said Friday. Fuel can thus be bought to the reactor, according to the officials. Kyushu Electric, which aims to resume the reactor’s operations in mid-August, plans to bring nuclear fuel to the reactor on Tuesday.
Japan Times 4th July 2015 read more »
Iran
Iran and six world powers appeared to reach tentative agreement on sanctions relief for Tehran, a key element of a potential nuclear deal as talks continued on Saturday.
Independent 5th July 2015 read more »
Iran stands to reap a windfall gain of about 25 per cent of its entire economy if $100 billion (£65 billion) of frozen assets are released under a nuclear deal. This sum is likely to be unlocked – in whole or in part – if America and Iran meet Tuesday’s deadline for a final agreement that would settle the confrontation over Tehran’s nuclear programme.
Telegraph 4th July 2015 read more »
Israel
The Israeli Disarmament Movement has written to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu requesting that he legislate for the existence of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. Set up behind the scenes in 1952 to manage Israel’s nuclear activities, the commission has never been affirmed in law, campaigners say. The commission runs two research reactors in Soreq and in the Negev desert, and says it helps develop nuclear energy for civil purposes. But it is widely suspected of also being involved in nuclear weapons development. Israel maintains a deliberate policy of “nuclear ambiguity” and has never confirmed that it has nuclear weapons. But US experts have estimated it could have as many as 80 nuclear warheads. The Israeli Disarmament Movement’s initiative has been backed by a former Israeli politician and peace campaigner, Mossi Raz; Professor Avner Cohen, an expert on Israeli nuclear policy from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California; and the Israeli lawyer, Itai Mack. Netanyahu and his energy minister, Water Yuval Steinitz, have been given 90 days to announce that work has begun on legislation for the atomic commission. If there is no response, the campaigners are threatening to launch a long legal battle that could end up in Israel’s supreme court.
Herald 5th July 2015 read more »
Renewables – Jobs
Only six per cent of the 30,020 jobs projected to be created in Scotland by 2015 through the growth of the offshore wind industry have actually materialised, the Sunday Herald can reveal. A 2010 report on the future of the sector commissioned by industry body Scottish Renewables forecast that, under the most optimistic scenario, 30,020 full-time equivalent jobs would be in existence by 2015 and that this number would grow to 48,554 by 2020. But the most recent figures show that in 2013 just 1,842 people were employed in the sector in 2013: a figure that is unlikely to have changed substantially as no offshore wind farms have been built in Scottish waters since then. Those 1,842 created jobs are however more than twice the number of the study’s worst case scenario projection of 741 jobs by 2015, bu t far short of the 17,076 estimated under a second “more moderate” development scenario and considerably less than the 5,346 projected under the study’s third scenario of the number of jobs that would be created by 2015 “if Scotland fails to capture the economic benefits of offshore wind development.” The gap between optimism and reality for Scotland’s offshore wind industry was laid bare last week when the South Korean multinational Samsung Heavy Industries said it would not be going ahead with a planned £100 million offshore wind turbine factory in Methil in Fife, which would have brought 500 jobs to one of Scotland’s most deprived areas.
Herald 5th July 2015 read more »
Fossil Fuels
AN EXPLORATION company has applied to “frack” for shale gas in Yorkshire just four days after Lancashire county councillors rejected a proposal from a rival developer, Cuadrilla Resources. Anti-fracking campaigners claimed last week that the Lancashire verdict was the shale gas version of Waterloo. On Friday, however, Third Energy lodged its bid to frack at a site near the Vale of Pickering in North Yorkshire. The project has led to protest from locals concerned about the effects of hydraulic fracking – the drilling technique that pumps millions of gallons of water, chemicals and sand underground to blast apart gas-bearing rock formations.
Sunday Times 5th July 2015 read more »
