New Nukes
The man who delivered the Olympic Games to Britain has been brought in by the Government to kick-start negotiations on bringing new nuclear power stations to Britain. Lord Deighton, who was made Commercial Secretary to the Treasury in January, will lead negotiations with the French nuclear firm, EDF. He will work alongside the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Energy, Stephen Lovegrove. Lord Deighton, the former chief executive of the London Olympic organising committee and a former banker at Goldman Sachs, is seen as a “doer” who can get big projects off the ground. EDF has received planning permission for a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset but has said it will not build the facility unless it can agree a price on the energy that it will produce with the Governm ent. It also wants a partner to take a 20pc stake in the project. Even if a strike price is agreed, EDF will still need to secure partners to help fund the project. Any deal with the Government will also need to secure European Union state aid clearance. The Government is putting pressure on EDF to “bear down” on the costs of building the plant. Sources have made it clear that a number of significant issues still remain to be resolved and no deal is imminent. The Sunday Telegraph also understands that the size of the contingency budget is another possible sticking point. In an open letter to this newspaper today, published online, a cross-party group of MPs and dozens of British university academics call for the National Audit Office to review the negotiations “in the context of openness, transparency, fiscal and regulatory accountability, and ‘best value’ for the UK taxpayer and energy consumer”.
Sunday Telegraph 7th April 2013 read more »
In an open letter to the Sunday Telegraph, MPs and academics call for the National Audit Office to review nuclear negotiations between the Government an EDF Energy over financial support for the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant in Somerset. We need to know what kind of nuclear deal the Government is signing up to. The Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Treasury are negotiating with the French nuclear corporation EDF about the financing of possible new nuclear in the UK. Through these negotiations, the Government is aiming to guarantee a set price for nuclear energy – a ‘strike price’. This price will be well above the market price for electricity, meaning that UK taxpayer and energy consumer will be paying the difference. This contract will be locked in for very many decades – up to 40 years. The impact of this contract will be to shift the economic risk of building new nuclear facilities from the nuclear corporation to the consumer. Because of ‘commercial confidentiality’, there will be very limited Parliamentary or public access to information about important details of these non-reviewable contracts. Normally contracts of this scale and length would include provision for re-negotiation as and when circumstances change – and we need to know how and when these triggers would initiate.
Sunday Telegraph 7th April 2013 read more »
EMR
POWERLINE, a lobby group set up “to avert the nightmare of blackouts and misery” caused by the coalition’s energy policies, breaks cover today. The group will launch its website with backing from the Major Energy Users’ Council. Philip Stephens, a former commercial director at British Energy, has been appointed as the face of Powerline. Its membership is unclear but it is thought to be funded by a group of businessmen and firms concerned that the government’s £200bn low-carbon overhaul will lead to high bills and energy insecurity. Ofgem, the regulator, said last year that by 2015 there was a one in 12 chance of “supply disruptions” as coal-fired power stations closed. Powerline will publish new research from AT Kearney, the consultant, claiming that the government can hit its CO2 reduction targets for tens of billions of pounds less than envisaged. This would be achieved by focusing on smaller generation plants distributed around the country, and gas-fired stations, costing a fraction of offshore wind farms and producing only half the CO2 that coal-powered plants emit.
Sunday Times 7th April 2013 read more »
Wylfa
HORIZON Nuclear Power will hold its next monthly Open Surgery on plans for Wylfa B next Monday. The event, which will take place between 1pm and 7pm, on April 15, at Cemaes village hall enables local people to call in and ask questions about plans for a new nuclear power station at Wylfa. Horizon’s plans to construct and operate a new nuclear power station at Wylfa will create a peak workforce of up to 6,000 during construction and around 1,000 permanent jobs over many decades.
Power Engineering 6th April 2013 read more »
Japan
Around 120 tons of contaminated water with an estimated 710 billion becquerels of radioactivity has probably leaked into the ground under the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. revealed Saturday. “It is the largest amount of radioactive substances that has been leaked” since the crippled facility’s cold shutdown was declared in December 2011, Tepco official Masayuki Ono said. The utility, which announced the leak overnight, said Saturday morning that the water escaped from one of seven underground reservoir tanks at the No. 1 plant and that the remainder — an enormous 13,000 tons — is being pumped to other tanks nearby.
Japan Times 7th April 2013 read more »
Energy Efficiency
Insulation is a topic whose time has come. Energy prices keep rising and will continue to do so to pay for wind farms and nuclear power stations. We are more receptive to the notion that £20 notes are slipping through cracks in our walls, windows and roofs. You can save two-thirds of your heating bills by insulating your home properly. That is, of course, if it has no insulation at all, but there are sizeable gains to be made by topping up any job done more than a decade ago, when we didn’t take insulation as seriously. An investment in insulation continues to pay dividends, unlike that in a new kitchen. There are two obstacles – besides the cost of actually installing the stuff – torpor and trust. Torpor because you may decide you can’t face the hassle of hiring an army of workers to empty the clutter from the attic. Trust is trickier still, because who, actually, do you? I would like to trust Greg Barker, the energy minister and inventor of the government’s Green Deal, which offers us the opportunity to put the cost of energy-saving improvements on our future electricity bills. But the jury is still out on the skills of the contractors he has empowered, or the wisdom of the advisers who decided Green Deal recipients had to pay annual interest of 7% or more on the investment, secured on the property, which might make it harder to sell. Now there is a baffling variety of strips and brushes for draught-proofing your doors and windows Nor do I have faith in the murky formula by which energy compan ies are supposed to top up the money you get from the Green Deal under a new scheme called the Energy Companies Obligation. I do, however, trust myself. I also trust Ian Rock, the chartered surveyor who has written the Haynes Home Insulation Manual, for his book shows that the most economical and architecturally sensitive way of insulating your home is to do it yourself; that includes commissioning someone else to do the tricky bits, such as cavity wall insulation. Many of the tasks involved – which Rock rates for difficulty from one to five – are jobs any fit person can do.
Sunday Times 7th April 2013 read more »
