15 Apr (NucNet): The UK’s energy security will be put at risk and future generations left to suffer with higher bills if ministers fail to agree a deal with EDF Energy to build the country’s first new nuclear plant in a generation, the Nuclear Industry Association has claimed.
Lord Hutton, chairman of the NIA, said in an article in The Sunday Telegraph on 14 April 2013 that failure would undermine the UK’s credibility with investors and threaten other projects across the energy sector.
Lord Hutton also disclosed that the industry has calculated cost savings of 20 percent could be achieved for a second plant after Hinkley Point. He said that 25 percent of any price offered to EDF will go back to the Treasury through taxes.
Failure of the talks would also raise questions about EDF Energy’s future in the UK. The company’s existing fleet of nuclear plants are mostly due to cease generating by early next decade.
The Daily Telegraph said there is believed to be a key meeting today between senior executives of the French company and the government’s representatives.
The talks focus on the so-called “strike price” for electricity that the plant will generate, which will be guaranteed for more than 30 years and subsidised through levies on consumer energy bills.
Lord Hutton said: “Time is of the essence. EDF Energy has spent 1 billion pounds (GBP) (1.5 billion US dollars, 1.6 billion euro) already and the project is at present costing the company GBP 1 million a day.”
“More than GBP 100 million has now been spent keeping the project ticking over since EDF’s first agreement deadline of December was missed.”
Lord Hutton warned that failure to agree “threatens not only the first new nuclear power station for a generation, but potentially all those that will come in its wake”.
He said: “If a deal cannot be struck for new nuclear, can it be struck for offshore wind or carbon capture and storage?”
Planning consent has been given for construction of the first new nuclear power plant in the UK since 1995 at Hinkley Point. But EDF Energy warned last month that before construction begins agreement is needed with the government on a contract for electricity the plant would produce.
EDF Energy chief executive Vincent de Rivaz said in March that “intensive” discussions with the government were taking place and agreement was “still possible”.
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