[ad_1]
The UK government confirmed today that it will take a joint stake in the Sizewell C nuclear power station, allowing China General Nuclear to “exit from the project”, which it said was “prostituted to generate reliable electricity and clean for 6 million UK homes.”
The United Kingdom will spend £700 million ($843 million) on Sizewell, a funding figure that will be matched by French partner EDF.
The move cuts China General Nuclear out of building the new power station, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak saying Britain’s “golden era” of China relations is over.
Nuclear power plants take a significant amount of time to build and bring online, with the plant expected to start producing electricity only in 2035.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt said: “Today’s investment in Sizewell C represents the biggest step on our journey to energy independence – the first government support for a nuclear project in over 30 years. Once completed, this mega project will power millions of homes with clean, affordable, home-grown energy for decades to come.”
The news comes a day after the country awarded £32 million ($38 million) in funding to five projects developing new energy storage technology and the UK’s National Grid decided not to turn on a scheme of blackout prevention that pays consumers for not using electricity.
National Grid said The Register last night he “no longer needed the service to manage the margins” last night, although he had anticipated it earlier.
Europe’s largest battery energy storage installation went live in the UK earlier this month, with the capacity to store up to 196 MWh of electricity. The Pillswood project, based in Hull near England’s North Sea coast, aims to provide load balancing services to the UK grid. It is said that the project, developed by Harmony Energy Limited, will store enough energy to power about 300,000 homes for two hours – not much in terms of the country’s consumption, but a step in the right direction.
The National Grid earlier this year included scenarios [PDF] in its winter outlook that included rotating power outages of up to three hours.
The Electricity System Operator said: “Electricity storage will need to increase significantly to support the decarbonisation of our electricity system, with a twelve-fold and seven-fold increase in capacity (GW) and volumes (GWh).
Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Graham Stuart, when asked earlier this month what recent steps his department has taken to increase energy security, said: “We are confident in our plans to protect families and businesses across the range of scenarios this winter in light of Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine.
“To strengthen this position even further, we have put plans in place to ensure supply this winter. This includes supporting coal plants to be open, ensuring an additional 2.4GW of generation capacity to be used as the ‘last resource in the coming months. working closely with key international partners, to monitor and share information on energy supply, demand, and preparation for winter.’
At least one of the coal plants he is referring to is owned by Germany’s Uniper, which is keeping its Ratcliffe coal-fired power plant in Britain open to help the country maintain its electricity supply this winter.
The new government funding includes money for projects developing thermal batteries and liquid flow batteries, which the government said would help increase the resilience of the local power grid while also maximizing value for money.
The money pot is part of the second phase of LODES, the Longer Duration Energy Storage competition, aimed at helping participants develop technologies that can store energy as heat, electricity, or as an energy carrier to little carbon like hydrogen.
It moves to Europe to maintain energy supplies
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin cut gas supplies to Europe before suspending flows altogether in August, Europe has been preparing for a winter energy crisis.
The UK, which has some of the continent’s lowest gas storage capacity, brought its Rough gas storage facility in the North Sea back online last month, although it will only operate at a fifth of his previous ability.
This comes after decisions made in the UK in the last decade or so that grid storage (of electricity or gas) between seasons was no longer cost effective. The Rough site was closed in 2017 after Centrica decided it didn’t make sense from a “commercial perspective” to pay for expensive repairs and the government refused to help.
Meanwhile, in Europe…
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen earlier this year called for cuts in electricity use across the bloc and excessive taxes on energy companies to tackle high prices , and demanded that electricity consumption be cut in peak hours by at least 5 percent.
Germany, with its over-reliance on Russian gas, has made many of these moves, with the German city of Hanover turning off the heating and switching to cold showers in all public buildings.
The German government has since increased its stake in Uniper SE to 99 percent, taking the historic step of fully nationalizing the country’s largest gas importer.
The EU held an emergency meeting in September when the energy crisis became a pressing issue in the region.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/speech_22_5389 Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at the time: “We are facing an extraordinary situation, not only because Russia is an unreliable supplier, as we have witnessed in the last days, weeks, months, but also because Russia is actively manipulating the gas market.”
Germany, the financial powerhouse of the European Union that is heavily dependent on Russian gas due to decisions made over a period of decades, has come under fire for plans to keep two of its last three nuclear power plants on standby until in the middle of 2023 – beyond. the original deadline of the end of 2022.
You can’t just turn a nuclear power plant off and on again
Anger intensified after government officials appeared to suggest keeping nuclear power plants as an “emergency reserve” – a phrase widely derided by engineers, with the operator of one of the reactors saying. Der Spiegel that any plan “to send two of the three operational reactors into a cold reserve status, to feed themselves and when necessary, is not technically feasible”. Energy minister Robert Habeck, incidentally a member of the anti-nuclear Green Party (the green part of the current government’s “traffic light” coalition), who is also the deputy chancellor, accused one of the operators of the plant of not understanding the government of the government. plain
Meanwhile, JPMorgan’s European offices have been running power outage simulations, tests to help the bank prepare for a potential power outage.
Speaking at the Eurogroup press conference, Economic Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni said:
“We know that the key cause of these problems is Putin’s war against Ukraine and we must have this very clearly in mind and repeat this to citizens and on public occasions. Putin’s war and his weaponization of Russia’s energy exports is to divide Europe and to weaken the collective resolution of the West to support Ukraine. The Russian government will try to use our economic difficulties. And it will fail.”
The Kremlin shut down its flow of natural gas to Europe via the key Nord Stream 1 pipeline in September and said it would not reopen it until the West lifted sanctions against Moscow after the Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
German gas reserves at the time of publication were 98 percent of storage levels, with consumption of 21 percent, 3 percent lower than the average consumption in the last four years.
Energy is also a problem in the United States, where a heat wave recently strained California’s grid to the point that energy authorities in September asked residents not to charge their electric vehicles during “alerts flexible” designed to reduce stress on the network. However, despite the fact that the United States is much less exposed to volatility in energy markets than Europe, the Biden administration passed measures in the Inflation Reduction Act that included the creation of funds for those in energy poverty, with unprecedented climate legislation.
President Biden also plans to release 15 million barrels of oil from the US strategic reserves in an attempt to prevent the rise in gasoline / gasoline prices now that OPEC and its allies plan to reduce the production. ®
[ad_2]
Source link