Over the next decade, around a quarter of the UK’s power stations will close, leaving the country with a potential energy shortfall. On the plus side, the effect of the global recession has been to move that potential shortfall further towards 2020 but that does not mean that we – and the rest of the energy industry – can rest on our laurels.
We have to look at ways to produce cleaner & better energy for our customers, and for the UK. That’s why we’ll be opening our Isle of Grain gas-fired combined heat and power plant this year, as well as progressing with work on our nuclear joint venture, Horizon Nuclear Power. With Horizon, we aim to have up to 6GW of nuclear capacity up and running at our two sites, in Wylfa on Anglesey and at Oldbury in Gloucestershire, by 2025. These projects are cleaner than any existing fossil power generation plants that we own and operate in the UK and will also contribute towards closing the energy gap.
We are also involved in major renewable projects, with work on the world’s largest offshore wind farm, the London Array, and, in 2010, Robin Rigg, our largest UK wind farm, was officially opened. In all, our UK renewable development portfolio could see an additional 1,500MW of wind and biomass power being brought online, which could lead to more than 4m tonnes of carbon dioxide being displaced every year.
In 2010, we were short listed for the Government’s carbon capture and storage (CCS) competition for our proposed supercritical coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. The competition is designed to subsidise the construction of a commercial-sized CCS facility at a UK coal-fired power station. However, when we took the decision to delay the Kingsnorth project because of the effects of the recession on energy prices and demand, we also decided to withdraw our application to the competition on the grounds that we could no longer meet its timescales.
In addition, construction work at our Holford Gas Storage facility in Cheshire continued. Now completed it is one of the UK’s most flexible gas storage schemes and offers us the opportunity to store gas for our customers when prices are lower and to remove it when prices are higher, so helping to smooth out peaks in prices. In addition, we have upstream gas assets in the central and in the southern North Sea.
Alongside that, we have also started to explore energy from waste opportunities in the UK. Projects may include local authority contracts and partnerships with waste producers. The development of energy from waste plants will allow us to help tackle the growing problem of waste by using our long-term experience to support a significant reduction in landfill rubbish, while producing valuable power and heat for both industrial and domestic customers. We are involved in two projects – at Lostock in Cheshire and at Kemsley in Kent.We are currently reviewing options for the wider Energy from Waste business, covering all European projects
Some of our initiatives to ensure reliable supply
But as we know, it’s not just about keeping the lights on, that’s just one of the three major challenges we face. We also need to keep energy affordable and to reduce our carbon emissions. So the decisions we take today are crucial, because they will affect future generations.
We’re investing billions of pounds in developing a balanced portfolio of generation options because we believe this is the only way to solve the three huge challenges we face. Cleaner fossil fuels and nuclear power have their part to play alongside renewables.
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