A look at Exelon’s 4 economically challenged nuclear plants in Illinois, S & P Global, Author, Anna Duquiatan, 25 Sep 20, Exelon Corp.-owned nuclear power plants in Illinois eyed for early retirement have had declining financial margins of late, according to an analysis using S&P Global Market Intelligence’s plant-level production cost model. ………
Exelon Generation Co. LLC announced Aug. 27 that it plans to retire its 2,346-MW Byron and 1,805-MW Dresden nuclear power stations in September 2021 and November 2021, respectively.
The Exelon Corp. subsidiary added that the 2,384-MW Braidwood Generating Station and 2,313-MW LaSalle County Generating Station are “also at high risk for premature closure,” though the company has not yet projected any closure dates for those plants………
The two-unit Dresden plant in Grundy County, the first of the four northern Illinois plants to enter service, in the early 1970s, is licensed to operate until 2029 and 2031. Braidwood in Will County, Byron in Ogle County, and LaSalle in LaSalle County all began operating in the mid- to late 1980s and are licensed to operate until the 2040s. …………..
Q2: U.S. Solar and Wind Power by the Numbers
Wrestling with the COVID-19 pandemic, solar project developers installed nearly three times as much solar power capacity in Q2’20 compared to the same period a year ago. Meanwhile, the U.S. wind industry posted one of its strongest second quarters on record in 2020, adding 2,369 MW of capacity, and the 2020 development pipeline stands strong at 30,554 MW.
Q2: U.S. Wind Power by the numbers
Essential Energy Insights – September, 2020
Numbers Utility-Scale Solar Surge Reaches 1.6 GW in Q2
Utility-Scale Solar Surge Reaches 1.6 GW in Q2
September 26, 2020
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
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Ministers urged to support new nuclear at a critical time for the industry
The energy giant is pressing the case for a plant at Sizewell but backing from a cash-strapped government could be limited, Sky News, Ian King 23 Sept 20, This is a critical time for the UK’s nuclear energy industry.
The construction of the UK’s first new nuclear power station for a generation, Hinkley Point C in Somerset, is well advanced and EDF Energy, the French-owned energy giant building the plant, is keen to pick up the pace on its next big infrastructure project.
Sizewell C, in Suffolk, is envisaged as a replica project to Hinkley Point C.
..But The future of new nuclear build in the UK has again been thrown into doubt by
last week’s decision by Hitachi, the Japanese company, to abandon the Horizon project – which would have seen new nuclear power stations built at Wylfa Newydd on Anglesey and at Oldbury on Severn in south Gloucestershire.
Meanwhile, a cash-strapped government is unlikely to want to provide the financial support that its predecessors have given Hinkley Point C, under which EDF Energy was guaranteed a minimum price of £92.50 per megawatt hour (MWh), inflation-linked, for 35 years.
September 26, 2020
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Climate News Network 23rd Sept 2020, The decision by the Japanese company Hitachi to abandon its plan to buildtwo large nuclear plants in the United Kingdom leaves the British government’s energy plans in tatters, and the UK nuclear industry
reeling.
The UK’s official plan is still to build ten nuclear stations in
Britain, but only three schemes remain. Most have now been cancelled by the
companies that planned to build them, principally because they cannot raise
the capital to do so.
This leaves only the debt-laden French giant EdF and
the Chinese state-owned industry still in the field. At the same time,
Britain’s existing nuclear plants are in trouble. They are not ageing
gracefully, cracks in their graphite cores and rust in their pipework
causing ever-lengthening shutdowns and retirement dates to be brought
forward.
The plants at Hunterston B in Scotland, Hinkley Point B in
Somerset in the West of England, and Dungeness B in Kent on the south-east
coast, are all struggling to survive.
https://climatenewsnetwork.net/uk-nuclear-industry-seeks-subsidies-for-survival/
September 24, 2020
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U.K. Nuclear Fleet Plans Evaporating Amid Economic, Political Problems, https://www.enr.com/articles/50109-uk-nuclear-fleet-plans-evaporating-amid-economic-political-problems September 20, 2020, Peter Reina
The U.K.’s hopes for a fleet of new nuclear plants, potentially exceeding 13,000 MW, took another hit when Japan’s Hitachi Ltd. recently pulled out of a major project in Wales. With Chinese investment in two other projects alsolmore doubtful, only the 3,300MW Hinkley Point C project in Somerset, England, has so far progressed to construction
Having suspended development work on the Welsh two-unit plant at Wylfa Newydd in January 2019, Hitachi earlier this month announced that the already difficult investment environment had “become increasingly severe due to the impact of COVID-19.” The company wrote off $2.8 billion of investment in the Welsh plant last year.
Hitachi’s departure followed the Toshiba Corp.’s decision in late 2018 to quit the 3,400-MW Moorside plant, in Cumbria. It had failed to find co-investors for its Westinghouse powered project.
With uncertainty growing, Hinkley Point C is the only U.K. nuclear project o have started work, which is so far largely on schedule, according to Electricité de France (EdF), which controls 66.5% of the deal. China General Nuclear Corp. owns 33.5% of project, which will be powered by two French EPR pressurized water reactors.
Hitachi’s withdrawal from the U.K. market has alarmed supporters of the nuclear industry, since it also casts a cloud over the planned 3,340-MW Sizewell C project in Cumbria.
“For the first time in a generation the U.K has developed a world class nuclear construction and engineering supply chain. Without Sizewell C, we will not sustain it,” says Cameron Gilmour, spokesperson for the Sizewell C Consortium lobby group of key companies in the sector.
The Sizewell C plant would replicate Hinkley Point C and is “shovel ready” according to Gilmour. The U.K. Planning Inspectorate is considering an application for the project submitted this May. The agency’s recommendations will end up on the government’s desk for a final decision at some point.
However, general investment uncertainties and increasingly frosty relations between the U.K and Chinese governments bode ill for the deal, says Stephen Thomas, an energy policy specialist at the University of Greenwich, London.
Set up under a previous conservative administration, the Hinkley Point C deal included CGNC’s participation as a junior partner in Sizewell C. Also, CGNC would have full responsibility for a proposed 2,300 MW Bradwell plant in Essex.
Bradwell would be a global showcase for the technology as it would be the first plant in an industrialized country to use the Chinese Hualong One reactors, Thomas says.
However, the Chinese government was angered over the U.K.’s rejection this July of Huawei technology for the cell phone networks. At the same time, criticism by the country’s lawmakers of China’s participation in critical infrastructure is increasing.
Both developments make the Bradwell deal uncertain. And if Bradwell falls, the Chinese are unlikely to remain merely as passive, junior investors in Sizewell C, potentially scuppering the whole deal, says Thomas.
Investment uncertainties lie at the heart of the U.K.’s fading nuclear hopes. The government offered the Hitachi team a far less generous deal than the one secured by EdF for Hinkley Point C.
While the Hinkley deal protects U.K. electricity consumers from cost escalations, it comes at a high price, according to Thomas. The deal is based on a “contract for differences” which sets an index linked energy price of $120 per MWh at 2012 prices for 35 years. That is hugely more than the $51 per MWh now being bid for offshore wind contracts, he says.
For subsequent deals, the government last year turned to the Regulatory Asset Base (RAB) form of funding used by water and types of utilities. Rather than having a target energy price, electricity tariffs would be controlled by the regulator, which would consider factors such as need for investment and a fair rate of return on capital.
The government completed a review of the system this January but has yet to make a decision, adding to investment uncertainty, says Thomas.
Meanwhile, in the west of England, contractors recently placed the 170-tonne base of the second reactor’s steel containment liner at Hinkley Point on time, despite pandemic working restrictions.
EdF claims to have met critical path goals during the pandemic, but it has yet to reveal the extent of delays on other parts of the job. The site’s workforce is now back to its pre-pandemic level of 4,500 having fallen to 2,000 after February.
Civil and building work is being handled by a joint venture of Paris-based Bouygues Travaux Publics and the U.K.’s Laing O’Rourke Plc. in a contract signed in late 2017, then valued at around $3.6 billion.
However, “challenging ground conditions” and additional design effort have contributed to an overall project cost rise to $29 billion from around $23 billion in 2016, reports EdF. The company still plans to commission the first unit in 2025, but the project has yet to enter its trickier nuclear component phase, officials concede.
Europe’s only two other projects using the same reactor design and involving Bouygues are hugely over schedule. Finland’s Olkiluoto 3 plant and EdF’s flagship French project at Flamanvile are both running about a decade late.
With this track record and future financing doubts, prospects for new projects around the world look bleak, says Thomas.
But nuclear power “has had a history of climbing out of the coffin,” he adds.
September 22, 2020
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UK government could take stake in Sizewell nuclear power station, BBC, Simon Jack, Business editor@BBCSimonJackon16 September 2020
The collapse of a project to build a new nuclear power station at Wylfa, Wales may accelerate government approval of a new station at Sizewell, government and industry sources say.
The government is disappointed after Japan’s Hitachi pulled out but insists it is committed to new nuclear as way to decarbonise the UK power supply.
It is looking at options to replace China’s CGN as an investor in Sizewell.
That could include the government taking a stake in the plant.
Of six sites originally identified over a decade ago for replacements for the UK’s ageing nuclear fleet, only one is under construction, three have been abandoned and two are waiting approval.
One major sticking point over Sizewell has been the involvement of Chinese state-owned company China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) in the UK’s new nuclear plans.
CGN already owns a 33% stake in Hinkley Point C in Somerset, currently under construction by French firm EDF, which owns the other two thirds.
The Chinese firm also took a 20% stake in the development phase of Sizewell on the understanding it would participate in the construction phase and then land the ultimate prize of building a reactor of its own design at Bradwell in Essex.
State aid rules
If CGN are excluded the government may choose to take a direct stake in Sizewell, according to people familiar with the matter.
There was a time when a Conservative government would have been very reluctant to take a direct stake in a commercial development. That time has passed.
Industry sources and within the government say Chinese involvement in designing and running its own design nuclear reactor on UK soil “looks dead”, given revived security concerns and deteriorating diplomatic relations after the government’s decision to phase out Chinese firm Huawei’s equipment from a new generation of telecommunication networks.
It’s no secret that Boris Johnson’s powerful adviser Dominic Cummings is a big fan of the idea of small nuclear reactors and EDF are telling him that big nuclear is an important stepping stone to small.
EDF has also been very vocal about the advantages of reproducing the design of Hinkley at Sizewell. Although a similar design of reactor ran into major cost and time overruns in France and Finland, EDF says they UK is poised to benefit from the lessons learned from those mistakes. It also points out that the UK will benefit from transferring high skilled jobs from one site to another.
There was a time, not so long ago, that government ministers talked enthusiastically about “a new nuclear age”. A fleet of brand new reactors producing reliable, low carbon (but expensive) electricity for decades to come.
Hinkley, Moorside, Wylfa, Oldbury, Bradwell and Sizewell were identified as the sites for the most significant national wave of new nuclear power construction anywhere in the world.
Of those six, only one is under construction, three have been abandoned, and two are still waiting for the green light.
The next couple of weeks could tell us which way the wind is really blowing on the government’s appetite for both nuclear energy and new levels of direct state investment.
If a mobile network is considered too sensitive, it’s hard to argue that a nuclear power station is not.
The next couple of weeks could tell us which way the wind is really blowing on the government’s appetite for both nuclear energy and new levels of direct state investment. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54181748
September 21, 2020
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UK spending watchdog warns on costs of cleaning up old nuclear plants
Decommissioning charge has risen by £3bn since 2017 and there remains ‘inherent uncertainty’ over final bill, NAO finds, Nathalie Thomas in Edinburgh, SEPTEMBER 11 2020, Estimates of the cost to clear up 12 of the UK’s earliest nuclear power sites have increased by nearly £3bn since 2017 and there remains “inherent uncertainty” over the final bill, the country’s public spending watchdog has warned.
The National Audit Office on Friday published its latest report into the long-running saga around the decommissioning of two research sites and 10 early nuclear power stations in Britain, which came to be known as the “Magnox” plants due to the magnesium alloy that was used to cover the fuel rods inside their reactors.
The spending watchdog also found that the costs to the taxpayer of a botched 2014 tender process to outsource the decommissioning to the private sector was £20m higher than when it last investigated three years ago. Cleaning up the Magnox sites, which were built before privatisation and include Hunterston A in Scotland and Hinkley Point A in Somerset, has turned into a costly and torturous affair.
In 2016 the High Court ruled the 2014 competition for a 14-year contract to decommission the sites — which had been awarded to Cavendish Fluor Partnership, or CFP, a joint venture between UK-based Babcock International and Fluor of the US — had been “fudged” by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a body attached to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
A year later ministers, acting on legal advice, terminated the arrangement with CFP nine years early and renegotiated a shorter contract that ran until the end of August 2019. Decommissioning of the sites was then brought in-house by the NDA .
The NAO’s previous probe in 2017 into the decommissioning concluded that the failed Magnox contract had cost the taxpayer £122m in settlements with unsuccessful bidders, legal costs and staff time. In its latest report on Friday, the watchdog found the NDA had, in addition, agreed to pay up to £20m to exit the contract early, although it praised the authority for renegotiating the agreement under “the challenging circumstances”.
The watchdog also revealed that NDA estimates for the cost of getting all the Magnox plants “cleared and safely enclosed” had increased by up to £2.7bn to as much as £8.7bn since 2017. It added that costs are “likely to be subject to further change, largely because of the inherent uncertainties involved in cleaning up the UK’s nuclear sites”. Once the reactors and waste stores are sealed, the sites are kept secure for a period potentially as long as 80 years for radiation levels to decay. In 2014, the same costs had been estimated at £3.8bn.. ……..
https://www.ft.com/content/6f313c84-d314-4160-b124-a68c4e85be09
September 17, 2020
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