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The STA’s analysis compared the amount of subsidy required over the lifetime of Hinkley Point C with what would be needed to deliver the same amount of electricity through solar and storage over the same 35-year period.

It calculated that the subsidy needed for Hinkley C would come to £29.7 billion, compared to £14.7 billion for solar and storage – £3.8 billion for the solar element, £10.9 billion for storage.

Mike Landy, head of policy at the STA, said the association hoped the analysis would give the public cause to think about “how inexpensive solar has become” and “how competitive it is” against other forms of low-carbon generation.

“We are not saying that solar is the solution to all our energy problems, nor that it could completely replace other technologies. However the government needs to explain why it is drastically cutting support for solar energy whilst offering double the subsidy to Hinkley Point C.

“It also needs to explain why it is championing overseas state-backed utilities over British solar companies which given stable support would have considerable growth prospects,” Landy added.

The STA report comes just a day after environmental charity Greenpeace’s own analysis claimed that a fleet of three new nuclear reactors at Hinkley, Sizewell and Bradwell would add £33 per year to the average household energy bill for more than three decades. This would represent a 4.5-fold increase over the £6 cost per year associated with the solar feed-in tariff that UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change is currently consulting on cutting for this reason.

During a hearing yesterday of the UK House of Commons’ Energy and Climate Change Select Committee with Andrea Leadsom, committee chair Angus Macneil put it to the energy minister that the government was being “miserly with renewables, but profligate with nuclear”, a claim which Leadsom rejected.

But Frank Gordon, senior policy analyst at the UK’s Renewable Energy Association, agreed with Macneil, telling PV Tech’s sister site, Solar Power Portal: “Well before Hinkley C is commissioned solar power will be generating electricity without subsidy. It will be able to produce baseload electricity as it combines with massively falling costs of energy storage.”

“Government support in its many forms is acting as an effective bridge to this future, but the proposed changes jeopardise some of the tremendous achievements of the past decade,” he added.http://www.pv-tech.org/news/new_nuclear_in_the_uk_would_require_twice_as_much_subsidy_as_solar_report

That’s the conclusion of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a London-based researcher that estimates the cost of power from renewables in the U.K. are rivaling fossil fuels even without subsidy. Wind easily beats the more expensive nuclear plant that Electricite de France SA is building with the support of investment from China.

The findings highlights the trade-offs Prime Minister David Cameron weighed in his decision to support EDF’s bid to build the first new reactors in the U.K. in more than two decades……..

In some places, notably the U.K., wind is cheaper than nuclear. The new EDF plant at Hinkley Point will sell electricity for 92.50 pounds per megawatt-hour. That compares with lowest contract price of 79.23 pounds for supplies from onshore wind-power plants that the government awarded in February after a competitive auction.

Hinkley Point will supply 3.2 gigawatts of electricity to the grid. Spending the equivalent money on wind would give 21 gigawatts of capacity, said David Hostert, a wind energy analyst at BNEF in London.