Utility Week

12 | 16TH - 22ND NOVEMBER 2018 | UTILITY WEEK Policy & Regulation This week Ministers could have 'salvaged' Moorside Local MP says aborting the Moorside project has thrown the people of Cumbria 'under a bus' The government could have stopped Toshiba from pulling the plug on its plans for a new nuclear plant in Cumbria if it had offered similar support to that proposed for other projects, according to an MP in the area. John Woodcock, whose constituents in the area backed the aborted Moorside project, told the House of Commons on Monday the people of Cumbria had been "thrown under a bus" by ministers. Last week, Toshiba's board decided to close down NuGen, its UK nuclear arm, which was set up in 2010 to deliver a 3GW nuclear power station at Moorside. Woodcock, who secured an emergency Commons debate on Toshiba's decision, said: "It is not good enough for the government to hide behind the idea that this is simply a commercial decision, because [Greg Clark] knows that if the government had offered terms to NuGen, to Kepco, to Toshiba that were on a par with those that they have offered on other sites in the country, this deal could have been salvaged." Business and energy secretary Greg Clark said he was told by Toshiba's board when they met in Japan last week that the decision had been a "commercial one". "It wants to concentrate on its activities away from interna- tional nuclear. The announcement is a consequence of that. The decision is ultimately a matter for Toshiba and we fully understand the challenging circumstances that that company has faced over the past 18 months." Clark said ownership of the Moorside site will revert back to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. DB WATER Wholesalers urged to boost service Ofwat has insisted wholesalers in the business retail market must step up the quality of the service they provide to retailers. The regulator has published a "call for inputs" to assess the issues that are having the biggest impact on wholesaler performance. Intelligence gath- ered as part of the review will align with existing initiatives, and feed into the work of exist- ing groups including the retailer wholesaler group. There is a consensus among retailers that there is a lack of effective reputational and finan- cial incentives for wholesalers to deliver high-quality services to the market. Many retailers also experience problems and associ- ated cost impact from dealing with a wide variety of wholesaler policy approaches. GAS Hydrogen blending pilot gets green light A ground-breaking pilot project to blend up to 20 per cent hydrogen into the gas network at Keele University has been given the go-ahead by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). The year-long HyDeploy scheme led by Cadent was awarded £6.8 million of funding in Ofgem's Network Innovation Competition for 2016. Construc- tion is scheduled to begin by the end of this year, with the trial starting in 2019. The HSE has granted the project an exemption from the current 0.1 per cent limit on hydrogen in gas networks aer concluding that the blend would be as safe as natural gas. GAS Safety rules 'block' decarbonisation Gas safety regulations should be updated to spur the develop- ment of low-carbon heating by allowing the pipe network to transport hydrogen, MPs were told at the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy select com- mittee's first evidence session of its inquiry into carbon capture and storage on 6 November. Professor Stuart Haszeldine, director of the Scottish Carbon Capture & Storage alliance of universities and research insti- tutes, told the committee that the gas safety rules are a major blockage to the decarbonisation of the heating network. The specification of the existing regulations, which is based on the very pure natural gas produced in the North Sea, meant the pipe network could not be used to transport hydro- gen, he said: "At the moment it's not legal to put hydrogen into that network, so the government needs to change the regulations." Clark: decision was 'a commercial one' Political Agenda David Blackman "Nuclear finds itself in an unfriendly environment" The late former Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser once endeared himself to the voting public by telling them "life wasn't meant to be easy" when defending his government's economic policies. Business and energy secre- tary Greg Clark will know the feeling. Last week, he was in Japan holding last-gasp talks in a bid to rescue plans for a nuclear plant at Moorside in Cumbria. As we know now, Clark's din- ner date with the Toshiba boss comes as the nuclear sector finds itself in an increasingly unfriendly environment. The National Infrastructure Com- mission recently concluded the UK will only need another two large nuclear power stations as renewables provide an increas- ingly cost-effective alternative. Clark was due to make a speech on low-carbon energy aer Utility Week went to press. Question marks over the coher- ence of the UK's energy policy are growing. didn't deliver what he wanted, as last Thursday saw the Japa- nese multinational announce it had pulled the plug on its project to build the plant, which was meant to deliver 7 per cent of the UK's electricity needs. And clocking up all those air miles didn't win him many friends in Parliament, either – John Woodcock, MP for the coastal Cumbrian constituency of Barrow and Furness, said the people of Cumbria had been "thrown under a bus". Toshiba's failure to find a buyer for its UK nuclear arm opens up a big hole in the UK's nuclear development pipeline. Its exit, while not unexpected,

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