Energy

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, spent time in Brussels before a meeting of the European Council to see what it would allow him to bring home for voters in a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. The board of HSBC voted to keep its headquarters in Britain. Sir John Vickers, who headed the Independent Commission on Banking, said that Bank of England proposals for bank capital reserves were ‘less strong than what the ICB recommended’. The annual rate of inflation, measured by the Consumer Prices Index, rose to 0.3 per cent in January, compared with 0.2 per cent in December. Unemployment fell by 60,000 to 1.69 million. A

EDF has bought itself some valuable time over its decision about whether or not to build a new nuclear plant at Hinkley Point. The energy giant said it was going to be extending the life of four of its nuclear power stations in the UK. Heysham 1 and Hartlepool will now stay open for another five years, until 2024; whilst Heysham 2 and Torness won’t shut until 2030. The decision means several thousand people will stay in work. More significantly perhaps, it also helps ease some worries that Britain may struggle to keep the lights on in the future, by ensuring plants which generate about a quarter of electricity in Britain

Amid all the turmoil in global energy markets, we should not lose sight of the UK power programme that we’re praying will keep our lights on a decade hence: it is, as you know, a hobbyhorse of mine. So how’s it going down at Hinkley Point in Somerset? My man with big binoculars in the Bridgwater Bay nature reserve tells me he’s seeing plenty of lorry movements on the nuclear site, but signals from EDF of France — which has a two-thirds interest in this £18 billion project, alongside Chinese investors — are very worrying. Having already spent £2 billion, the French state utility has deferred until at least the

In 2007 Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive of EDF’s UK arm, made the now-infamous promise that by Christmas 2017 we would be cooking our turkeys using energy generated at Hinkley C nuclear power station. That has already been put back to well into the 2020s. But if you are making plans for Christmas 2025 it might be an idea to base them around eating cold turkey sandwiches by candlelight around a wind-up gramophone. The French newspaper Les Echos reports today that an EDF board meeting about Hinkley has been postponed, amid fears that EDF is having more problems funding the project. EDF has already looked to China’s Nuclear Power Corporation,

Ahead of the Paris climate conference, there is intense focus on the carbon policies of governments around the world. To reduce global warming, we need to find cleaner ways of generating electricity. But we also need to think about how we transmit energy across smarter grids, and how we use the energy we already produce more efficiently. Measures to secure supply and manage demand are equally important. Both were covered in depth at our ‘Smarter Britain, Smarter Environment‘ event earlier this month. Top speakers – Lord (Gus) O’Donnell, Jonathon Porritt CBE, Sara Bell, Robert Denda and Lord Bourne – considered what was described by Porritt as ‘the biggest challenge humankind

‘I visited the black marble obelisk which marks the epicentre of the explosion, and I saw the plain domestic wall-clock retrieved intact from the rubble with its bent hands recording the precise time of day when the city was obliterated: 11.02 a.m. I was glad to be alone, because I could not have spoken.’ Published here 20 years ago, that was my memory of Nagasaki, the target on 9 August 1945 of the second and last nuclear weapon ever deployed. The subsequent seven decades of non-use of nuclear arms — deterred by that most chilling of threats, ‘mutually assured destruction’ — is one of the miracles of modern history, given the

That democracy is a superior form of government to any other goes without saying. But in order to function, it has to be conducted in such a way and on such a scale as to ensure that the people or their elected representatives are making decisions based on genuine alternatives. With this week’s decision by Lancashire County Council to reject a second application for fracking on a site near Blackpool, something has gone seriously wrong. An important national issue has been allowed to be settled according to purely local concerns. Warned by their lawyers that there were no environmental or safety grounds for rejecting the application, councillors instead voted to

Pluscarden Abbey, just outside Elgin in northeast Scotland, is one of the most beautiful places in Britain. But to those who have visited in winter over the years, it has also felt like one of the coldest. After the war, when Benedictine monks arrived to restore what was a medieval ruin they slept with no roof, let alone heating. Then came the paraffin burners, which gave the monks a choice between freezing and asphyxiation. Central heating arrived in 1980 (it’s needed, if your day starts with prayers at 4.30am) but it was used sparingly. But when I went to visit last month I found a miracle had happened. There is a biomass boiler

In his latest encyclical Pope Francis will apparently describe global warming as a ‘major threat to life on the planet’. If the leaked reports are accurate, his Holiness is absolutely right. Here are some examples of the havoc ‘global warming’ has wrought in the past decade: Honduras:US-backed security forces implicated in the killing of more than 100 peasant farmers involved in disputes with palm-oil magnates. Kenya: Teenage boy shot in February this year while protesting against a ‘wind park’ in Nyandarua. Mt Elgon National Park, Uganda: According to a newspaper report, more than 50 locals killed by park rangers and 6,000 evicted to make space for a ‘carbon offset’ plantation.