UK wind power developers worry that wind power will pay for nuclear power

The direct result that British wind power developers can see is that their management costs increase at a rate of one million pounds a year. The reason for this is that the National Grid plans to strengthen and upgrade the grid to accommodate nuclear power as a backup resource for wind power. British wind power developers are worried about this.

In a meeting document published in June, the National Grid of the United Kingdom elaborated on the plan to integrate six nuclear power plants into the power grid, but this needs to increase the total amount of power reserved by the national grid. The document mentions that this will effectively solve the problem of insufficient power supply for a large number of power plants, from 1,320 MW to 1800 MW. State Grid also said that its operating costs are estimated to increase from 16 million pounds a year to 31.9 million pounds. The conference proposed a variety of ways to charge energy companies to make up for the rise in the cost of the national grid, but Alison, the commercial director of the transmission division of the State Grid, stated in a letter to Ofgem, a regulator of the UK natural gas and electricity market, that the grid company The decision to retain the current charging system means that the power companies will charge the same amount of electricity per megawatt for the State Grid.

This decision made wind power operators almost jumpy. They claimed that the tariffs of the national grid are extremely unfair to them. Although the State Grid stated at the meeting that the current charging methods will not cause additional losses to companies with a power generation scale of less than 350 megawatts, including all wind power plants in the United Kingdom, they still cannot stop protests from wind power companies. In contrast, nuclear power developers are very much pleased with the decision of the National Grid, because they do not want the State Grid to increase the charge for large-scale power plants, which will be detrimental to the construction of new nuclear power plants. Now that the cost of increasing costs has been evenly distributed to all energy companies, they naturally are not happy.

According to the information disclosed at the meeting, the cost of many users has increased, which may delay the commissioning of a large-scale nuclear power plant for several years. For the power companies that lack power, it is likely that they will be compensated by a new gas turbine combined cycle (CCGT) power plant. This will not only hinder the UK and even Europe in fulfilling their emission reduction targets, because investment in low-carbon technologies is bound to be affected. Not long ago, a spokesman for the State Grid admitted in an interview that their decisions may disappoint wind power operators. However, he also stressed that wind power companies' efforts to develop large-scale offshore wind power plants are pleasing to the public, because the increase in power generation means that they do not have to face additional charges immediately. But in fact, even among the operators of offshore wind farms, few people support the decision of the national grid. Not only that, but many wind power companies have expressed their hope that Ofgem will be able to change the decision made by the national grid because they believe that the State Grid will do the same to make wind power and other renewable energy resources bear a heavy burden on the development of nuclear power.