Energy secretary Greg Clark has said the UK’s “substantial” pipeline of renewable energy projects could offer a replacement to the capacity lost by the scrapping of Toshiba’s plans for a new nuclear power station in Cumbria.
The Japanese company announced last week its decision to close its NuGeneration (NuGen) subsidiary after it failed to find a buyer for the Moorside project.
It had been slated to deliver 3.4GW of capacity – supplying around 7% of the UK’s electricity requirement – by 2024 but after failing to secure new investment or a buyer for the project, Toshiba said in a statement it had come to the “economically rational decision” to wind up NuGen.
Coming to the commons to provide a statement on the issue yesterday, Clark was questioned by MPs across the house on what the government planned to do in order to fill what was dubbed “a clear gap in the energy market” by Labour’s Jim Cunningham.
In response, Clark said: “There won’t be a deficit, we have a substantial – in fact growing – pipeline of new investment. One of the features of the energy industry in the UK is that not only do we have a pipeline of proposed new nuclear power stations…but we have a substantially increasing volume of investment in renewable energy, reflecting the fact that price of offshore renewables has halved in the last two years.”
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