Hinkley Point Will Hit Poor Hardest (But Apparently Offshore Wind Won’t!)
By Paul Homewood
h/t Pheonix44
Astonishing hypocrisy from the Public Accounts Committee, not to mention the BBC for failing to highlight it as such:
A group of MPs has said that the £18bn cost of the UK’s new Hinkley Point C nuclear power station will hit the country’s poorest the hardest.
The Public Accounts Committee said that households had been "locked into an expensive deal lasting 35 years".
In a report, it said there were no plans for Hinkley Point to provide wider benefits such as jobs and skills.
But EDF, the French firm funding two thirds of the project, said it would bring "huge benefits" to Britain.
The government gave the green light to Hinkley Point near Bridgwater in Somerset last year, in a deal which guarantees EDF a fixed price of £92.50 per megawatt hour for the electricity it produces for 35 years.
If it falls below that level, consumers will pay the difference.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy estimates that top-up payments will cost consumers around £30bn.
In its report examining the deal, the Public Accounts Committee said: "Over the life of the contract, consumers are left footing the bill and the poorest consumers will be hit hardest. Yet in all the negotiations no part of government was really championing the consumer interest."
The committee’s chair Meg Hillier said: "Bill-payers have been dealt a bad hand by the government in its approach to this project.
"Its blinkered determination to agree the Hinkley deal, regardless of changing circumstances, means that for years to come energy consumers will face costs running to many times the original estimate.
"It doesn’t know what UK workers and business will gain from this project, and appears to have no coherent idea of what to do about it."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42065837
I don’t recall the MPs or BBC complaining about “the poorest being hit hardest”, when DECC was doling out contracts to offshore wind farms at prices up to £161.71/MWh.
https://lowcarboncontracts.uk/cfds
Or £108.02/MWh for Drax to burn forests.
At least Hinkley can provide reliable, dispatchable power, which is more an ocean full of wind farms can.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
They can pour as much concrete as they like, but can the French deliver the reactors? Hope they default so we can claim compensation.
Never expect an unbiased report from a group of MPs or even more so from the BBC with its biased reporting of a biased report.
“At least Hinkley can provide reliable, dispatchable power, which is more an ocean full of wind farms can.”
Small consolation, when we could have highly reliable, and efficient updated coal fired power stations, and CCGT at about £45/MWh. Each with less carbon dioxide emissions than burning wood at Drax.
However, as a consumer I have no choice. So much for free market economics.
We are truely run by a government devoid of brain power at a cost of £bns/h
we are not ‘run by a government devoid of brain power’ – we are run by Green placemen, deep state operators in our Civil Service who have been ‘sleepers’ for years. They, and they alone are determining the policies regarding power generation in this country. Government ministers stand no chance against them and their evil fifth columnists. Any one who starts to show a modicum of brain power will just be waited out: The Greens can wait. They will always be in office; Ministers get moved/lose their elected power/etc. The Greens do not face elections.
Remember, Bryony Worthington has never held elected office and is no more qualified to define our power policy than the Downing Street cat.
No- they have brains, but the wrong kind.
Alot of these “intelligent yet idiots” studied PPE, at Oxford.
This course is well recognised as the greatest destroyer of common sense known.
What is worse is that they are destroying coal fired power stations that could be refurbished to give many more years operation for a modest cost. This is to ensure that we cannot return to coal (other than by massive new plant builds): sadly no one will ever be held accountable for this destructive and costly policy.
But we are shooting up the “green” tables in every way!
You expose the first level of Animal Farm style financial hypocrisy, where “green-defined” power is good irrespective of price and nuclear is bad, very clearly. The political hypocrisy that lies behind selecting an unproven French PWR design is also bad: there are excellent Russian reactor designs that are now the best proven in the world – but as the USA is continuing with its McCartheist “reds under the bed” fanaticism, we must meekly follow. Is not increasing trade the best way of reducing tensions between countries: isolationism achieves little except with very weak countries.
The options of re-using the well-proven AGR designs was originally, in my view wrongly, attacked by Arnold Weinstock. This would give more UK supply content and a safer reactor than the PWR or BWR. The recent SMR concept also has potential long term benefits to UK suppliers, much needed as the UK has killed-off its power station design and manufacturing industries.
The Public Accounts Committee and unfit for purpose except Common Purpose and virtue signalling to all their mates on twatterati-islington-tosserati.
Seesh, the muppets always never fail, when it comes to selective eyesight and polarized bias. To the promotion of the green insanity and just plain old purblind idiocy, the choice is across the board and irrespective of which rosette colour has been pinned to that particular donkey/ass and almost to a man and woman of them.
No word then [The Public Accounts Committee], on throwing £billions down the toilet – UK Exchequer and its annual debits;
£50 billion to service the National Debt,
£60 wasted on quangoes,
£13 billion thrown away on buying Merx and Parisian apartments for African despots aka Foreign Aid,
£40 billion proffered to the endlessly corrupt Berlin-Brussels kletocracy,
£210 billion on welfare,
£name a figure – bombing the bejabbers out of the desert, in attempt to clearing up Bliar’s mess in Syria and Iraq,
Green agenda – ± £18 billion p/a.
Umpteen Billions on an ever growing public sector pensions liability – gawd knows.
I dread to think what hammond is going to shower us with, but it won’t smell pretty and phil is known for spreading it, tax and more tax and a bit more tax – down the black hole……. ref above.
Haven’t you seen this particular UK balance sheet?………………the nation is effin bankrupt and going deeper, thanks to d**ks – like you Mr. hammond!
Ed Davey, and perhaps otHers, need to be put on trial for MALFEASANCE IN PUBLIC DUTY, ALSO FOR BEING STUPID.
Watch out the sainted one; you also failed to understand that you had been conned.
Why all the hostility towards Ed Davey? As a minister, he was simply an honest man out of his depth. He would probably have seen his main job as being to determine where the best trade off should lie between the need to protect the environment on the one hand and the need for affordable and reliable energy on the other. The ins and outs of climate science would have seemed somewhat peripheral.
Like any incoming minister, he would have been heavily reliant on briefings by his senior official and in-house “experts”. If he had sought outside advice, where should he go? There are no “respectable” British institutions who are skeptical of AGW. Had he chosen the obvious route of going to a university with a large climate science department, he would probably have ended up with CRU! If he had gone international, he would probably have ended up with the IPCC. Neither would have helped.
Unfortunately, there are too many in the sceptical community who are simply cranks. Exposure to a few of these would hardly have helped either. It is these cranks who give the rest of us rational sceptics a bad name.
Btw, the correct tyerm for the offence you allege would be misfeasance in public OFFICE.
The British government has ensured that electricity prices will rise, which is in line with what the bureaucrats and politician wished to have happen*. How else could they make ruinable power generation (aka wind and solar) look like it is a cost effective method.
It was never “grave strategic errors” as this report said, it was by design!
*As per deindustralization via the Climate Change Act (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/27/contents ).
I did not know that Jeremy Corbyn was the Prime Minister.
Effectively ALL the governments since Thatcher have been run by lefty loonies.
It’s wonderful! The PAC has come up with the extraordinarily novel and valuable insight that higher energy prices ‘hit the poorest hardest’. Any cynics inclined to doubt the brilliance of the members of this committee must surely think again. But it gets better! The PAC has apparently discovered a new ‘intelligent’ type of energy price increase which hits the poor if it results from energy suppliers paying high prices for nuclear energy but not if it results from them paying high prices for renewable energy. My admiration knows no bounds!
For a fleeting moment I thought this might be because members of committee were suffering from rank hypocrisy, as Paul suggests, or terminal cognitive dissonance, but then I realised I must be wrong. After all, the members of the PAC are chosen by their fellow MPs, respected members of the oldest Parliament in the world. So I was just being silly.