In the light of the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima plant in Japan, there has been much speculation as to whether new nuclear build will now go ahead. Recently the EU Energy Commissioner, Günther Oettinger, said that Europe needed to consider whether it could live without nuclear energy.
To investigate the implications, we undertook a scenario analysis in MDM-E3 in which there is no new nuclear build in the UK over 2018-25 (our baseline assumes an additional 6.6 GW of capacity by 2025, contributing about 12% of electricity generated in that year). Our analysis suggests that additional generation from Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) plants would be needed to meet the shortfall in electricity supply, leading to an 18% increase in gas demand from the electricity generation sector, all of which would have to be met by increased imports.
If CCGT generation did replace the forecast nuclear generation, UK electricity generators would produce an additional 21 mtCO2 pa in 2025 (raising the UK’s emissions by some 4.5% in that year) and would therefore be required to purchase additional EU ETS allowances at a total cost of approximately £600m in 2025. Moreover, if the development of new nuclear is stalled across Europe, this is likely to put considerable upward pressure on the EU ETS CO2 allowance price, which in turn would put an upward pressure on UK electricity prices.
If sufficient incentives were introduced to make it attractive to build renewable sources to meet the generation shortfall in 2025, this would require an equivalent of 18 GW of offshore wind turbines (over 3,000 additional 5-6 MW offshore turbines by 2025). This looks to be achievable (our baseline projection has 10 GW of offshore wind by 2025, and a total of 28GW of offshore wind capacity by 2025 is possible, but there would be implications for the network to adapt to the intermittency of offshore wind generation.
The evidence on nuclear safety should of course take precedence in any future decision to build new nuclear in the UK. However, the implications for CO2 emissions, energy security, and energy infrastructure planning are quite clear: with reduced nuclear capacity, the only ways to avoid increasing CO2 emissions and greater dependence on imported energy are to provide support for alternative clean energy sources and/or energy efficiency measures.