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The head of infrastructure at one of the UK’s largest investors has expressed concerns over the lack of government support for “nascent” renewable technologies such as tidal power.
Susannah Stock, director of infrastructure debt at Aviva Investors, made the comments during a panel discussion at yesterday’s (12 September) London First Infrastructure Summit.
The government announced last year it would not provide support for a pilot tidal lagoon project in Swansea Bay through the Contracts for Difference (CfD) mechanism on the grounds it would be too expensive on a per-megawatt-hour basis.
Under the rules governing CfD auctions, technologies such as tidal lagoons and turbines are included in the same category as offshore windfarms, which generate much cheaper electricity and hence can submit lower bids.
Stock said: “A combination of those technologies or several lagoons together could provide baseload power that would remove the need for much gas and nuclear depending on where we get with those technologies.
“For the government to dismiss those technologies where the UK has a huge resource is somewhat premature.”
She also called on the government to readmit onshore wind and solar to the auctions.
“If you want to support big investment in those technologies you need risk of power price to be removed from the private sector. If the government were to announce a CfD or simply to take away power price risk for these technologies, we would see investment continue.”
Suleman Alli, director of safety, strategy and support services at UK Power Networks had earlier told the conference’s opening session that the lesson from last month’s grid blackout was the need for a greater public debate about the resilience of the electricity system
He said: “Given that we are digitising and putting electricity in everything, we need to think about resilience in the round so that if there is a frequency drop the trains continue to operate and don’t have to be physically reset by someone.
“We need to think about resilience as a society.”
Alli also said UKPN is currently installing more capacity on London’s power network than at any time since the late-60s.
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