Lord Turner: The facts have changed on nuclear

The first chair of the Climate Change Committee (CCC) has backtracked on his support for new nuclear power, saying that he no longer thinks the UK needs it.

Lord Turner told a House of Lords enquiry last week that when heading the CCC ten years ago, he had viewed new nuclear power as one of the three key technologies for decarbonising the power system, along with renewables and carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Giving evidence to the ongoing Lords Industry and Regulators Committee on Ofgem and net zero, he said it would be “certifiably mad to close down nuclear power stations before the end of their useful life”.

However the peer, who now heads the multi-national Energy Transformation Commission, said the “truly dramatic reduction” in the costs of solar and wind power had prompted him to rethink the case for new atomic capacity.

“The facts have changed. It is absolutely possible to build an electricity system, which relies 70 to even 80 per cent on variable renewables like wind and solar, balanced with hydro and hydrogen burnt in gas turbines, and we do not absolutely need nuclear.

“If nuclear is cheap enough, you shouldn’t exclude it. Certainly, within a system it is good to have diversity but you don’t need it and it now has to depend on price.

“My own gut feel is that new nuclear will play a relatively small part in the UK system.”

He said that developing a small number of new nuclear plants would be costly compared with rolling our offshore wind, pointing to the “very expensive” tariffs that EDF’s Hinkley looks set to deliver.

Lord Turner said that the “jury is out” still on how expensive small modular reactors will be, adding that he is “not convinced” they will be “necessary” for the electricity system.

He also said that while nuclear fusion power will be required for a decarbonised power system, it is “certainly” worth investing in because of the “extra additional” power that this as yet untested but potentially limitless source of power could deliver.

Ex-Ofgem director of regulation Maxine Frerk, appearing in her capacity as an associate of Sustainability First, raised concerns that lower income households could lose out in the transition to electric vehicles.

While all customers contribute towards the reinforcement of distribution networks to cope with additional electric vehicle use, only 35% of households in the bottom income decile of the population have a car, she said

“If you get all customers to pay for reinforcement of networks you are hitting those on low income hardest,” she said.

Lord Turner said there is a risk that costs of decarbonisation could fall to an “unacceptable degree on lower income people”, adding that he suspects that the costs of replacing boilers with heat pumps will work out at a “higher figure” than estimates of £8-10,000 per household.

To ensure that such works do not become “regressive”, he said that the government must take “specific actions” to subsidise the retrofitting of heat pumps or insulation for lower income households.

“We can’t avoid looking at distributional  consequences particularly in relation  to heat,” the peer said, adding that residential heat is the “biggest and most difficult issue” facing the UK’s transition to net zero.

“Where there isn’t a clear plan is residential heat: we don’t have a clear plan about who is going to pay for and how are going to deal with distributional  issues.”

He also said that he would be “wary” about a shake-up of the existing regulatory and policy making framework in energy.