£190bn of process projects in national plan

The Treasury document, which outlines up to £375 billion of planned public and private sector infrastructure investment, features 197 projects and programmes from process-intensive sectors including power generation, water treatment and energy from waste.

Gas import, nuclear decommissioning and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects also feature in the plan, which looks at all projects planned up to 2030 and beyond.

[We aim] to agree an in-principle guarantee by the end of 2016 to support the financing of a new nuclear power plant at Wylfa

HM Treasury statement

In addition to the report, the Treasury today also confirmed that it was committing to an investment guarantee for Hitachi and Horizon Nuclear Power’s planned Wylfa Newydd plant on the isle of Anglesey, North Wales.

Less than two months after its agreement to support EDF’s Hinkley Point C project by guaranteeing bank debt totalling up to 65% of the project’s £14 billion capital costs, HM Treasury today said it had “entered a cooperation agreement with Hitachi and Horizon with the aim of being able to agree an in-principle guarantee by the end of 2016 to support the financing of a new nuclear power plant at Wylfa”.

The new plant at Wylfa is set to comprise three 1.2GW nuclear reactors and is estimated to cost around £15 billion. It will be built on a site adjacent to the existing 460MW Magnox reactor, which is due to shut down in September 2014.

In other areas of power generation, the National Infrastructure Plan identifies over 15GW of Combined Cycle Gas Turbine plants at various stages of planning that are scheduled to be built by 2020. There are also multiple energy from waste and anaerobic digestion projects identified as part of local authority waste contracts, and multiple water plant improvements as part of the industry’s ongoing Asset Management Plan periods.

However, just being identified by the Plan is no guarantee that projects will go ahead. For example, the Plan identifies multiple biomass electricity schemes that have received planning consent.

While they have received these consents, the Department of Energy and Climate Change was today unable to confirm whether these projects have been successful in securing the necessary subsidy support under the Renewable Obligation (RO) scheme.

As highlighted before by Process Engineering, there is as much as 1GW of planned biomass facilities competing to secure RO certificates (ROCs) after the government set a 400MW cap on the total number of ROCs to be made available to new electricity-only biomass schemes.

To view a spreadsheet of the process projects included in the Plan, click on the attached file “Process Projects NIP 2013”.