Question to the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero:

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, pursuant to the Answer of 19 May 2023 to Question 184612 on Nuclear Power, whether his Department has made an assessment of alternative ways of providing stability to the grid which does not use nuclear power.

The Department has run thousands of power sector simulations; these are published in aggregated form in the “Modelling 2050 – Electricity System Analysis” paper.[1] The model used for this work, the Dynamic Dispatch Model,[2] is configured to ensure that the system always has a loss of load expectation of 3 hours or less. This work has shown that reducing nuclear capacity in the system tends to make system costs more expensive and increases the risk of not achieving Net Zero, as significant additional capacity for other technologies (e.g. wind, CCUS etc) is required to ensure security of supply and displace unabated gas generation.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/modelling-2050-electricity-system-analysis

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dynamic-dispatch-model-ddm