Hello, thanks for your comment. I'm sorry if your experience with smart meters hasn't been a positive one. Smart meters are designed to provide accurate readings and help manage energy usage, and you have my assurances that they do not scam customers. If you believe there's an issue with your smart meter, please contact our customer service team so we can investigate and resolve it at [email protected], or on WhatsApp to 07480 589 950. Thanks, ^Lisa.

Hello, thanks for getting in touch. I'm sorry for any issues you may be experiencing with EDF. Please feel free to reach out to our customer service team so we can help at [email protected], or on WhatsApp to 07480 589 950. Thanks, ^Lisa.

It’s difficult to turn up and down. It’s great for base load. If everyone had battery storage it would be excellent.

Big reason why it’s expensive is because there is very little actual taxpayers money used in constructing it. Using private money is expensive!

Spot on. That's 9.2pence per kwh to the customer. My current rate is about 26p, so this is an utter bargain. Doesn't work so well for night use rates at 7p or so, but small beer over the 5 hours the small amount of customers get to use it. I'd say "well done, Mr Cameron," and the same to all politicians who got HPC over the line. This is cheap baseline power for us all to benefit from.....but there are always whingers.

That's only 115tonne per lifting trunion, and those straps will be type tested well above that lift. There are much bigger lifts on straps.

Kevlar but I still wouldn't trust it.

No it won't. Big coal stations of 2000MW have tripped and thr grid survived. I was on station in Ironbridge doing tests and other than a "hands off" whilst the grid stabilised, it coped well.

Another point worth making here about its danger to the national power grid: at least 2 commissioning tests for each unit will consist of full load trips: and islanding test where the Turbine Generator are tripped from the grid at full load and remain at operational conditions to power the "plant island" and a full load trip which trips the Turbine generator and dumps 170pMW of steam to the turbine drains. I've been in a 1000MW station where the latter didn't work well and we tripped the lot due to a transformer failure. My brown underpants went in the bin after that one. I can assure those of a nervous disposition, 1700MW insgantly exiting the grid isn't disastrous. It creates a dew fluctuations, but the systems are there to protect the rest of it and the black start GTs soon kick in...and there are more of those than there have ever been.

@@AdeFlint Big coal stations were never 2000MW in a single generating unit. They were 4 x 500 MW units, and the 500MW units designed to be independent of each other to avoid common faults brining down multiple units in one go. The generator in the video is 1500MW in a single rotating machine, so it will need a large amount of operating reserve alongside.. If there is a frequency drop, frequency sensitive relays in the distribution system will start shedding load by automatically tripping off supply. The cost of holding operating reserve is dear because it has to be spread across a number of rotating generating units operating inefficiently at part load. Ofgem consulted the cost of holding reserve for these large units back in 2010, asking if the nuclear operator should bear the cost, or if it should be "socialised" into everybody's electricity bills. The decision was to "socialise", which means you and I bear the cost of an inefficiently large design. www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/docs/2010/10/gsr007-ia-final_0.pdf

@@AdeFlint Commissioning has to test full load trips because it is essential to show the units can survive these before they are finally handed over. But commissioning tests can be planned, so you know exactly what was going to happen and set up reserve to cover the test. NESO has to constantly hold operating spinning reserve across the network to cover for the "single infeed loss" of the biggest generator . This is presently 1000MW for Sizewell C. In future it will be 1500MW for a Hinkley Point C unit risk of trip. This operating reserve will NOT be provided by asynchronous wind generators because they don't have the technical capability to ramp-up in an emergency. A purely nuclear and renewable mix on the network is therefore infeasible. There will have to be fossil-fired power stations kept in operation to provide the operating reserve. This will be expensive enough, but if these part-loaded fossil fired generating units are to be carbon-captured, operating reserve will be hideously expensive.. Black start GTs take 10 minutes to synchronise, and the distribution network will have long started load shedding on frequency before these black start units can respond. Your solution is not what NESO will do. It will be forced to hold spinning reserve close enough to Hinkley Point, and we will all end up paying even more for electricity ... yet again!

Sadly, you're incorrect. There is no "spinning reserve" as such now, it's storage hydro and soon, batteries, as the large battery farms are completed. And a peak loading GT can start and synchronise in seconds: that's what they're designed for. Add to that the gas turbines which will still be operating as load correction and 1.7GW isn't a grid trip. I've seen bigger load sheds and you didn't even miss your tea. Relax about big baseload units. They're very unstressed.

Up until the announcement of Hinckley Point C, the largest net output "units" in the UK were 660Mwe - such as at Drax and the former Longannet stations (i.e. coal fired plants). The UK "nukes" (both AGR's and the PWR at Sizewell B were/are around 600Mwe. So I've no idea where you get your "900-ish" figure from? :-) Hinckley Point C is also unique (in the UK) in that, as far as I was told by staff there back in approximately 2012, is that the turbine will rotate at just 1,500 rpm (rather than the usual 3,000 rpm) to avoid issues with the tip speed of the large diameter turbine blades (exceeding supersonic conditions). Whether that is actually the case or not, I do not know and having lost contact with the industry, will not be able to confirm one way or another.

Their website seems to suggest 2235 MVA as their biggest model. Maybe that's the one shown here.

Both Torness and both Heysham 1 and 2 turbine generator sets are "rated" at 660MW, and we're a standard GEC design on 4 of those units;which i actually built (pride 😀).They operate at around 600MWe, and that is constrained by the reactor output. Some of the heysham reactor outputs are now limited due to cracks in carbon in some of the reactor heating baskets, so they've been made redundant and the TG operate at slightly lower loads. Iirc the lowest of these is 450MWe

@@AdeFlint Thanks for the clarification on Heysham and Torness. Wasn’t sure they had the GEC 660 sets, just knew they were “circa” 600. The only other fossil fuelled station that I can recall that had 660 sets, other than Longannet and Drax, was Littlebrook, which was Oil rather than Coal fired.

​littlebrook D was 3x660MW GEC and indeed oil fired. Drax was 6X660MW NEI Parsons sets (now 4x660MW) and Longannet was an interesting station as it was a cross compound setup with 2x300MW GEC units per boiler, so each boiler was 600MW but the turbine generator technology hadn't caught up, so smaller units were used in a slightly more efficient setup as cross compound turbine. . If I remember correctly, the first GEC 660MW units in service were at Hinkley Point B, which were around 1969 build. HTH

What do you call "an off the shelf generator"? Having been in the turbine generator design, development and installation for decades, I've never seen an off the shelf generator. This is a standard Alstom top gas 4 pole generator which operates at half grid frequency (hence 4 poles rather than 2) and works with the relatively cool, wet steam turbines which receive the reactor secondary steam circuit energy. It's all very well proven in the French reactor fleet on their Framatome PWR units. Personally, I'd have preferred a Sizewell B kind of setup with two 660mw units connected to each reactor secondary as that gives a little redundancy when the turbine generator set goes "whoops".....as it definitely will at least once.

Oh yes would love to see the shelf the off the shelf generator would sit on.

It would be significant. The upfront costs ( £millions) knowledge of exact requirements and the 2 years it takes to build one could also be against shelving any.

@OliverMayo-o9i The main reason airlines prefer 2 engine on their planes is because more engines means more drag which means more fuel burn. Generator doesn’t create drag sitting still.

@ No, the only reason they choose to go with two engines is almost purely based on lower fuel burn. Also, 4 smaller engines are cheaper to buy, easier to maintain and doesn’t brake down as often as 2 humongous engines. That’s a fact.

think you have to deduct the hotel load from that top figure. meaning NET 1600MW

Correct. The rated output of an EPR is 1650MWe....the clue is in the e: export. Generator is rated to cover the export and station load of around 50MW, so will be notionally 1700MW

Generator power also has a pf 1.0 value, which i would assume is the 1770MW stated earlier. This will operate at a lagging of around 0.85 to 0.90 which reduces the "real" generator rating as the lagging pf creates more I (current) related heat which the generator has to remove using its standard coolers.

The turbines don't share the steam source on these units. Both reactors and turbines are on separate pairs of islands . I did a bit of reading up on the Arabelle steam turbine, and it appears they've redesigned the last stage LP blades and they're longer than ever....so that explains the small output increases. Blade (both static and rotating) design is always exploring the boundaries, and as has long been the case output can be increased on replants. This has that increase built in. Some of the French pwr units were seeing quite large power increases via replants in the 90s and nouties

It Is called "scale economy". And another term is important here: "first of a kind": those plants are new and therefore nobody had the experience in building them. The next "copies" will be built faster thanks to the troubleshooting and experience gained here.

@@1080pMarco Yep. Tens of years of not building such facilities, people being scared by some countries(Germany in Europe) about factually the safest form of generation and here we go- price of restarting industry is high. Hope for very fast learning curve and 100+years of service for this facility (should be possible and it will put the price and long build time into different perspective)

The next ones will be built quicker and cheaper

@@VictorHHH7 Fingers crossed. "We" are better in making things in scale in any field- no reason why modern NPPs should be any different.

I get the arguments. I will be amazed if the production run for this reactor type in the UK is more than 4 units. I hope the experience gained from these engineering cathedrals is worth the diversion of capital. History will tell.